Nelson Piquet, Fast and Funny

It’s a dirty job being an automotive and racing writer but, you know, somebody’s got to do it. A couple of weeks back, my work consisted of flying into Daytona for the first day of the Rolex 24-hour race, then flying back to Miami, where I spent a day on the roadcourse inside Homestead’s mile-and-a-half oval testing high-speed tires on the latest Jaguars, BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, Audis, and Saleen Mustangs, among others. Oh, did I mention, I also lapped the oval at speed riding shotgun in a Porsche with three-time F1 World Champion Nelson Piquet? Tough life, eh?

The occasion was the press introduction of Pirelli’s new P-Zero Rossa, an extension of their famous P-Zero line, particularly in the direction of increased wet weather grip. Piquet, being a Pirelli distributor in Brazil, joined several other well-known drivers to give thrill rides to the “journos” after our tests. One writer apparently got a bit more of a thrill than he wanted when Piquet had what was described to me as a pretty big “moment” at around a buck-twenty-five in turn two, just “centimeters” from the wall, I was told. Must have scared the hell out of the journalist.