Robert Nguyen is the newest Australian on the international motorsport stage and, while much of the season's hype surrounds the likes of
Mark Webber, Ryan Briscoe and James Courtney, is poised to make his debut in the
FIA F3000 series this weekend.
Nguyen is of Vietnamese origin, but has grown up in Australia, and is now based in Switzerland. He is set to make his F3000 debut with Team Astromega at this weekend's Brazilian GP in the category which produced four wins for Webber in the past two years. The connection does not end there either, as Nguyen's team-mate at Astromega this year will be none other than Brazilian Mario Haberfeld - Webber's partner at Super Nova in 2001.
Q:
There is not a great history of Vietnamese in motorsport, so have you been expecting an easy ride, or is it going to be pretty tough for because you are pioneering?
Rob Nguyen:
You can say that I'm pioneering in a way. As we know, F3000 is the last proving ground to
Formula One, and all the drivers in F3000 are champions from various other categories, so I'm really going to be expecting a really tough ride because it's very competitive and a lot of the guys are very experienced.
Q:
How's the testing been going?
RN:
The testing in pre-season, I think, is very similar to
F1. When you just look at timesheets, you cannot really tell who is going to be the winner, who are going to be the slow guys, because, with this car, you can run under-weight, run different fuel loads. As in F1, normally you see the slow teams running under-weight and things like this, just trying to get sponsors and that. During pre-season testing, it's really hard to know exactly where we stand, how competitive we are, so the only real indication is where you are with a team-mate and, basically, I've been comparing myself with Mario.
