Toyota Life Featured Picks

Thursday, 8/16/07, 1:30pm

Since I retired I usually do a race a year at least, sometimes more. Doing this "Race of Legends" for Toyota here at Laguna Seca this weekend is going to be a lot of fun. It's an amazing driver line-up, but there's no one person in particular I'm looking forward to racing the most. They're ALL very good.

Bobby Rahal will probably be the "youngest" of the guys I'm racing! He's certainly one of the of the most "recent" race drivers out there. Although Emerson Fittipaldi's going to pretty tough, too. He did the Masters series recently, and I saw he was winning races. Then there's Johnny Rutherford, my brother Al? We're all good friends. It's going to be a good group of guys, and will be a lot of fun.

This whole thing is all for charity, so it's not as if our lives depend upon who's going to win the race - although it's clear that everyone wants to win! As a driver, that's something that never leaves your system!

I actually told the Toyota people that they should expand a program like this for the older drivers to something like five or six races, and do it at different tracks, and make it a TV series. I think that would be really good for all the fans.

I've not raced here at Laguna Seca probably in more than 10 years, so in practice my idea is to just find out where the road goes! I'll have to figure it out when I get there. The last time I raced here we were flat from the start straight all the way up the hill. That was some run to what is now Turn 6!

I tried the Scion tC for size this morning, and held the belts fitted. I'm not very familiar with front-wheel drive on a racetrack, so that'll be fun for me. I wanted to get the belts fitted early, as there's so much going on here at the circuit, and so many great cars and people to see in the paddock. This is a wonderful event, with so many personalities and cars with history.

It's a pleasure to be a part of it.