The Way It Is: The booming Atlantic formula.

Tuesday, 9th May 2006

Here we are in the merry month of May, hand-wringing time for ten unfortunate years about the state of the Indy 500 and American open-wheel racing.

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Highly-rated Brazilian Raphael Matos finished a close second to Wirth in Long Beach. Matos won last year’s Star Mazda championship and drives this year for the top-rated Sierra Sierra team. Like most of today’s racers, Matos started racing in karts when he was a kid. He raced karts seven or eight years, then started racing cars. In 2001, when he was twenty, Matos won Brazil’s Chevrolet Formula Junior championship.

“I was supposed to race in F3 in Brazil in 2002, but I didn’t have the budget for the South American championship,” Matos explained. “So my option was to go to Europe or come to the United States and I had some connections here in the U.S. with some Skip Barber people. I had a good chance here, so I came here and ran the Barber series. That’s how everything started.”

Right away he caught people’s attention, finishing second in the entry-level Skip Barber Midwest series and winning the Formula Dodge national run-off. In 2003, Matos won the Formula Dodge national championship series. His prize was supposed to be a ride in the ‘04 Barber Dodge pro series, but the series came to an end amid CART’s bankruptcy and the Barber organisation was good enough to bankroll a season for Matos in the Star Mazda series.

Matos finished seventh in his first year in the Star Mazda series, then won the championship in his second
year in convincing style. Now he’s one of the favorites to win this year’s Atlantic championship and Matos couldn’t be happier to have chosen American racing and Champ Car as his goal over Europe and Formula One.

“My goal for sure is Champ Car,” he declared. “I love racing in the United States. In my opinion, Champ cars are real race cars. It’s real racing. I think I’m kind of old school. I like a sequential box. I don’t like paddle shifters. I don’t like so many electronics in the car and I think that Champ Car has been able to keep control of the technology so it’s more about the driver than the car, and I think that’s very important for racing. I like racing hard and, you know, I think F1 is too much about electronics right now.”