The F1 nearly-man winding back the clock in NASCAR’s European cousin

After a year’s enforced absence due to COVID-19, Euro NASCAR roars back onto UK soil this weekend to a soundtrack of throbbing 5.7-litre V8 engines at Brands Hatch’s American SpeedFest. To say that plenty has changed in the world at large since its last visit in June 2019 would be an understatement, but the calibre of drivers competing at the sharp end certainly hasn’t.

Its leading light is three-time series champion Alon Day, who notched up his latest title in last year’s pandemic-afflicted season of five rounds packed between September and December, while the returning series regulars include 1997 Formula 1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve and Belgian veteran Marc Goossens, who 30 years ago marked himself out as a name to watch by winning a typically frantic Formula Ford Festival.

The 51-year-old would go on to become a race winner in Formula 3000, finishing third in the standings in 1995 and 1996, with only a lack of budget preventing an F1 graduation. Following a stint in Japan, ‘The Goose’ earned a reputation as an F3000 troubleshooter, which explains his presence alongside young Astromega team-mate and race winner Fernando Alonso on the podium at Spa in 2000.

Now with 13 Le Mans 24 Hours starts under his belt and 10 in the Daytona 24 Hours (he has twice finished third at Daytona), Goossens is also one of few European drivers to have raced in the NASCAR Cup series, making him well-placed to assess the merits of Euro NASCAR. “It’s the most fun championship I know right now,” he asserts. “It’s back-to-basics, you have a four-speed manual gearbox, H-pattern, carburettor to take care of, so it’s still the real deal.”

Goossens’s two NASCAR Cup outings for Robert Yates Racing (both on road courses, at Watkins Glen in 2006 and Sonoma in 2007) came during a period of excess for the series where he found regular employment as a test and development driver. Testing was drastically cut back when the global economic crisis of 2008 struck, closing the door on further opportunities in NASCAR. But he says the 400bhp European equivalents have many of the same qualities, even if they are underpowered compared to their US counterparts (“back in 2006 I had 850 in my Roush-Yates engine”) to reduce costs.

“The pure form of racing, I did find that in Europe,” he says. “In order to be successful in building a series in Europe, you have to make sure that it is affordable and I think they did a very good job in putting together what they have now. If you look at the numbers, you’ll realise pretty soon that for drivers or sponsors, there are not a lot of championships that go all over Europe and are so cost-effective, because it’s not very expensive for the amount of exposure that you can get.”

 

Goossens explains that €85-90,000 is deemed “a pretty good budget for the season” and would likely include a pre-season test day, but points out that, as with any form of motor racing, “you can make it as expensive as you want”.

“There are also teams that are charging €120,000 per driver,” he says, “but I don’t know what they do with the €40,000 extra… It all comes down to having a good car that we can put a good show on with. It’s close racing, we all have the same cars, and the whole bumping thing and rubbing doors, it’s hard to do that in an Audi R8 [GT3] if you know the financial impact of hitting someone. It’s action-packed, to put it that way.”

Goossens’s Euro NASCAR journey began with Braxx Racing in 2016, although IMSA SportsCar Championship commitments that year and in 2017 caused him to miss a few rounds.

“It’s the most fun championship I know right now. It’s back-to-basics, you have a four-speed manual gearbox, H-pattern, carburettor to take care of, so it’s still the real deal”Marc Goossens

“Then, after that, we had some difficult seasons with Braxx to get the finances together to go and run a proper programme,” he says.

This prompted a switch to former GP2 team Racing Engineering for 2020, only for the Spanish squad to pull out of the series “about three weeks after we made the deal”. A return to Braxx appeared on the cards until the pandemic hit – “so two deals collapsed before we even got started” – but a last-minute agreement with CAAL Racing secured Goossens’s place on the grid, and he ended the year fifth in the points.

A late deal with Norbert Walchhofer’s DF1 team “about a week before the whole show started” meant he hadn’t tested before this year’s first round at Valencia in May. “Of course I always want to win, but you cannot always win, so I decided for that first weekend to stay out of trouble,” he says.

 

In this he succeeded, managing two top-10 finishes to come away eighth in the standings, ahead of Day, who was pushed off in race two.

“The first thing I did was try to put the whole DF1 team on my shoulders and carry them along,” he says. “I don’t necessarily know how it all needs to be done, but I know a lot about how it shouldn’t be done! I’m still very motivated; my body still allows me to try to perform at that kind of level and I’m not broken on Monday and Tuesday. I think I’m still competitive enough.

“Team FJ [series promoter] is putting a pretty good show together. It shows every year in Brands Hatch because the crowds that come out for that race, it’s unbelievable.”

Given Goossens’s history with the Kent circuit, where he has six top-five finishes with a best of second place (2018) in eight Euro NASCAR appearances, he’s naturally looking forward to Brands. “It’s a track that I like, where I have been fairly successful in the last 30 years, so I have a lot of expectations for Brands,” he says. “I’m here to win, and if I can take myself to a position where I can challenge for podium finishes or top fives that would be great. We have to keep digging to make the whole performance of the group better, so that we win races soon.”

How Goossens’s Brands Hatch love affair began

Despite winning 11 out of 18 races in the 1991 British Formula Ford Championship with Van Diemen, Marc Goossens only pipped team-mate Russell Ingall to the title by five points. That meant the stakes were high for the Formula Ford Festival, an event seen as crucial to the fortunes of aspiring Formula 1 drivers.

A second-year Formula Ford racer, Goossens had backing from Marlboro that would smooth his path to British Formula 3 in 1992 with West Surrey Racing, but still felt pressure on his shoulders at the Festival.

“Every race that I started in that time, I needed to prove that I could win,” he says. “I didn’t have the financial background at home, I was depending on sponsorship and had to convince Marlboro the entire time that I was worth it.”

 

In the end, Goossens had a smooth path to the final and was never headed on his way to victory, but was under constant pressure from Ingall.

“He was on my gearbox for about 17 laps,” recalls Goossens. “We couldn’t make one mistake or we’d have been out of it. I must admit, I was looking in the mirror quite a bit that day!”

Goossens was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief when Ingall was knocked out by Dino Morelli. Goossens is convinced that Ingall, who earned the nickname ‘The Enforcer’ in his subsequent career in Australian V8 Supercars, would have punted him wide, had Morelli not got to him first.

“[Ingall] was going to take me out, that’s for sure,” Goossens says. “I was most worried about when and where was he going to bump me and how was I going to recover. It was going to happen; he just waited a bit longer than Dino!”

Only then could Goossens begin to set lap record pace, achieving the landmark on the penultimate tour.

“We had a good pace, but the other guys did as well,” he recalls. “It was about creating the right package, which both Russell and I had at Van Diemen at that time.