27/10/2017
NEWS STORY
Fans of a certain vintage will remember those heady days when the F1 stars of the day were to be found racing almost every weekend, even though the world championship calendar featured less than half the races we have today.
Be it Sports Cars, F2, Can-Am or even Touring Cars, drivers simply wanted to race. It was not unknown even over Grand Prix weekends, for F1 stars to contest the support events, while the legendary Mario Andretti once famously commuted between Europe and the United States as he contested two events over the same weekend and in the late 70s was regularly hopping the Atlantic as he raced F1, USAC/CART and even IROC.
Ironically, another driver who followed the mantra of 'any car, any time, anywhere', was Pedro Rodriguez, one of the two brothers the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez is named after. One of the fastest drivers to ever grace the track, the Mexican was killed in a minor Sports Car event on a weekend between F1 races.
Nonetheless, in the wake of the news that Fernando Alonso is to contest the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, Sebastian Vettel admits that he too would love to race outside F1.
"I don't even know which cars they really race there; I think it's GT3 mostly in Daytona," he said of the Rolex 24.
"The way I look at it, in the past, if you look back a long way, not the last twenty years probably, but a long way, drivers used to race a lot more in different cars which I generally find pretty cool.
"The fact that they had to adapt to different cars, work with different people, with different mechanics, setting up the cars differently but mostly drive and adapt…
"Obviously where the sport has gone has been very, very professional, there's not that much time to do many other things, if you commit properly to Formula One but overall we are racing drivers and I quite like the idea to drive more in different cars.
"I don't know if that will ever change in the future but if they had different categories in the same weekend where Formula One drivers were... I don't know, with the Procar series many years ago, for example, with the BMW M1s, where they did a race before the Grand Prix. Stuff like that I think would be cool but for sure you can see the difficulties these days in terms of the paperwork and all that. But for raw racing, it's very nice to race different cars, why not, every weekend."
Mindful of the ProCar series which saw the drivers of the day matched in identical cars, Vettel was asked if he liked the idea of a similar event which sees the drivers go head-to-head in equal equipment.
"It's called Race of Champions," he immediately replied, "so I think we have something in place.
"I like it," he continued, "I join it every year that I can and we race in different cars. Obviously it's mostly fun and the track is a different track, it's in a stadium and there's a lot of show as well but overall I think it's a great idea as well.
"I don't know why other people are not joining, I think mostly because they prefer to spend their holidays somewhere else. I think it would be great to meet up for a race in the same car and just race for fun."
Indeed Seb, indeed.
Oh, and asked about the whole Michael Buffer thing in Austin, the German admitted: "It's not my cup of tea to be honest but I think for the people if they enjoyed it then that was obviously nice."
Classic.
Check out our Friday gallery from Mexico, here.