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NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon, a four-time NASCAR Cup champion, once had serious discussions about switching to Formula 1 twice. However, his love for stock cars was too strong.The champion of the 1995, 1997, 1998, and 2001 Cup Series and now a member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame tested a Williams FW24 in 2003. This was part of a promotional event at Indianapolis where he swapped seats with then-F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya.Much is made of the differences between the two motorsport disciplines. But the results from the private test provided a fascinating insight into the comparisons between drivers in F1 and NASCAR.After swapping places with Montoya, Gordon consistently clocked laps of 1:17 towards the end of his run. To give you an idea, the fastest lap at the previous F1 race at the track was 1:10, while the slowest was 1:13.He eventually set a fastest lap time of 1:16.5 seconds and also performed a launch start. On the other hand, Montoya ran a stock car lap of 1:39.9 seconds, which was only 1.1 seconds slower than what Gordon had run earlier in the day. Gordon’s fastest lap in the F1 car was 1.3 seconds slower than Montoya’s lap earlier in the day. “No, I can see where getting that last second is really tricky,” Gordon said after the test. “I’d love to sit here and play with the car– yeah it feels a little bit tight… yeah I’d like to take some front brake bias out of it. But that experience in itself is what I came here for. What a fun, awesome experience and I can’t thank everyone enough for pulling this together.”Gordon once thought about racing in Formula 1. He told ‘F1 Beyond the Grid’ in 2021: “So there were a lot of discussions that went on that got more serious than I thought they would after that [test] because I did have so much fun with it and I started thinking: ‘Can I train my neck enough to do this, can I learn the tracks, can I be competitive? ‘”.He found out that F1 cars are very different from stock cars and that F1 drivers need to be super fit. They even have to do special exercises for their necks because of the fast turns in races.Now 52 years old, Jeff remembered how he met with two big F1 teams, Jaguar and Williams, but decided not to switch to F1. Jacques Villeneuve, another racer, also talked to him about it in the late 90s.Gordon explained: “I thought it was too steep of a climb to accomplish,” talking about moving to F1. He did get a chance though. He went to the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona just for fun, but ended up meeting with F1 folks while he was there.Gordon shared: “Jimmie Johnson was actually with me and all of a sudden a couple people are like, ‘hey, such-and-such would like to talk to you’ and I’m over in the Jaguar paddock ‘hey, tell us about what’s going on with your future, we saw you drove the Williams’. It probably was, more than anything, did I have any money to bring to Formula 1 and did I want to be a Formula 1 driver?”I sat down with Frank, I think he came to Indianapolis after that test for the actual race. I went and sat down and had coffee with them and we talked about it. It might have been a similar kind of probe. It really never got serious or went anywhere, and I really at that time didn’t expect it to because I was so established in NASCAR. Ten years or eight years prior to that, had that happened, it would have been different.”After considering F1 in the early 2000s, Gordon decided to stick with NASCAR for another 13 years, running his last race in 2016 at Martinsville. Gordon retired from NASCAR after competing in 805 races over 25 years, winning 93 times, as well as securing an impressive 477 top-ten finishes.”So, both of those opportunities came my way and they were fun discussions but never went anywhere because I love NASCAR, and I just didn’t see where me starting over at that point was reality,” Gordon admitted.
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