CHENNAI: When Vitantonio Liuzzi is asked about how he finds India, a smile appears on the face of the former F1 driver. During his two-year stint at Force India, Liuzzi made multiple trips to the country. “I feel quite at home here,” he says.
Liuzzi’s journey from Formula One to driving in X1 Racing League, the second leg of which will be held on Sunday at Madras Motor Racing Track, has been eventful. He burst onto the scene in 2001, when he won the Karting World Championship and beat none other than Michael Schumacher — already a multiple-time F1 world champion at that time — in the final race.
“I remember every single minute of that year. When I was a go-kart driver, my only goal was to win the championship. I was able to achieve it in an amazing season and with a race in which Michael Schumacher himself was driving.”
What happened after was less than ideal. Many would categorise Liuzzi’s F1 career in the folder marked “what may have been”. An F1 career that spanned a total of 81 races is not to be looked down upon. But Liuzzi, who many describe as one of the most underrated drivers in recent times, never climbed the podium in his Formula One career. His six seasons in the circuit were split between four teams: Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Force India and Hispania Racing.
“I had huge potential. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show it. I was living in a decade when motorsports had started changing. Many drivers arrived with a bagful of money. I was there because of merit.”
A big near-miss of Liuzzi’s career came during his stint with Red Bull in 2005. When he joined the newly-established team, they put in place a unique strategy of splitting the second driver’s seat between him and Christian Klien. It ended up helping no one. The Italian was shunted down to developmental team Toro Rosso.
“It was not the right decision because it just created confusion in the development curve of a driver,” remarks Liuzzi. “That helped neither of us. So after four, five races, we decided to stop the swap. Obviously, Klien was more experienced and he was keeping the seat. It’s a shame because my potential career at Red Bull could have been really long.” Five years later, Sebastian Vettel won the title in a Red Bull.
The closest the 38-year-old came to a podium was when he displayed blistering pace in a Force India at the 2010 Canadian Grand Prix, qualifying at sixth. “That’s one of my favourite moments in my Formula One career. But we had an incident in the very first lap. I was forced to pit and start the rest of the race from behind. But still, I fought to ninth. If it weren’t for that crash, we had the pace for a podium.”
But even that story, Liuzzi’s narrates with a smile plastered on his face. “I have nothing to regret.”