This year’s Indy 500 did see a number of former F1 drivers
compete, with varying degrees of success. For starters, Takuma Sato, who drove
for Jordan, BAR and Super Aguri over the course of the 2000s, came very close
to winning the whole race. He was running second as the leaders crossed the
line to commence the final lap, and anybody familiar with Sato’s antics in F1 knew it would be a case of death or
glory for the Japanese. He lunged to the inside of race leader Dario
Franchitti, the door was firmly closed on him, and he spun helplessly into the
tyre barrier. Whoops.
That meant ex-Minardi and Jaguar driver Justin Wilson would
be the highest-placed of the F1 veterans in seventh with ‘rookie’ Rubens
Barrichello eleventh, Sato classified seventeenth and Sebastien Bourdais coming
home in twentieth. Jean Alesi meanwhile took the start, but his participation
in the race was ill-fated to say the least, the one-time Grand Prix winner having
been as much as 16mph slower than the pace-setters during practice.
Predictably, his hopelessly underpowered Lotus-engined car was pulled from the
race after just nine laps in the interests of safety.
Barrichello is the latest F1 veteran to have sought refuge
in IndyCar following a successful (or otherwise) career in F1, with Teo Fabi, Emerson
Fittipaldi, Stefan Johansson, Mauricio Gugelmin, Michele Alboreto, Mark
Blundell and most famously Nigel Mansell having all made the jump over the
course of the last twenty or so years. This trend belies a number of key
differences between the two championships: IndyCar is currently a
single-chassis series (albeit now with multiple engine manufacturers), fuel
strategy plays an integral part in the outcome of the races, and most
importantly oval tracks make up around half of the calendar.
The predominantly US-based series is on the road to recovery
after some lean times. For those unaware of the infamous IndyCar ‘split’, allow
me to explain – during the mid-1990s, when the championship had reached its
peak in terms of popularity, Indianapolis circuit owner Tony George took the
decision to found a rival series in 1996 known as the Indy Racing League (IRL),
disillusioned with the ever-increasing emphasis on road courses and
non-American drivers. The IRL eventually morphed into the current IndyCar
championship, with the existing series continuing under the guises of CART and
later Champ Car before merging with IndyCar in 2008 following bankruptcy.
Mansell’s unexpected leap from F1 to IndyCar was a major
factor in the latter’s surge in popularity. The moustachioed reigning F1
champion inked a deal with the crack Newman-Haas outfit in 1993 to replace the
F1-bound Michael Andretti after failing to agree terms to remain at Williams,
duly winning the title in his first season. In spite of Fittipaldi’s title win
four years before, IndyCar’s popularity was up to this point limited outside the
States; Mansell’s success changed that to a considerable extent and by the time
of the split the popularity of the series was beginning to challenge that of
F1. Alas, by the early 2000s the rivalry between IRL and CART had turned off
the fans, who in the States by and large switched their attentions to NASCAR.
Not only have plenty of F1 drivers found a home in IndyCar, but
a number of IndyCar drivers have similarly tried their hand at F1, the two
success stories in this department being Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya.
Villeneuve took honours in both the Indy 500 and the overall title in 1995 at
his second attempt, and consequently joined the ranks of F1 the following
season with Williams, where he pushed teammate Damon Hill all the way in his rookie
season before sealing the title himself in 1997. Montoya joined the Chip
Ganassi CART team in 1999 having won the previous year’s Formula 3000 crown in
convincing style, and followed in Mansell’s footsteps by sealing the championship
at the first time of asking, paving the way to join the F1 fold whereupon he
would go on to win seven races for Williams and McLaren.
There are others whose forays have been somewhat less
successful. The most notorious among these was of course the aforementioned
Andretti, who headed to the McLaren team in 1993 with ambitions of replicating
his father Mario’s F1 title fifteen years beforehand. However, his inability to
adapt the more technologically advanced cars in F1 along with his refusal to relocate
from the US to Europe meant that he was made to look extremely average by
teammate Ayrton Senna. With only three top-six finishes to his name after
thirteen races, Andretti parted ways with McLaren with three races still to run
to arrange a return to IndyCar, future F1 champion Mika Hakkinen taking his
place at the Woking-based équipe.
More recently, Cristiano da Matta joined the Toyota F1 team
in 2003 fresh from winning CART in 2002, and quietly impressed by outscoring
more experienced teammate Olivier Panis in his debut year. His sophomore season
was decidedly lacklustre however, leading to his replacement by Jarno Trulli,
who in turn had been recently dismissed by Renault. Sebastien Bourdais, who
joined Toro Rosso in 2008 after stringing together no fewer than four Champ Car
titles from 2004 to 2007, was also axed after a season-and-half of anonymity
compared with his namesake teammates Vettel and Buemi, Jaime Alguersauri taking
the Frenchman’s place in mid-2009.
Going back to the present day, Barrichello’s defection to
IndyCar is just what the series needs. In much the same way as Mansell made the
British audience sit up and take notice of IndyCar, Rubinho’s exploits in the US are sure to be closely followed by his
legion of Brazilian fans. Such a boost could scarcely have arrived at a more apt
time. Not long after Danica Patrick, international motorsport’s most successful
female driver of recent years, announced her plans to move to NASCAR, a horror
shunt at the final round of last year’s IndyCar championship at Las Vegas
tragically claimed the life of popular British champion Dan Wheldon, robbing
the sport of another of its finest ambassadors.
The arrival of a new car for the championship, fittingly
named in Wheldon’s honour, could thus be seen to mark a new era in IndyCar, one
that could potentially allow the series to scale the heady heights of the
mid-1990s once more. Rumours are already afoot that Felipe Massa, who looks all
but certain to lose his Ferrari drive by the end of the year, could well join
his compatriot Barrichello in forging a fresh career across the pond; if he
does, you can bet he won’t be the only one member of the current F1 grid to do
so at some stage in their career. Meanwhile, it’s not impossible that one or
two of the more accomplished IndyCar field may head the other direction against
the backdrop of a unique relationship between the two most prestigious
single-seater series on the planet.
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