Teams and sponsors don't want their drivers risking injury on larks into other leagues. The casual observer tends to lump open-wheel cars together, but this season, Rubens Barrichello is finding it at least as difficult to transition from F1 to Ind圜ar as Patrick is to adapt to NASCAR.īeyond the cars lie even greater obstacles, money and politics. Now they're major issues in all forms of racing, and each achieves it in vastly different ways requiring vastly different driving skills. When Andretti and Foyt won Daytona, "aerodynamics" and "down force" weren't even terms used at the tracks. When Clark and Hill won Indy, they brought the rear-engine concept from F1 so their adjustment wasn't radical.
So it has been with race cars as they evolved. The higher they evolve, the more complex the plant or animal, the farther apart they grow. That's where we're taught that animal and vegetable life are fairly similar in their most primitive forms. To understand why, you start with Biology 101. Wonderful as it would be for fans, we'll never see Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson in the Indy 500 as we saw Cale Yarborough, LeeRoy Yarbrough and Bobby and Donnie Allison nor Sebastian Vettel or Lewis Hamilton as we saw Clark and Hill. When we see Indy drivers in the Daytona 500, that's because they've moved full-time to NASCAR, not because they're on adventures like Andretti or Foyt. The transition process is too long, the learning curve too steep, the schedules too demanding, for a Tony Stewart, a Juan Pablo Montoya or a Danica Patrick to move back and forth. They came, they won, and then they all returned to the other disciplines whence they came. It's easy to wonder, when you read that Andretti won the Daytona 500 in 1967 and Foyt in '72 that Formula One's Jim Clark and Graham Hill won the Indianapolis 500 in 1965 and '66 that Foyt and Dan Gurney won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in '67 that Andretti won the F1 world championship in '78 So why don't drivers "cross over" anymore, the way Mario Andretti and A.J. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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