Stock Car may be creating a nice problem for the category in the near future: to not let the following rounds lose its cache and the grid quality of the opening round of the 2015 season this Sunday (the 22nd), in Goiânia. With 14 former Formula 1 drivers, many of them from a very recent past and one champion, plus several big names in the world of motorsports, the challenge now is not only to keep this momentum throughout the remaining 11 rounds of the championship, but to overcome the grid quality of the special dual race next year.
The director-general from Vicar, the company organizing the Stock Car, does not hide his pride in the success of an event created last year and which came to seem foolhardy in view of the pretensions of the idea - to make each of the 34 regular drivers invite a (preferably illustrious) partner for a relay round. “And to think some people did not believe it could go right...”, Maurício Slaviero remembers, happy with the stars parading around the paddock of the Goiânia International Speedway.
Those who believed the idea and plunged in it headlong has no reason to regret. This was the case with the Prati-Donaduzzi team, which rescued the biggest rivalry in Formula 1 history when they united in the same boxes – for the first time since 1989, which was when Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost split from McLaren – two legendary brands of the tracks. Heirs of notable families, Bruno Senna, nephew of the three-time champion Ayrton, and Nicolas Prost, son of the four-time champion Alain Prost, will battle each other as teammates, respectively, of Antonio Pizzonia and Alain Prost. The two – rivals in Formula E – are friends and respect the ancestor of the other, but they will forget the camaraderie on Sunday. “I want to defeat not only him, but everybody else,” they repeat in chorus.
The reunion of a Senna and a Prost has been attracting attention due to the global repercussion. The announcement of this news traveled all five continents, reaching even remote centers of motorsports, such as India. “Prati-Donaduzzi was the company who best understood the race concept. Several others will have to chase in 2016,” Slaviero believes. Senna and Prost are the icing on an extremely sophisticated cake that also includes Nelsinho Piquet, the Spaniard Jaime Alguersuari, Lucas di Grassi, the Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi and the Portuguese Antonio Felix da Costa, all former Formula E drivers. Other attractions are Jacques Villeneuve, former Formula 1 champion in 1997, the return of Ingo Hoffmann, twelve-time champion and the biggest Stock Car name ever, alongside the defending champion Rubens Barrichello, and the Argentine José Maria “Pechito” Lopez, 2014 Touring Car World Champion.
The magnitude that this series is reaching made TV Globo, holder of the rights to broadcast the series, to flood their newscasts with reports directly from the boxes at the capital of the state of Goiás. And they mobilized basically its entire Formula 1 production staff to work at the Stock Car opening round. This Sunday, with the start scheduled for 10:30AM, the race will be broadcast live.
