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| The Inside Line: Nick Longhi |
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The car Longhi drove at Monza was the 2003 car driven by Rubens Barrichello. Longhi reached a top speed of around 210mph.
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TheRaceSite Was it difficult to drive the F1 car in any way, such as getting started?
Longhi: The way you sit in the car and have everything around you is just the most perfect thing you can imagine as a race car driver. You can see and feel the time and energy that went into refining every part of the car. I assume that if you get an F1 driver in the car that can get it closer to its limits, they would find shortcomings, but I found it unbelievably easy to drive and found everything about it to be completely intuitive. They told me that it was easy to stall going out of pit lane using the hand clutch, but to me it felt like the best foot clutch I've ever used. One thing I found absolutely impossible to get my mind around in the short time I had in the car was the Brakes. I've driven race cars that have great Brakes but nothing gets anywhere close to the level of braking that I experienced in this car, not even an Indy car. When you're going at high speeds and hit the brakes, the pedal at first feels spongy, but if you stand on the pedal, the car slows down in a way that my brain could not catch up to. When I first approached the Parabolica corner for the first time and hit the brakes hard, it stopped so fast that I almost lost track of where I was with the markers. For me, the one thing that it would take to reach my limit in the car is to just practice braking really hard lap after lap and get a sense for how quickly it slows down.
TheRaceSite How fast did you go at Monza?
Longhi: I think I got up to around 210mph. Monza is a very fast track, but it's very narrow. With the trees along the circuit, it feels like you're driving through a tunnel when you're going fast.
TheRaceSite Tell us about your involvement in vintage and historic racing. . . .
Longhi: I've had some really good customers with the vintage race cars and it's been great to be accepted into that world. Once owners see that someone else they know trusts you with their valuable cars, then they will start to trust you also and have you drive theirs. I've had a lot of fun doing the vintage racing and I've had the opportunity to drive many of the cars that I admire, from the 1933 Alfa Monza Grand Prix car to the Ferrari 512M and the Ferrari F1 car. It takes a while to get into the mindset of the older cars and what to expect out of them, because you can't drive them the same way that you would a modern race car.
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