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Austin Lindberg, Senior Editor
On any given Sunday, race automobile drivers world wide pilot essentially the most exhilarating vehicles on the planet. From the primary apply session Friday morning to the waving of the checkered flag late Sunday afternoon, each flip of the steering wheel or press of the gasoline pedal dumps one other dose of adrenaline into their bloodstream.
For the remainder of the week, although, they nonetheless have driving to do. And whereas the NASCAR Subsequent Gen automobile may be excellent for braving the banking of Daytona, and a Dallara-chassis IndyCar might need been bred for the Brickyard in Indianapolis, the reality is that neither is excellent for dropping off youngsters at soccer apply or selecting up groceries.
So, when race automobile drivers are away from racetracks, what do they drive?
To reply that query, ESPN contacted each driver with a full-time experience within the NASCAR Cup Collection and IndyCar, granting them anonymity to reply in truth: What’s your each day driver? Greater than half of these fields offered solutions, only one driver declined to take part, and the responses — from drivers who come from all around the world — mirrored the individuality of the American auto market.
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Earlier than we get into the drivers’ weekday rides, although, we should always discuss who’s supplying them. Automakers put money into motorsport, primarily, as a advertising and marketing train, and with drivers showing because the face of that funding, manufacturers are incentivized to increase that relationship past the racetrack. They usually do, by giving drivers free autos for private use.
There are 4 producers that help these sequence in a major method: Chevrolet, Ford, Honda and Toyota. Chevy is the one provider concerned in each NASCAR and IndyCar, with Ford and Toyota becoming a member of them in inventory automobiles and Honda the rival engine provider within the U.S. open-wheel sequence.
Of the 61 full-time drivers approached, Chevy provides 28 of them (46%), Honda has 15 (24%), Ford has 12 (20%) and Toyota has six (10%). Of our respondents, 61% drove for Chevy, 29% raced for Ford, 6% had been Toyota drivers and one other 3% represented Honda.
Lower than 10% of respondents admitted to daily-driving a car that had no direct relation to the producer they had been employed by. So we anticipated to see a lot of Chevrolets in our information, and we did.
No car was extra in style amongst drivers than the Chevy Tahoe, a full-size SUV chosen by greater than 25% of our respondents. Felix Rosenqvist, a Sweden-born IndyCar driver for Chevrolet-supplied Arrow McLaren, known as it “the most effective automobile you’ll be able to have residing in Indiana,” the place McLaren’s IndyCar operations are primarily based.
“It is simply the liberty of your house,” he instructed ESPN forward of Sunday’s IndyCar race on the streets of Toronto. “For those who spend a variety of time on the street — which I believe in case you would take the common time you spend on the street within the U.S. in comparison with Sweden, it will most likely be thrice, 4 occasions extra — and being in that surroundings, you simply need it to really feel good. You’ve got room, you’ll be able to calm down, you’ve got good audio system, you’ve got good consolation, you are sitting up excessive, it isn’t noisy — all these issues.”
What Rosenqvist needs in his each day driver are the identical issues the common American automobile purchaser needs, too: house, consolation, visibility from a raised seating place. In 2022, the full-size pickup vans from Ford (the F-150) and Chevy (the Silverado) had been the 2 bestselling nameplates within the nation, accounting for almost 8.5% of all new autos offered final 12 months, and the structure of the Silverado is what underpins the Tahoe.
Unsurprisingly, then, the F-150 was the subsequent most-popular response amongst our drivers, accounting for 16% of responses. The truth is, 77% of our drivers report driving full-size pickups or SUVs: 25% selected the Tahoe, 16% the F-150, 12% the Silverado and 6% the Chevy Suburban — an extended-length Tahoe.
“It is undoubtedly type of loopy once you come over right here, you see the dimensions of the automobiles,” Rosenqvist mentioned. “Being a European, the primary time you come to the States, you are like, ‘Man, all of the autos listed below are a lot larger.'”
These being race automobile drivers, we did discover one subset of respondents who sought out a few of that adrenaline they discover on the racetrack of their each day drivers, and that was in F-150 homeowners. Ford presents a variant of the F-150 known as the Raptor, a 450-horsepower monster designed to be as comfy on the desert sands of Baja as it’s within the parking zone of your native ironmongery store, and 10% of respondents enthusiastically relayed that they drove one every single day — together with NASCAR Cup Collection common Chase Briscoe, who drives for Ford-supplied Stewart-Haas Racing.
“Rising up, for no matter cause, my dream car was all the time a Raptor,” Briscoe instructed ESPN. “So once I bought signed by Ford and began doing the NASCAR factor, I bear in mind they had been like, ‘All proper, so what would you like to your loaner car?’ And I used to be like, ‘Nicely, what can I decide?’ They usually’re like, ‘Something.’ Clearly you’ll be able to’t decide a [$500,000] Ford GT or one thing, however I used to be like, ‘Can I decide a Raptor?” They usually’re like, ‘Yeah, completely. If that is what you need.’ So I’ve this white Raptor with blacked-out wheels.”
The American auto market is altering, although. Gross sales had been down 11% throughout the board in 2022, besides in electrical autos, whose figures jumped by 57%. EVs accounted for five.6% of latest car gross sales within the U.S. final 12 months.
That rising electrification is mirrored within the NASCAR and IndyCar garages. Although these drivers are paid to burn rubber and vaporize gasoline at a fee far past the common driver of America’s highways, they’ve adopted EVs at a fee much like the remainder of us. Greater than 6% of respondents mentioned they drove an electrical car every day, and all of these respondents had been Ford drivers, having opted for the F-150 Lightning or the Mustang Mach-E.
Race automobile drivers, they’re similar to us. Infinitely extra proficient, blessed with bravery most of us won’t ever know, however as soon as they depart that racetrack, they climb into the identical automobiles, vans and SUVs that all of us do. They only do not must pay for them.