Norway has never produced a Formula 1 driver, a fact discovered by Rob Kamphues during a brief vacation. He now understands why.
I recently spent a week in Norway. It was a break for my peace of mind. No more ‘Pérez must go’, no more ‘how long will Horner last’, and zero ‘Max needs to move to Mercedes’: I really needed it. We stayed in a beautiful house by a private lake with our own dock and a sauna floating on the water. If we were murdered, it could take years before we were found. Blissful.
After three days, I started experiencing withdrawal symptoms. I began doing strange things. In the nearest café – a one and a half hour drive – I started signing bar receipts as ‘Toto’ and ‘Checo’ without realizing it. I loudly told anyone who would listen about how good Max Verstappen is. The girl behind the coffee machine looked at me as if she was seeing water catch fire.
‘Mæx Vërståppø?’ No, she had never heard of him. Desperate, I looked around the café. A shriveled old man cautiously asked if he was a speed skater, as the Netherlands was always good at that, he said. ‘Ard Schenk, Kees Verkerk’, he shouted, ‘against our three S’s!’ ‘Yes,’ I shouted, ‘Stenshjemmet, Sjøbrend, and Storholt, but why don’t you know Max? He’s our greatest athlete of all time, a three-time world champion!’
Big questioning eyes.
‘Auto racing?!’ I exclaimed in the bar, my hands frantically imitating a powerslide. ‘Ah, rally driving,’ the whole café sighed in relief. Yes, they knew that. Was Mæx Vërståppø then an unknown competitor of their Solberg brothers? Defeated, I sank into my chair and sipped the coffee that was as far removed from an espresso as Norway is from Italy.
I scrolled through Wikipedia, because they even have wifi in Nova Zembla these days, and typed in Formula 1 drivers by nationality, history. Turns out, Norway has never had anyone in Formula 1 in the entire history of auto racing. Sweden, twelve drivers, Finland ten, Denmark six, even countries like Liechtenstein, Czech Republic, Morocco, Malaysia, Uruguay, and Chile all had at least one, Norway none.
Max Verstappen: The Norwegian Hope in Formula 2
However, I did read that there is currently a Norwegian in Formula 2: Dennis Hauger who has won races and was once in Red Bull’s junior program. Someone came up with a picture of a chicken nugget package with his picture on it.
‘We thought it was the fryer boy,’ they explained. That Hauger, I concluded, will never make it to Formula 1. It’s a hopeless mission, they just don’t need Formula 1 in Norway.
A man in woolen socks and sandals, the type you only encounter near a circuit to protest against it, raised his finger and shared a theory: ‘In Norway, wealth is evenly distributed, we have much less poverty and much less obscenely rich people, so sponsorship doesn’t work here. The fact that we don’t have Formula 1 drivers says something about how well we are doing. The fewer Formula 1 drivers, the better the rest of the country is doing.’
He slapped me jovially on the shoulder. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you guys just got an ultra-right government, didn’t you? That’s very bad news for asylum seekers, culture, healthcare, and poor people. But great news for the ultra-rich, so hey, you can bet that in ten years you’ll have a few more Formula 1 drivers.’
I found it a depressing theory.
