RACING A1GP:Prospects look tip-top for Adam Carroll after his A1GP wins for Team Ireland at the weekend, writes JUSTIN HYNES
ADAM CARROLL’S name is not one that has featured too heavily on the sports pages of this or most other newspapers over the past year.
There isn’t, after all, much room for motorsport beyond the extravagant world of Formula One, where the budgets, drivers and powerbrokers are equally gilded, and in which the soap opera off-track is every bit as charged and explosive as the one on it. With that hysterical drama on show, other series don’t get much of a look in.
That’s certainly the case with A1GP, a series an Irish team has been steadily chipping away at for the past four years. Led by Mark Gallagher, the former head of marketing at the Jordan F1 team, Team Ireland has been edging close to lifting this self-styled world cup of motorsport ever since it scored a maiden win in Mexico last year – ever since Carroll joined two races into the 2007/2008 season and took that Mexico win.
Carroll’s relative anonymity was erased last Sunday, however, when, after taking his fifth race win of the series and his second dominant victory that day, he pushed Ireland to title glory, the first time a global series had been won by an Irish team, indeed, by an Irish driver. Suddenly his was a major story and one with possibly glamorous future episodes to come.
How realistic, though, are those forecasts, and is the title Carroll has just lifted a fitting springboard from which to make the jump to F1? In the murky world of Formula One driver politics, the answers are intertwined.
For a young driver, the traditional routes to Formula One are shaped as Formula 3, Formula Renault and ultimately GP2. For Carroll these were irrelevant. He had passed that way before, winning in GP2 on five occasions, signing with the Honda F1 team’s junior programme and going precisely nowhere.
Stymied by the then immovable Honda objects of Jenson Button, Takuma Sato and “tester for life” Anthony Davidson, Carroll faded from view.
His GP2 career too was a patchwork of hastily stitched together drives found where opportunity and paltry budget allowed. When he raced he invariably decimated better-prepared opposition, but the race opportunities were thin.
He couldn’t go back, but there was no road ahead. Step forward Mark Gallagher, boss of A1GP Team Ireland.
“I sat down with Adam last August (in the driver’s second year with the team) and I said to him ‘Look, if you want your career to go forward you have to win this year’s title,” says Gallagher. “He’s done that and done it in some style, and he has been fantastic for us.
“I think when he joined us it was a catalyst for us because we realised we had a driver of a different calibre. The team was already a good team, but we also could identify areas where we were a little bit lacking and with Adam we then could set about fixing those issues.
“He was no longer a driver that was simply plugged into a car on a weekend and asked to go and do it – here, he was key to the development of the team. He had a role to play in helping us and we could also help him greatly by treating him as part of the management, by treating him like an adult. And it’s paid dividends.”
The bonus now for Carroll is that this year’s A1GP series has, on track at least, been the most potent yet. In the past the series was, in F1, regarded with scepticism, and while the finances of the series have been troubled and events cancelled this year, it was bolstered by a host of ex-F1 drivers looking to re-establish credentials. Carroll can now claim to have beaten them all.
Carroll’s F1 prospects look better-starred than at any time recently. The tentative approval by F1’s teams of a budget cap of approximately £40 million (€45 million) per year should see several new teams submit proposals to join the F1 circus with the FIA in coming weeks, the most likely being two which Carroll would have a good chance of landing a seat with.
Top of the list is undoubtedly Lola, the race car company owned by Irish businessman Martin Birrane.
The Mondello Park owner has already intimated an interest in entering Lola for its first F1 championship since a disastrous campaign in 1997, the year before Birrane acquired the company.
If Lola does enter the 2010 F1 contest, rumour already suggests that Gallagher could be in the frame to run the programme and Carroll would likely be drafted in as driver.
The other possibility is Prodrive, the massive motorsport company run by former Honda F1 boss David Richards and which until recently ran Subaru’s world rally programme.
As recently as 2007, Richards was on the brink of an F1 entry, with the added bonus of Mercedes power and McLaren development assistance.
A row over chassis sharing scuppered the entry but with the cost cap now looking secure, Richards has said he is set to push the button on a new entry. Carroll, whose Portadown roots make him appealing to both Irish and British fans and whose history will be well known to Richards from his time as Honda boss in the early 2000s, would make a fine acquisition for the British team.
Carroll has endured some tough seasons on the periphery of the big leagues but can now realistically claim to have a calling card worthy of admittance to the F1 paddock. It may not be the traditional one, but stranger have been used. It wasn’t too long ago, after all, that another Ulsterman, Eddie Irvine, was finally migrating to Formula One from the remote confines of Japanese Formula 3000.
Carroll can only hope he can emulate the success of that little move.