When British driver Lando Norris clinched the F1 World Championship at Abu Dhabi last Monday (NZST), he became the tenth Formula 1 World Champion to have raced at Teretonga Park in Invercargill.
It is an unsurpassed record of world-class sports stars coming to our region, dating back to the early days of the circuit and continuing to this day.
In those early days, F1 drivers used to spend the summer racing in New Zealand and Australia. World Champions to come to our city in those days were Jack Brabham and Jackie Stewart, both three-time champs, two-time champions Jim Clark and Graham Hill, plus American Phil Hill, John Surtees (also a seven-time World Motorcycle Champion), Kiwi Denny Hulme, and Austrian Jochen Rindt.
It wasn’t just World Champions either. It was all the big names of the day, including Stirling Moss and Bruce McLaren, and many more. At the end of the 1960s, Formula 1 changed; it became more commercial, and the days of the current superstars racing in the Antipodes in the off-season ended. It did not mean the end of seeing some of the best, though.
In 1977 and 1978, Finnish driver Keke Rosberg raced here before going on to become World Champion in 1982. Now Norris, who raced here in 2016, when he won the Spirit Of A Nation Trophy, is the tenth World F1 Champion to have graced Teretonga Park.
Only thirty-five different drivers have won the World Championship in its 75-year history, so that is a healthy percentage that have raced here. The ten we have seen in the south account for sixteen World Championship titles.
It is not only F1 champions but also Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans 24 Hour winners that have raced at the circuit operated by the Southland Sports Car Club.
On the grid alongside Norris in Abu Dhabi were others to have come to Teretonga Park – Liam Lawson, Yuki Tsunoda, Franco Colapinto, and Lance Stroll. Next year, Arvid Lindblad, a winner at Teretonga Park less than twelve months ago, will also join the F1 grid.
And what awaits us over the weekend of 24/25 January next year is more of the same when Castrol Toyota Formula Regional Oceania Trophy Series visits us.
With it will come a field of up-and-coming international racing drivers all vying to follow in the wheel tracks of Norris and others who have gone on to stardom.
Already, drivers from Ireland, Japan, Sri Lanka, China, Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and of course New Zealand are entered and adding to the star power of the grid is a Finnish driver who is already a World Champion, in fact a two-time one in rallying.
At just twenty-five years of age, Kalle Rovanperä has retired from rallying to pursue a single-seater journey, which he hopes will take him to the top of that discipline.
If you are trackside at Teretonga Park over the weekend when the NextGen NZ Championship brings the Ascot Park Hotel Teretonga International meeting to our circuit, you could just be watching another future World Champion!
Header Image: Toyota Gazoo Racing New Zealand
