Vitaly Petrov: ‘When I was a child I didn’t watch Formula 1’

“I delved into motorsport, started assembling and disassembling cars”

Vitaly, you started doing motorsport during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it was not considered very popular. How did you become interested in this sport?

Rally and track racing were popular in the USSR. Specifically for me, they hired a rally driver coach to help, who after several lessons encouraged my parents that the boy had a certain prospect. In turn, I delved into motor sports, began to assemble and disassemble cars, and participate in rally sprint competitions.

If clubs and youth sports schools were opened in the Olympic disciplines, were motorists at the beginning of their development attached to the system of the Russian Army, Air Force and Navy Volunteer Society?

No, we didn’t even know what the society was, we just found a coach who had experience in rally competitions and asked him to train me. Especially since he had stopped racing, and under his guidance I first went to rally sprints and track races, after which I switched to circuit racing. My debut was in 2001.

“I remember that the Nevskoye Ring competitions were absolutely packed”

I come from Vyborg, Leningrad region (the editor’s note: Petrov is known by the nickname Vyborg Rocket). And motor sports were very popular here. You can see this if you look at even those competitions when I started in 2001, when there was the Nevskoye Ring, and these were circuit races that took place along the Neva embankment, past the Kirov Stadium. They attracted tens of thousands of spectators, right up until the closure of these competitions in 2006 (the author’s note: the fate of these races was connected with the dismantling of the stadium itself and the construction of Gazprom Arena on this site). I remember that back then the competitions were absolutely packed, not a single free seat, I even have archived records that testify to this excitement. True, it is difficult to say now: where did the spectators get information about these competitions from. On the other hand, posters, word of mouth, the media, which people actively studied, probably allowed us to gather people for our competitions. Now, with the development of the Internet, there is so much information that sometimes you get lost in its flow.

Judging by everything, local motorsports have always been popular in your area, including due to the great interest in it from neighbours from Finland, Latvia, Estonia, where even the Olympic cycling champion Aavo Pikuus extended his sports career by participating in car rallies. There are such sports disciplines that were developed locally during the Soviet era, such as speedway in Bashkiria or kuresh in Tatarstan.

“Dad insisted that it was necessary to develop physically harmoniously”

And what is kuresh? Honestly, I don't know.

It's belt wrestling, an extra reason to come to Tatarstan in June, in the midst of Sabantuy.

It's interesting. Honestly, I myself was involved in martial arts — it was both taekwondo and judo, to which I devoted five years as a child. Because my dad insisted that auto racing is good, but it is necessary to develop physically harmoniously. And I honestly earned belts of different colours in both judo and taekwondo.

If we talk about my childhood and youth, then there were football, boxing, tennis, both classical and table tennis, my dad even sent me to a ballet school as a child to develop good flexibility. Everything was positive, somewhere in the physical plane, like the same stretching, muscle corset, and in the psychological plane, since the same boxing, both types of tennis are discipline, concentration, speed skills, endurance. Each of the sports disciplines I listed allowed us to work on something of our own, and all this was positive.

For example, in endurance races, we feel like the same triathletes, losing up to five kilograms of weight in two hours. And not only water and fat mass, but also muscle, which is necessary for a racer not in a pumped-up state, but in an elastic one.

“Both in rally and circuit racing I gained experience that was useful in Formula 1”

The early 1990s was the time when TV channels were growing, and TV reports from Formula 1 probably inspired you to get involved in motorsports?

I’ll surprise you that when I was a child I didn’t watch Formula 1 races. To begin with, there were no motorsport fans in our family. I am the first, in fact. Moreover, my love for cars has been with us since childhood, I remember when we went to neighbouring Finland, I ran to the toy store, where I could spend the whole day just looking at car models. If my dad could afford to buy something, he would please me with the model I liked, because he saw my craving for everything like that — with a remote control, so that I could take it all apart, put it together. It's just love.

Only at the age of 17, when I switched to circuit racing, my coach Yuri Nichiporuk began to enlighten me in this regard: about Michael Schumacher, the late Ayrton Senna, our neighbors the Finns Hakkinen, Raikkonen.

When we had just built the Vysokaya Gora Circuit, some of my colleagues asked the organizers when Michael Schumacher would come to us. Even without realizing that Formula 1 cars and rally racing are practically incompatible. But your sports career proves the opposite. That you can switch from a regular car to a racing car.

I think it's the same with the sports I did as a child, as well as in motorsports: both in rally racing and in circuit racing — I gained experience everywhere that came in handy when I made my debut in Formula 1. The feeling of the car, the experience of driving in different weather conditions, the same overcoming of jumps, how the car works, how the shock absorbers behave, the grip of the wheels on the road on different surfaces. It's just that the same go-kart drivers who then move up the vertical of prototype racing, they get used to driving on asphalt from early childhood, they know how tires wear out on it. I wore out my first tires on dirt. I know that there are narrow specialists, the same karting drivers, who have won everything in their discipline, but could not go further than Formula 2. Or pilots who specialize in the circuit feel uncomfortable in rally. Therefore, for me, karting is one of the schools of future formula racers, but I believe that you can get there by doing something alternative.

“We had our own mini-battles with Michael Schumacher”

The hardest thing is to be first. There are sports where sparring is necessary, when an athlete reaches out to an opponent, then begins to overtake him. Almost all Formula countries had a flagship, looking at whom the rest caught up. And only here you became a reference point for Sirotkin, Kvyat, Mazepin.

When I became a Formula 1 racer, I didn’t focus on becoming a kind of benchmark for someone. I simply loved and continue to love motorsports, and when I switched to professional motorsports, I didn’t even care where to race: in my native Vyborg or on the most famous Formula 1 track. Over time, when I had already travelled a lot, listened to my coach’s stories about formula racers, and watched a lot of races with Schumacher, a dream was born, which at first became a cherished one, and then came true: to become one of the Formula 1 participants in order to compete with Schumacher.

Let me clarify that we are talking about Michael, not his younger brother Ralf.

Of course, Michael. And we had our own mini-battles when we crashed into each other's cars, sometimes I overtook him on the track, and he, I can't lie, never overtook me.

We are talking during one of the most intense periods of participation of Russian athletes in international competitions. Here are the world championships in water sports, fencing, the Summer Universiade. When, in your opinion, will Russian motor racing return to the international arena?

We have not interrupted international contacts at all, in particular, our racers participate in competitions in Dubai, although this is a semi-official story, which is not carried out under the auspices of the International Motor Sports Federation. I am not a politician, I think that we have a ministry of sports that is working in this direction.

“Our motorsport federation is working on returning to international competitions”

The Ministry of Sport's priority is returning to the international arena to participate in the Winter Olympics in Italy. In my opinion, it is easier for non-Olympic sports to rely on their own strength and so-called horizontal connections.

Of course, the Russian motorsport federation is also actively working on returning, moving in the same direction as government agencies. The president of our federation, Boris Rotenberg, his entourage, including the First Vice-President of the RAF Sergey Sirotkin, we are all interested in Russian motorsport being represented at international competitions of the highest level.

Did you plan to go to the Rubin and Zenit football match?

Exactly, Zenit is playing in Kazan. I was originally planning to leave, but I can stay on Monday to go to the football match in the evening. It is an attractive topic. I need to go and watch.

By the way, this is not our last time in Kazan this year, because we still have to come with the Formula 4 competitions scheduled for September.