Rodger Ward Quotes

With tennis, you can go pick up a racket, take a lesson, and understand how much talent and skill it takes to be as good as the top pros. Same with golf: pick up a club. But not many can go out and get in a race car and experience a drive at over 200 miles an hour.

Every time I get into a Nationwide car after being in a Cup car, I feel so much more comfortable than I did previously.

I've never been to a race car race before.

Racing a thoroughbred grand prix car in front of a home crowd will be a surreal and mighty experience.

I've always been attracted to cars, and driving is a completely measurable experience: if you qualify last on the grid, you're the slowest, and if you qualify first on the grid, you're the fastest. So no one can say you're slow if you're fast and no one can say you're fast if you're slow.

I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour.

I think it's always better to be in an F1 car because, in general, the car behaves itself.

You get such a visceral thrill driving a race car. You think you've driven, and then you're like, 'Oh, I was doing something for 20 years that I didn't realize I hadn't experienced the real version of.'

The Lotus is a couple of years newer than the Williams was, and as the pace of development in F1 cars is so quick, I expect it to be another completely different experience, but still one that I know I'm going to enjoy.

Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of it, a thing you get through your bones and nerves rather than simply your ears.

In sport there is never any moment that is the same as the other. I have been in Formula One for 12 years, and out of that I had one year with the perfect car.

I hate to take compromises with a racing car. The more standard a car is, the more compromises you have to take.

To understand the intensity of driving an F1 car, you have to be in it. When you're driving a 750hp machine at 200mph, the noise and the vibrations are incredible. The G-force when you take big corners is like someone trying to rip your head off. You hit the brakes, and it feels as if the skin is being pulled off your body.

As a driver, you want to race every lap possible, especially when you've got a good car.

I guess everybody saw it. It's a deal where I'd been racing cars a long time and I knew going around the track the fender was on the tire hard.

Going to car racing school was phenomenal.

I think we'll be in pretty good shape. We've got the same car we ran in all the speedway races since 2001, and it's been a real good car for us. It's led every race we've been in.

The GTO is such an important car because it's a racing car and a touring car and that's pretty unusual.

I don't think that American drivers going to NASCAR are taking the easy way out because as I said, the racing is amazing; it's just that it's easier to adapt to what you grow up with. American drivers grow up with NASCAR, they know NASCAR, and that's where they want to go.

We don't have any CGI with any of the car stuff. I think it's a real experience when you see this car going through really fast really wild and you see me driving a lot of the times and also a big chase in downtown Atlanta. It's just incredible.

When I turned 16, I got my driver's license like the rest of my classmates, but I also got an extra present: a two-day practice session in a Formula Ford: my first open-wheel racing car and the first step on the ladder toward becoming a professional driver.

You know, it's always good to have seen a track before, just to kind of know where the little bumps are here and there, and just the general feel for the size.

Gone are the days when you could lie on a beach between races and still be in good enough shape to compete. Gone are the days when simply wearing a brand on your firesuit was enough to justify the marketing expense of an Indy Car. Racing an Indy Car is only about a quarter of my life as a racing driver.

I had professional stunt racers teaching me how to drive.

I think I have experience in rowing, and that has given me some ability to go about racing. I'm lucky genetically. I have a good VO2 max - I can hold a lot of air in my lungs - and that definitely helps.