Romain Grosjean on His New Endurance Racing Gig, His Last Days with Haas, and Turning His Frightening F1 Crash Into Something Positive

In November 2020, Romain Grosjean exploded into a fireball in front of millions of people. He was driving the first lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix for Haas, the languishing Formula 1 team that he would be leaving just a few weeks later. The Swiss-French veteran of 11 seasons and 10 podium finishes in F1 made contact with another car, lost control of his own, bashed into a wall, and produced one of the most horrifying moments in racing (and Netflix) history. Miraculously, Grosjean walked out of the fire with only minor injuries. Now, more than two years later, he talks about the crash with almost a half-smile as he points to a scar on his left hand. That night in Bahrain, as Grosjean exited F1, he took on a nickname: The Phoenix.

Grosjean has been reborn as a few different things. These days, he is a Miami resident. He is an airplane pilot. He drives in IndyCar, the American series he used to tell his wife he’d never race in, for Andretti Autosport. And this weekend, he will drive in the 24 Hours at Daytona, an endurance race on the Atlantic coastline of Florida that is just what it sounds like: Grosjean and three teammates on Italian racing squad Iron Lynx will take turns launching a screaming-green Lamborghini Huracán around the 3.56-mile course at Daytona International Speedway, 24 hours in a row. No one driver can drive for more than four hours out of any six, and Grosjean doesn’t think he’ll do stints of much more than 54 minutes at a time. But they call it “endurance” for a reason, and it’ll be a different kind of test for a driver who is used to flooring it for a few hours at a time.

An additional complication lies in machinery. There will be several distinct classes of car on track at Daytona, with roughly a 12-second-per-lap qualifying difference between the fastest and slowest types. Grosjean will be in one of the slower car classes, a GT Daytona Pro—sort of an exaggerated version of the years he spent racing Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes around F1 tracks while operating a Haas.

GQ talked with Grosjean about his endurance test, his F1 career, what he took away from going up in flames in front of both live and reality TV audiences, his new American life, and the limits he won’t test.

Even if you’re not racing for more than an hour a time, 24 hours is a long time to maintain focus while going well over 100 miles per hour. How does your preparation for an endurance race differ from your prep for an F1 race that will take two hours, start to finish?

For me, it’s not so much the time in the car, because on ovals like the Indy 500, we can get to three hours, four hours, just because of the safety car or caution. So the time is not so much the hard work. It’s more that here we’re in GT [grand touring] cars, so we are the slowest on the track. And there’s four different classes of cars, so there’s always guys coming around. And we have a spotter, so he tells us, “OK, it’s coming right, it’s coming left,” and so on. But it’s really trying to drive the best you can knowing that there are other guys around you that are going to go faster because they’ve got a faster car.