CONCORD, N.C. – As the list of open-wheel stars moving to NASCAR grows, Sam Hornish Jr. remains undecided about his future.
He’s had tremendous success in IndyCars – winning three championships and last year’s Indianapolis 500 – but his tryout in stock cars hasn’t been nearly as smooth. He’s still trying to make his first Nextel Cup event, and dropped to 0-for-4 after failing to qualify for Saturday night’s race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
“We knew it was going to be difficult coming in,” Hornish said Thursday. “We’d like to have been racing a couple times so far, but we knew this was a possibility. We knew this was going to be tough, and that’s why I said I wanted to do this.”
A longtime open-wheel loyalist, Hornish now finds himself one of the many newcomers in NASCAR.
The road was paved last summer by Juan Pablo Montoya, who left Formula One for the Cup Series, and the defections have been fast and furious since. In the past week, reigning IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti and Champ Car star Patrick Carpentier said they will run full Cup schedules next season.
Former Formula One world champion Jacques Villeneuve, also scheduled to run a full season, made his Cup debut last week at Talladega (Ala.) and Scott Speed raced in the ARCA event there in preparation for a full season in that series.
All the moves have been full of fanfare, but Hornish has just been quietly plugging along. He can’t get into a Cup race, and he’s not turned too many heads in the eight Busch Series events he’s run, with a 15th- place finish at Atlanta this season his best showing.
But Hornish cautions that it’s unfair to judge him against drivers who have been racing stock cars far longer than he has.
“These guys have more races in stock cars the past two months than I have my entire life,” he said. “We knew it was going to be tough and that’s why we didn’t decide ‘We’re going to do it next year. Let’s just go do it.’
“We’re here trying to get track time, trying to get experience, so if I do go this route, I’ll at least have a little experience and at least have been to some of these tracks before.”
But Hornish remains undecided on what route he plans to go. Car owner Roger Penske is leaving the decision up to him, assuring Hornish there will be a seat for him in either series.
And unlike some of the other open-wheel defectors, Hornish believes he has a choice.
“Some of the Formula One guys, there is nowhere else for them to go and this was a place where they could have an opportunity,” Hornish said. “And Dario, I hear he had his deal to come to NASCAR for two years, and he didn’t have a whole lot of success in the IRL until this year. So that may have been a case of ‘Let’s go try something different.’
“But for me, this has been something that’s always intrigued me. I always wanted to run the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400. And I know in order to ever have a chance to win, you’ve got to be doing it fulltime.”
