MICKEL’S AMERICAN DREAM
After winning a record f if thu k legends title, john mick el still has his sight son the USA.
History was made this year in the UK National Legends Cars Championship as John Mickel became the first driver to win five titles in the category, which incredibly was his fourth success on the bounce.
That’s no small feat in a series where more than 30 cars regularly compete, across six races over a weekend and with randomised grids.
“If people say it’s easy to win this championship then they want to come and have a go because we do six races in a weekend and you’ve got to keep that consistency going,” says the 47-year-old, whose first UK Legends title came in 2001.
“Week in, week out, making sure the car is reliable, keeping it on the track, there’s a lot of work involved and I don’t think people realise how hard it is.
“Some championships only do one race or two races a weekend but we have six.”
Drivers from the other series looking in might believe that Mickel’s domination is a sign that the series is competitively weak or that numbers are dwindling. But, in fact, the series, which will celebrate 25 years in 2019, is proving to be just as competitive and popular as ever.
The final meeting of the year – always a good barometer of how healthy a series is – at Brands Hatch in early November attracted 32 entries, while Mickel’s title was sealed that same weekend as opposed to several rounds before.
The series also shared five of its nine rounds this year with the highly-popular British Truck Racing Championship, which attracts thousands of spectators to its meetings.
Mickel isn’t surprised that the series and cars – five-eighth scale models based on pre-war Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge bodies with 122bhp, a locked rear differential and no aerodynamics – continue to be so popular.
“They’ve got loads of power and no grip, it’s not like they’re slicks and wings where you put your foot down and it goes where they want it to go,” says Mickel, who is also a fivetime Legends World champion.
“We’re on the knife-edge all the time with them and there’s a fine line between keeping it on the track or putting it off the track.
“That’s why they’re so fun to drive, they’ve just got bags of power over the ground and no grip at all.
“And that’s why I think anybody who goes from Legends into a different formula really does shine because they’ve got the car control and skill to handle something that does handle when they move into it.”
Racing has always been in Mickel’s blood, his dad Brian was a local stock car racer when he was growing up, and by the age of 10 Mickel was competing in Ministox.
He was Superstox World and European champion on short ovals when he was 18-years-old before eventually making the move into Legends in 1998, as “that was the only thing we could afford moving up to”.
He founded Mickel Motorsport in 2000 with his wife, and former Legends driver, Lisa, and his first UK Legends title followed the next year, as well becoming Legends World champion for the first time and the inaugural title holder in the Rockingham-based series ASCAR in the same year.
While Legends is where Mickel has made a name for himself it’s in the United States of America where he’s been looking to make a break for more than a decade.
Having done several races in the States, he explains it’s more than just racing over there.
“The Americans understand motorsport I think. They do so many different classes of racing, it’s just not racing it’s a show and I think that’s what the Legends have done,” says Mickel, who took Legends World Championship honours in 2001, ’15 and World Series success in 2001, ’15, ’17.
“It’s not just about racing, it’s the whole show and festival at the meeting, getting the crowd involved and the excitement of it all. Like we have the Trucks with the Legends, we get 30,000 or 40,000 people there.
“We’re not just drivers: we’re showmen really where we’ve got to put on a show for the crowd and get them excited and the more they get excited the better the crowd gets.
“That was the great attraction about Rockingham, the ASCAR was going because we had big crowds and if we can get big crowds back to motorsport then it makes everybody’s life easier.”
He made his NASCAR Truck Series debut in 2005 at Texas Motor Speedway and the following season contested the final five rounds of the championship.
In 2010 he also won the inaugural ASA Freestate 500 race in South Africa and in the process became the first Englishman to win a Nascar-sanctioned race outside of the USA.
But ultimately a lack of budget held him back from competing further, but it hasn’t stopped him eyeing a possible return to the States in 2019 for a full season of racing.
“I still want to do a year in America, it’s just finding the sponsor to get us there but I’m not getting any younger,” admits Mickel.
“It would be Trucks or Xfinity [Series], if we can raise the budget to do that for a season and then when I’m old and grey I can hang up my crash helmet and boots and say ‘you know what, at least I’ve had a go’.
“We’ve done four or five races out there but because you’re new and you jump straight into it you get two races underneath your belt and you just get into the swing of things and then you’re coming home.”
Even if the American dream doesn’t come true Mickel still plans to return to UK Legends next year to try and claim what he refers to as the “drive for five” titles in a row.
But he’s under no illusions that the task of winning another title isn’t becoming any easier.
“There’s a lot of good drivers coming through that have raced on the ovals. I’ve got to up my game and I’m in the process of doing that because I think I’ve been a bit lax last year, maybe the last two years,” he says.
“Hopefully that push will be enough to give me the edge but there’s a lot of good drivers coming through.
“You can’t put your finger on one, I could probably reel off 10 who possibly, on their day, could put it all together and win the championship.”
The fact that the UK Legends Cars championship record holder is already predicting how difficult next season will be tells the uninitiated all they need to know about how competitive one of the UK’S most popular series is. ■