THE ROOKIES
FIRST-TIMERS
WorldMags.net
talks to Felipe Nasr, Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz Jr about their expectations for the year ahead
69
SEASON
PREVIEW
“MY DAD AND I
TALKED ABOUT
WHAT WE
LEARNED THAT
DAY. IT REALLY
HELPED ME”
MAX VERSTAPPEN
It’s third time lucky
for Sainz as he takes
up a Toro Rosso seat
XPB IMAGES
Verstappen is set to be
youngest-ever driver to
start a grand prix
it’s special.
“But then you start to realise, ‘That really
helped me’. All those kinds of things gave me
so much more experience compared to other
17-year-olds.”
However intense the junior-racing preparation,
there’s no substitute for actually settling into F1
surroundings, reckons Nasr. He should’ve been
first stepping into a Sauber as a 17-year-old,
with a test drive his prize for winning the 2009
Formula BMW Europe title, but the German
manufacturer’s F1 exit scuppered that. While
he admits he can’t help but wonder how that
might’ve changed his career, he’s very happy
with his eventual Formula 3/GP2/Williamsreserve route to the grand prix grid.
“It feels much nicer than if I’d just stepped
straight into F1 today,” he says. “It was very
important to join Williams last year as a test
driver, to get to know the environment, to be at
every grand prix with them, to be listening to
every meeting, every debrief, to understand
WorldMags.net
what the drivers are saying, the communication…
“I’ve worked all the way. I did win
championships and races. It was a long process to
arrive in Formula 1, but it’s happened in the right
time. I feel prepared as a driver and as a person.
I know the environment I’m stepping into.”
Nasr has come into F1 almost under the radar
– at least in that his arrival, unlike Verstappen’s,
hasn’t been declared the “worst thing ever for F1”
by Jacques Villeneuve and prompted a
superlicence clampdown, nor, unlike Sainz’s,
come after two snubs from his mentors and an
agonising ‘will-he-won’t-he?’. He’s a driver with
personal sponsorship joining a team that needs
money, but he’s also an FBMW Europe and
British F3 champion, a Daytona 24 Hours podium
finisher and twice a GP2 title contender. He’s
“not a big fan” of the GP2 two-race/reversedgrid/tyre-choice format and hints at a feeling
that it skewed perceptions of him (“It can
confuse people when they’re looking; you can
rate drivers differently”), but ultimately he’s not
MARCH 5 2015 AUTOSPORT.COM 69