Motor racing fathers and sons are not uncommon. But a rally legend with a son who’s determined to succeed on the track, not trail, is a little unusual, as The Red Bulletin's Anthony Rowlinson explains.
A friend, who has known Carlos Sainz for more than a decade, described his fame like this: “He used to be mobbed like Jesus.”
Some context: before anyone else had done anything, Carlos Sainz had done everything – at least as far as Spanish sports fans are concerned. He was a double World Rally Champion by 1992, having started winning events two years earlier in his first full world championship season. He went on to enjoy a massively successful WRC career through to 2005, winning 26 rallies against fierce rivals to become a true figurehead of his sport and a national celebrity along the way. He was – and is – massive. Before the emergence of Fernando Alonso in Formula One, he was Spanish motorsport.
It’s remarkable, given such ego-stoking success, that Carlos Sainz – ‘King Carlos’ to his most ardent fans – has always been regarded (excuse the cliché, but it’s true) as one of sport’s real gentlemen, and he remains one to this day. Yet courteous as he is charismatic, he’s as withering of those he considers ‘unprofessional’ as he is generous to those he respects.
Because, make no mistake, Carlos Sainz, for all his immaculate manners, is no sugar-coated patsy – he’s a ferocious competitor, and earlier this year, at age 47, he proved the racing fires still burn bright, by winning the endlessly challenging Dakar Rally – one of motorsport’s grand prizes.
'I am going to do what is in my heart and do my best to try to get up there' – Carlos Sainz Jr
A personal friend of the King of Spain, with whom he regularly plays squash, a schoolboy triallist for Real Madrid (the fortunes of which side he still follows with demented passion), Carlos Sainz is, in short, one hell of a class act, and a legend – not merely a name – for any offspring to live up to. Particularly if that offspring is also called Carlos. And particularly if said offspring decides his life path is in motorsport.
This daunting challenge is the one that has nonetheless been accepted by 15-year-old Carlos Sainz Jr – Carlitos among friends for the purposes of disambiguation – and this year, racing in that noted academy-for-superstars, the Formula BMW Championship, he has started carving a path he hopes will one day make ‘Carlos Sainz’ a twice-feted name.
That’s all in the future, because right here, right now, in the paddock area of the Circuit de Catalunya, hosting the 2010 Spanish Grand Prix, Carlitos can only contemplate what wreaths and garlands may lie ahead. While he has been racing since the age of nine in go-karts, his first-ever ‘car’ race was in Malaysia on April 3 this year, in the Formula BMW Pacific series. There, against somewhat weaker opposition than he will face in FBMW’s European arm, he finished second and fourth in the two races held over the Malaysian GP weekend, at the same Sepang circuit used by the F1 luminaries he aims – as soon as humanly possible – to join.
“Since I was three years old,” he offers, “I would sit on top of the kart and I would feel that sensation of speed. It was an exceptional sensation for me and I said, ‘OK, this is my dream, I am going to fight for it, and I am going to do what is in my heart and do my best to try to get up there.’”
Carlitos is, by any regular measure, preposterously young to be considered a professional sportsman, yet such are the demands of top-line contemporary motor racing: in 2008, his idol Sebastian Vettel became the youngest F1 winner, aged 21 years and 73 days, and if he wins the F1 drivers’ title this year, he will become the youngest ever so to do. As well as being the most celebrated graduate of FBMW, Vettel is also its most successful: in 2004, he won 18 races from 20 – a mark that has yet to be approached.
So, far from being an infant prodigy, Carlitos Sainz is simply in roughly the right place at roughly the right time to achieve his goal of emulating Vettel and other star FBMW graduates – Nico Rosberg, Bruno Senna, Timo Glock, Nico Hulkenberg, Adrian Sutil and Sébastien Buemi – who all made it to F1…
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