UPDATE: Following our earlier story, Kimihas now confirmed he’ll be in the race. Excellent.
As you may remember, this weekend’s NASCAR clash at the Charlotte Motor Speedway has been renamed the Top Gear 300 in our honour. We suspect our friend, the dancing mayor from the Blue Ridge Parkway, is delighted.
And rather pleasingly, this latest round has taken on an added significance with the news that the Top Gear 300 sees Kimi Raikkonen making his nationwide NASCAR debut.
The Finn will be the driver of #87 NEMCO Motorsports Toyota owned by Joe Nemechek, who has done a deal with the Busch team to allow Kimi to drive.
“I don’t have big plans,” Raikkonen said. “I’ll see how it is, because I didn’t have any expectations when I came here. It’s a bit like when I went to rallying – I didn’t have much expectation, I wanted to see how it is.“It’s the same story here. For sure, it’s a different sport, a different type of racing than what we have in Europe. It’s very popular here and maybe it looks easy, but it’s not so easy to be fast. I’ll try to do my best and we’ll see how it goes and what the future will bring. There’s not an awful lot of planning to be done, and I really don’t want to hurry the situation. We go step-by-step and see what happens.
“If I completely suck, there’s probably no reason to come back. Like I said, at the moment, I have no plans for next year, so it’s too early to think about it.”
Another F1 refugee who has raced in NASCAR is Juan Pablo Montoya. He said: “He’s a guy that likes to have fun. I think that’s the main reason he’s here. I think it’s more than smart to make your first start at Charlotte. I think it’s brave.”
Top Gear US presenters Rutledge and Adam will be starting the race, while highlights from Top Gear US will also air during the weekend on the world’s biggest high-definition video screen, which stretches some 200 feet wide.
If you’re in the UK, live NASCAR coverage is on the Premier Sports channel, which is channel 433 on the Sky platform and subscription-only (none of us have ever heard of it, to be honest, but it does also feature Blue Square Premier football highlights).
We’re also heading over there ourselves, so look out for news from the weekend on TopGear.com.
Let’s end with a quiz. To our reckoning, this would make Kimi only the second ever driver to race in F1, WRC and NASCAR. Can you name the first? And are there any others we’ve forgotten?
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