Travelling Man Has Drive To Succeed

Sun Herald

Sunday September 3, 2006

Peter McKay

Aussie Ryan Briscoe is keeping busy trying to secure a full-time job, writes Peter McKay.

THREE weeks, ago Ryan Briscoe was powering a sports prototype at Watkins Glen in the United States and last weekend it was an Indy car at Sears Point, California.

This week it's a V8 Supercar in the Sandown 500 in Melbourne, and on October 1 he'll be lining up in the opening race of the A1 Grand Prix series in Holland, before whizzing home for the Bathurst 1000.

Briscoe's racing career is moving through a strange period of diversification, selective sampling and a little uncertainty as he works towards a championship tilt in 2007.

Just which championship is the unanswered question. "I'm looking at opportunities," he says.

During the northern winter he expects to be racing in the A1 Grand Prix for Alan Jones's Team Australia. That series runs from October to mid-April, so he's pondering what to do about filling the other eight months of the year, in a premier open-wheeler championship or in the Grand Am sports car series in the US.

Not so long ago, Briscoe's career appeared to be belting along almost inevitably towards formula one. He had won championships in open-wheelers and was a full-time test driver for Toyota's F1 squad. But a change of personnel at Toyota left him on the outer and he had to settle for Plan B - racing in the Indy Racing League with the Ganassi team.

Then came the death-cheating crash last September when Briscoe's Indy car touched wheels at 300kmh with a rival's at the Chicagoland Speedway, sending his machine high into the air and into the debris fence, where it was engulfed in flames and almost split in two. He was dragged out concussed and with two broken collarbones, a bruised lung, a fractured bone in his right foot and multiple contusions, but was back in a race car two months later.

The crash was painful in other ways: IRL team Ganassi dumped him.

With his parents in Sydney not keen for him to go back to the IRL's high-speed ovals and bone-breaking walls, Briscoe chased a drive in the rival Champ Car World Series, testing impressively with Aussie Kevin Kalkhoven's PKV team. "It was a done deal as far as I knew," he says. "The people on the team were talking that way."

But then Kalkhoven opted for two other drivers, one being Katherine Legge who, though not as fast as the Australian, had other marketing attractions.

It was a big blow for Briscoe. The decision came too late for him to secure a drive with any other leading team. He turned to sports car racing, scoring a couple of podiums in Grand Am prototypes.

By mid year he'd ignored his parents' advice not to return to the IRL, accepting selected drives with the small Dreyer & Reinbold team.

The Chicagoland crash - now in the IRL annals as the "Briscoe inferno" - has not been an ongoing problem for him.

"I would have been back in the car the next day if I had been physically OK," Briscoe says.

In June, Briscoe drove an Indy car for the first time since his scary shunt. Before the deal was sealed, he had to convince the car co-owners Dennis Reinbold and Robbie Buhl that any psychological scars from the Chicagoland episode had healed.

Briscoe went out firing, and took third place. A month later, the IRL series moved to Nashville Superspeedway, a fast oval like the one that had nearly killed him.

He admitted to some trepidation. "But after three laps it was like I'd never stopped," he says. "I was concentrating on how the car was handling and the lines I was taking - I never thought about my crash."

Today, Briscoe lines up for his Australian V8 Supercar debut with Jim Richards in the second Holden Racing Team Commodore in the Sandown 500. Briscoe will also drive the HRT car in the Bathurst 1000 with seven-time winner Richards.

Although Briscoe has raced overseas since he was 16, Bathurst still means a lot to him. "Any Australian race driver dreams of racing at Bathurst," he says. "When I got the call from Mark [Skaife] I said, 'Yes, right on!"' But he isn't looking at a full-time drive in V8 Supercars yet.

Briscoe has been too close to formula one to let it go easily. Three seasons ago in European F3, he was racing against and beating Robert Kubica, hailed as the new sensation of grand prix and the driver who replaced former world champion Jacques Villeneuve at BMW.

Kubica was Briscoe's teammate in 2003 when they chased the European Formula Three Championship. Briscoe took the title. He also beat Nico Rosberg, now at Williams, and Christian Klien, who drives for Red Bull F1.

"It's aggravating to see those guys in F1 when I know I can race at least as hard," Briscoe says.

"I've always been realistic about there being just 22 available seats in F1. I'm well aware of the politics and the circumstances that dictate that some [drivers] get the chances and some don't."

Now his attention is on his two outings in the HRT Commodore.

"We haven't talked about any deal beyond these two races," he says. "But I'll get a taste of the cars and the series and have an idea of what I think about something in the future.

"This year has been about getting back on the radar, but I am missing not having the focus on winning a championship series. I want that back next year. I'm goal-oriented and I like having a title to chase."

© 2006 Sun Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home