Half a world away from Jimmie Johnson's last-lap NASCAR victory in Las Vegas,
another California native was making racing history without any fanfare.
Scott Speed became the first American since 1993 to compete in a Formula One
race, finishing a respectable 13th in the Bahrain Grand Prix.
But did anyone even notice?
F-1 loyalists paid close attention to Speed's debut, and the racing junkies
who follow anything on wheels might have taken notice. But the United States is
NASCAR country, and it's going to take the baby-faced Speed a long time to
change that.
That's unfortunate for the 23-year-old Speed (yes, that's his real name) and
everything he's accomplished in simply getting to the highest level in
motorsports.
Understand, young American racers aspire to be the next Jeff Gordon or Tony
Stewart, while purists might pursue an open wheel path and idolize an Andretti
or Sam Hornish Jr. But stock cars get all the glory, and with 43 spots in the
field every Sunday and a strong structure of feeder series, NASCAR is the route
most upcoming drivers take.
Little kids in Manteca, Calif., just don't grow up dreaming of being the next
Michael Schumacher. In fact, few have even heard of Germany's seven-time world
champion.
Speed has always been the exception, though. He knew from a very young age
that he didn't want to waste his time with the full-bodied stock cars, or get
sucked into the sad state of open wheel racing in the U.S.
His sights were always on F1, the globe-trotting, country-club series that no
American has dared venture into since Michael Andretti's ill-fated 1993
campaign. But dreaming of getting there and actually breaking into the gated
community are two very different things.
Making it to F1 requires money — lots and lots of it — and the Speed family
didn't have enough. Without that financing, Speed could never break into the
European junior ranks, where the competition is considered far tougher than in
American racing.
"For an American it's so difficult to go to Europe because (F-1) is primarily
based in Europe, that it sometimes gets to be an impossibility," Speed recently
said. "And you do things, you start driving in NASCAR and Champ Car, and it's
kind of a different community of people and it's a different type of racing."