He flies his own helicopter; he’s married to a Hollywood actress; he collects Ferraris and spends his weekends racing at 200mph.
And tonight, he’s coming to Fifth Gear – Tiff Needell, Vicki-Butler Henderson and Tom Ford flew out to meet Scotsman Dario Franchitti at his first NASCAR race – the Daytona 500.
The 35 year-old racer is the only British driver in the prestigious American racing series.
Dario also has connections with the Fifth Gear team – he started his motorsport career as a racing instructor working for Tiff Needell.
Tiff recollects on their working relationship: “At the end of one of our track days, I decided Dario had been the most mischievous instructor so deserved a punishment – to go and collect all the cones from around the circuit”.
“That was really boring” says Dario, “so I got my mate to drive a van around the circuit as quickly as possible while I hung out the back, scooping up the cones”.
Seemed like a good plan until the van raced round a sharp bend. “The stack of cones inside fell on top of me, pushing me out the van. I used my head and shoulder as a brake, and still have the scars to prove it!”
Catch the new episode of Fifth Gear tonight on Channel 5 at 8pm.
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Despite all his success in Indy, IRL, I remember him driving, with some good performances for Mercedes in DTM / ITC
back then in 1995, 1996, those D2 sponsored AMG C Klasse were my favorite racing cars, I was 11 and had lots of pictures of those beautiful Mercedes in my bedroom walls
Anyway, interesting enough, he and Montoya had quite a similar way in terms of racing, aside from F1, Montoya drove for Mercedes in DTM too, he raced at Silverstone round of the 1996 DTM ITC season