When people ask me: do you race with vans? I answer, no, I race in the NASCAR Truck Series. Raikkonen's arrival in our series is an opportunity to explain you my world. The top Nascar series is divided into three categories: Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Truck. All three have vehicles made with a similar chassis, steel hand-built tubular and covered with a body that must look like the road cars as closely as possible: saloon car in the NASCAR Sprint Cup and pick up in the Truck Series, the popular vehicles with rear body that are the most popular cars ever in USA along with the SUV.
The Truck engines are the same as NASCAR Sprint Cup: all 5.8-liter V8 with more or less restrictions, depending on the category, to produce 650 hp in Truck Series and 800 hp in the Cup (that's how we name the Sprint Cup Series in USA). All the cars share the transmission and the gear box that you can choose among different suppliers, but all with front clutch and 4 H speed gearbox . Now that you know that the Truck is not a sort of modified Ape car but “naughty racing beast” I'll tell you that in the Truck Series there are four manufacturers with many models: the Chevrolet Silverado, the Ford F-150, the Dodge Ram and my Toyota Tundra. The championship is of 26 races and is held the same weekend of the Cup and Nationwide, but we are not a lower category as the GP2 with F1, but a real all-in-one Nascar event. The races are broadcasted live on Speed TV with an audience of more than 800,000 listeners every race, much more than Indycar, so this makes the Truck Series the third motorsport in the United States. There are a lot different drivers, former Sprint Cup drivers like Hornaday and Bodine, now in the Truck, and drivers like me, who tired to drive a not competitive car in the Cup, decided to race in a top team in the Truck Series. And also young drivers, who are part of a development Sprint Cup team, and compete into Truck series to gain experience. All these ones are the 36 drivers who compete in each race, where 40-42 Trucks try to qualify and the first 25 have the place on the grid guaranteed. As normal in the U.S., all the 36 runners receive a race prize, from $ 8.000 of the 36th to 50-80.000 dollars for the winner.
The Truck Series is the most internationally NASCAR championship because like me, an Italian, there are Paludo and Piquet Jr. who are Brazilian, some Canadians and in May Raikkonen will also come, bringing even more attention to our series. I hope Kimi leaves the arrogance at home and comes in the U.S. with the humility of one who has to learn, because here everything is different, from the use of yellow flags, to the hardness on the track. There is much malice but not wickedness: here we say "rubbing is racing" as saying that leaning is part of the game. But this doesn’t mean to throw out your competitor; if you do it, next race you let him pass through or you're the one who doesn’t finish the race. Because in Nascar you pay your debts on the track, not in front of the stewards.
Kimi will certainly have much to learn even if he is a super champion with a great talent, because you can’t test on the tracks where we run in the race and because we don’t use any data system. This means that your reference will be seeing the others drivers in the race. That’s why learning to go fast in Nascar takes time. Raikkonen has never competed in a race on an oval and will be difficult at the beginning because the ovals are a strange “beast”. Each track is different, from Martinsville that is just 800 meters long with a banking angle of 8 degrees and where a lap can be covered in just 19 seconds, to Daytona, 4 km long with a banking of 33 degrees and a lap of 51''.
The experience that Raikkonen has gained in recent years in rallies will help him a lot more than if he had started in Nascar directly from F1, because you have to react, improvise, to adapt yourself to the car and to the change of the track and tyres grip.
And then the trajectories: you must learn to change them frequently, and there is not the ideal line but the line that best fits the setup of your truck. A good quality of the Nascar world is that if you don’t understand much, you can always go and ask people who are more experienced than you: and the more you will be sincere, the more the champions will open their hearts with you and give you a real hand, they will bring you on the track with the pace car to explain you the secrets of the circuits. Like Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin have done with me. And with that I welcome Raikkonen in the Truck Series hoping he will enjoy as much as I enjoy myself. And I hope that this is another step forward to bring the Italian fans in the special world of NASCAR, where everything is tailor made for the spectator, and not vice versa.
Source: Autosprint.it
Courtesy: _TaniaS_
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