If there is one thing that race fans love to see, it is crossovers between different genres of motorsports. With the likes of Jimmie Johnson and Fernando Alonso offering each other a glimpse into their respective worlds during their memorable driver swap, Dale Earnhardt Jr. also reflected on what it might have been like to drive an F1 car.
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More importantly, Junior spoke about what it would take to be competitive in one. The 26-time Cup Series winner and two-time Daytona 500 champion touched on how oval racing and road course racing, staples of NASCAR and F1, respectively, differ massively in how a driver approaches them.
A lifelong student of oval racing, Junior seemed to be on board the idea of taking the world’s premier open-wheeled series to the banking of an oval track.
If an F1 race were ever held on the high banks of Talladega or Daytona, Dale Earnhardt Jr. seemed confident enough that he would be able to trump the competition from the other side of the ocean.
“If F1 raced on ovals, I could’ve won an F1 race,” said the utterly confident Junior, talking on Hard Rock Bet.
“F1 is strictly road course racing. I would’ve had to have trained my entire life to even have been competitive, I believe, but I grew up racing on ovals. That’s really like a completely different discipline. The way you drive an oval versus the way you drive a road course is so different.”
“If they ever ran them on ovals, I’d have a shot for sure!” Food for thought, isn’t it?
Along with the Jimmie Johnson-Fernando Alonso McLaren F1-Hendrick Motorsports swap, die-hard NASCAR fans would also remember the time Tony Stewart drove another one of F1’s premier machines, in the form of Lewis Hamilton’s silver McLaren, while Hamilton took Stewart’s stock car out for a ride around Watkins Glen.
With swaps like this giving fans of both racing genres the only hope of a driver crossover from NASCAR to F1, one can only imagine how Dale Earnhardt Jr. would have fared in what is a completely different world of open-wheel racing, especially on an oval track. Maybe it’s time for Junior to test out an IndyCar now?
Who else from the NASCAR world is interested in F1 other than Junior?
Hendrick Motorsports regular and Indy 500 contender Kyle Larson’s affinity for open-wheeled racing is already obvious with the No. 5 driver competing in the famed race later this month for the second year running.
When asked about whether he would be up for swapping rides with a fellow F1 driver, Larson seemed up for the task. “I would love to do it, and it sounds like hopefully I’ll get to it down the road,” he said on an episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast.
“But, honestly, I would rather do it on one of those open test-style deals like after Abu Dhabi when other drivers are on the track, too… I think that driver swaps are really cool, but you don’t really have like a bar,” he said. It seems like Larson isn’t one to hang around.
With the upcoming Indy 500 due to go live on the 25th of this month, the most recent appearance for Kyle Larson in an open-wheeled machine seems to be his second Memorial Day Double attempt. After a satisfactory run at the same, who knows, we might be seeing an F1-NASCAR swap soon.
