Lewis Hamilton got to try out one of the
NASCAR "Car of Tomorrow" stock cars on Tuesday when he took Tony Stewart's #14 Mobil 1/Office Depot Chevrolet around the Watkins Glen International road course as part of
a car swap exhibition event.
In return, Tony Stewart managed to squeeze into the rather more cramped cockpit of a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes MP4-23 for a few circuits of his own, and said that he enjoyed not only the F1 experience but also the opportunity to test out parts of The Glen that
NASCAR races don't normally reach on their visits.
"It's not the same. They're completely different," said Hamilton when asked to compare the F1 and
NASCAR vehicles. "The weight - I was trying to calculate that before, because you do everything in pounds here, we do it in kilos. I think I measured it, it's three times the weight of a F1 car. It actually doesn't feel that heavy. I think the brakes were surprisingly very good.
"But the driving skills that you learn, the braking into corners, throttle shifting, that's all very, very similar. That's why I think it was easier to pick it up quicker than perhaps I would. I think it's the same for Tony. He went straight out there and picked it up. It was no problem for him. I could definitely see myself having some fun with it a little bit more!"
Hamilton said that he'd had a very good impression of the
NASCAR stock car. "I was really, really surprised. I was thinking this could be rolling quite a lot. I didn't know how stiff it was going to be," he said. "I tell you what, it handles really well. It's absolutely fantastic. The shifting and the engine, the way it's pulling through the RPM was fantastic."
Stewart described piloting the F1 car as "truly an experience of a lifetime" and said: "It's just amazing what the capabilities of the car are. I told the guys on pit road out there that it's probably going to make my crew chief a little more stressed during the weekends because I'm going to want [the #14] to handle like that all the time!
"The first thing I'd have to do is lose about 25 pounds right off the bat. I would actually have to go and work out in a gym again!" he quipped.
Stewart admitted that he had trouble just getting underway at the start. "The funny part is I couldn't even get it up high enough in the revs to get it to pull away in first gear. It goes into a default stall mode. [But] once we got rolling, it was unbelievable. The good thing is you have somebody like Lewis that can sit there and guide you through it."
The wet track conditions did mean that Stewart was far from finding the limits of the F1 car. "I never got to full potential of what the car was capable of doing in a braking zone," he said, admitting that "You may back it off a little bit just to enjoy the experience more.