Haas F1 driver Nikita Mazepin, in his own words

“I would say yes and no,” he says. “There is a certain mentality that you find as a driver to drive yourself during your many years in racing, regardless of the conditions. You push to the max. In my case, it’s so much a part of me that I can consciously say, ‘Okay, no pressure’ and think logically, but then when you get into the groove and want to improve every corner and try to go faster and it To make lap times better, you finally start to look around and see who has done what. I’m a pretty competitive person. If you give me a ping pong table and say, “Let’s play!” I would really be trying to beat you. If you have that, you have it. You can’t go out and buy it. We can only play with what the character we were born with gave us.

“I really believe that everyone is able to achieve certain things that are in their own hands. I would have exactly the same ambitions if my father had sent me to dance ballet when I was young. If I had turned 10 and spent four years doing it, and I knew that I wanted to dance in the best theaters in the world, I would put in exactly the same amount of effort. “

When Nikita was six years old, his father enrolled him in three sports that he believed would be good for his son: karting, mixed martial arts, and gymnastics.

“When my nose was broken for the first time, my father wasn’t that into cage fighting,” says Mazepin. “So I stopped doing that. I’ve never been super flexible or good at gymnastics. It just wasn’t my thing. But in karting, I had a more natural pace than the average kid and so I got drawn into it. It was the thing from the start that I happened to be pretty good at. Now I’m 22 and I’m sitting here in the F1 paddock … “

Mazepin is different from many of the Russian racers we’ve seen in the past, with a more international outlook. When you talk to him, you get the impression that his English is so good that he must have gone to school in England.

“That was me,” he says. “We have 11 years of school in Russia, but during my ninth to eleventh grades – basically high school – I lived in Oxford and studied at Oxford College. I rode for Hitech and Force India, and when I wasn’t racing I had a bike and would ride my bike to school in the morning. ”