Scott Speed, Brutally Honest
It’s time for the US of A to wheel its latest F1 cockpit jockey onto the grid, this time under the cloak of Scuderia Toro Rosso, owned by Red Bull Racing, which is busting a gut to raise its U.S. profile. So, can Scott Speed do the biz?
Scott Speed, 22, is arrogant, self-centered and difficult to deal with. His diagnosis – and mine.
“I think that, fundamentally, I’m self-centered, I’m arrogant and very competitive, and those three things make it quite difficult to deal with me off the track,” he says. “But they’re definitely the reasons I’ve gone so far in racing.”
Speed’s self-confessed reputation precedes him. At least five people warn me to expect the worst. “You’ll get nothing out of him,” says one experienced hack. “What that Yank needs is a good weighty kick up the backside.”
Our first meeting, in the GP2 paddock in Bahrain the day before our scheduled interview, appears to confirm the rumors. We’re introduced, but Scott – gangly, spotty, wearing an ill-fitting oversized Red Bull basketball top, Red Bull shorts and D&G flip-flops – isn’t interested. He barely grunts an acknowledgement, taking out one of his white iPod earphones and offering a floppy hand, before skulking off, neck poking forward-and-down, a model of bad posture. He couldn’t be further removed from the straight-backed enthusiasm shown a few minutes earlier by Europeans Heikki Kovalainen and Nico Rosberg, whom I also interviewed for F1 Racing in December 2005.
Next day, Scott’s interview with the world’s best-selling grand prix magazine is at least marked by the removal of both earphones. In fact, he’s generally more genial – which is saying not a lot.
Time to disarm the attitude. After painfully chit-chatting about driving for America’s A1GP team at Brands Hatch the previous weekend (“What did you think of Paddock Hill Bend?” “It’s all right.”) and his brake problems in GP2 the previous day (which, with one race to go, looked as if it might hand third place in the championship to Alexandre Prémat, and explained Scott’s negative demeanor yesterday), I confront it head on: “People say you’ve got an attitude problem…”
Unabashed, he agrees. “Yeah, my personality is sure not easy to deal with sometimes,” he drawls. “But I’ve stopped trying to change it and have realized that the way I am is what makes me so good in racing. It’s why I’ve gotten as far as I have. I’m very brutally honest sometimes. And that’s why I think I get along so well with Helmut Marko and the Austrians.”
Ah, Helmut Marko, consultant to Red Bull Racing’s owner, Dietrich Mateschitz, and the Red Bull Austrians, better known in the F1 paddock as the “Austrian mafia.” Their own attitude is often derided by the F1 fraternity, but it seems that they and their American hopeful are happy bedfellows. Scott says he likes them – which is understandable, all things considered.
“I mean, they’ve given me an opportunity to go to F1,” he says, “which, for sure, I never would have had if it wasn’t for them. Dr. Marko, in particular, believed in me from the start.”
The start for Scott was winning the Red Bull American Driver Search in 2002, in which 16 home-grown U.S .talents were selected to prove themselves in a shoot-out at Bernie Ecclestone’s Paul Ricard circuit in France. Scott got in by virtue of his reputation on the American karting scene, where he’d won several national titles. His Red Bull prize was a fast-track into the European racing scene – the traditional proving ground for F1.
To understand why this particular American is about to enter F1 – and so become the first to do so since Michael Andretti drove for McLaren in 1993 – you have to take on board Red Bull’s obsession with the States. Buying a couple of F1 teams is just one arm of a two-pronged strategy by Mateschitz to conquer the biggest market in the world. The other is to deliver the first U.S. World Champion since Mario Andretti in 1978. That’s why Ecclestone is bending over backwards to help Mateschitz. And why Mateschitz is bending over backwards to help Speed.
What-Mateschitz-say-Marko-do, so of course Marko has believed in Scott from the start. But will he really be the star-spangled savior of F1 in the U.S. that Bernie and Mateschitz hope? Well, he has the perfect American racing hero name – it is his real name, by the way – and he is quick, but his nationality confers a mantle that sits rather uncomfortably on him.
“To be honest I only think about it when I’m talking to people in the media, because my goal is to become World Champion. It has been since I was 11. It obviously feels good to sort of represent my country in Europe and I think I changed the perception [European racers have] of all Americans in the last year.”
He’s undoubtedly the best U.S. road-racer of his generation and impressed in GP2, utterly demolishing his iSport teammate, the inexperienced Turk Can Artam (as expected), and taking one pole, five podiums and five fastest laps (less expected). Although a win eluded him, over the season he proved himself worthy of third place in perhaps the most competitive junior series ever. The only two drivers to beat him (and by a wide margin) – Kovalainen and Rosberg – are being touted as the next Kimi and Fernando, so fair play.
But how will Speed fare as F1’s evangelist in the US of A?
“Having been an F1 fan since I was 11 and knowing that the fanbase in America is so little compared with what it is in some other places, for sure I’d love F1 to become bigger, because it’s where my interest is. But I don’t think about it when I’m working.”
In other words, he’ll be pleased if his own success ignites interest in F1 in the U.S., but he’s not about to undertake an F1 PR pilgrimage for the good of the sport.
Time will tell whether he has the talent to let his racing do the talking and widen U.S. interest in F1. But he’s certainly confident of his ability to match the big boys, given the right opportunity.
“I don’t think there’s any one driver out there who is two-tenths better than anyone else. I mean look at Schumacher, for example. Say what you like, but when things are not running right, he’s pushing harder and making more mistakes. He’s like everyone else.”
Scott Speed in F1 will be fascinating. He’ll rub American F1 fans and the F1 establishment the wrong way. On paper, in the wake of Indygate, the great U.S. hope should be an Ivy League jock with a deft ability for road racing and a willingness to PR the sport in the Land of the Free. He should, in other words, be an American David Coulthard.
But he ain’t. And I’m glad. Scott Speed is his own man. And by the end of our encounter, I even quite like the guy. At least he’s got grit and personality.
