“If I’m being honest, never in a million years …”
Jenson Button, the 15-time Formula One race winner, is speaking for himself. At least, that is his intent. The reality is that his statement of excited disbelief is a sentiment shared by everyone who will be hard at work in the paddock of Circuit of the Americas outside of Austin, Texas, this weekend. That’s where the 2009 F1 world champion will make his stock car racing debut.
He won’t be the only F1 world champion on the starting grid, either. Don’t worry. Your eyes and brain work just fine. You read that right. A pair of F1 world titlists — Button in a Rick Ware Racing Ford (powered by Stewart-Haas Racing) and ’07 champ Kimi Räikkönen in Trackhouse Racing’s Project 91 Chevy — will be in the field for Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix.
There are a lot of farms in Texas. So, excuse any racers of a certain age if you spot them looking skyward at COTA to see if any pigs are flying over the racetrack. Because those who were around in the 2000s saw Juan Pablo Montoya win twice in 255 starts and remembered by most NASCAR fans as the guy who blew up a jet dryer at Daytona. They saw Scott Speed move from Red Bull’s fledgling junior F1 team (then Toro Rosso) to its infant Cup Series outfit and struggle to qualify for races, scoring only four top 10s in 118 starts. And anyone older than that, well, they saw nothing. Unless they were at Rockingham in 1967 when two-time champion Jim Clark finished 31st out of 40 cars.
“The most amazing thing I ever saw was Jim Clark at Rockingham, and it was talking to him in the garage,” NASCAR Hall of Famer Benny Parsons recalled prior to his death in 2007. “He was on a bicycle and I was talking to him for like 10 minutes before I realized he had been sitting on that bike, totally still, the whole time. No kickstand. Just sitting there. That’s how great his balance was. He loved NASCAR. But he died in a crash the next year and all I could think was, we may never see another Formula One champion in NASCAR ever again.”
Parsons’ feelings were a common refrain. Why? Because everyone knew that Clark’s feelings about NASCAR were uncommon in the F1 world.
Now, that finally might be changing. At least, the opportunities are.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to race in NASCAR, especially in a Cup car, I just…
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