nara dizzel

I knew that it was a necessary step to try and make it as a racing driver. I wanted to be a professional, and going to Europe was the best way of doing that. In hindsight, it was actually a really nice experience, really cool experience, so I enjoyed it. But as a 14 year old kid, the idea of living at school didn't sound like the most fun, but if it meant I got to drive race cars, then that was good enough for me.

School was very accommodating for that, as long as I didn't cause any trouble, and still got pretty good grades, which I mostly did. So they were very good at letting me go and try and chase my dreams, which was very cool.

RC racing was in Australia, and the start of my racing career, if you want to say that. I was six years old when I started racing those, and it started out just me driving it around the backyard, school oval, anywhere really, and then started racing it.

I was racing against adults, or the next oldest person was probably a teenager, so to be eight or nine and racing against those people felt a little bit intimidating at times. I mean at that point, I didn't really care, I was just driving RC cars because I really loved it, but also kind of conscious that I was doing something that not many people do.

I did win eventually, yes, I won a national title in the, not the top division, but the second, which yeah was a really cool memory and cool moment. I mean still one of my first memories of success, that was a really cool moment.

The first time I went karting properly was a lot of fun. I spun on my outlap, certainly wasn't quite unnatural at start. But I found my feet pretty quickly after that, and some of the stuff I learned from RC racing transferred, probably a lot of it didn't.

I just really loved it, loved going fast, and then you know, once I started getting close to the pace. Then my competitive instincts really kicked in, and I wanted to know how to go faster, I wanted to do more laps to try and get closer, I wanted to race people and learn how to race that was a really cool journey as well.

My first time in a single seater was also very fun. It’s very different to anything I'd driven until that point, a lot faster on the straights, but on a much bigger circuit, just a very different way of driving. And once I drove that for the first time, I knew that that's what I wanted to do next after karting. I would say I picked that up pretty quickly and pretty naturally, and once I knew that I was naturally picking it up pretty well, then it encouraged me even more to try and chase that.

My first time in an F1 car was, the end of 2020, so I'd won the F3 championship, and I got a test day kind of as a reward for that at the time. That was just awesome, very intimidating. I still never forget the moment where my engineer for the day said: “okay, we'll just, quickly get your weight, and then you can jump in, and we'll go out in five minutes.”

I kind of felt like I needed about half an hour to build up to that point, for them it was just another driver getting in a car. But for me it was, getting in a car I've dreamt of driving for years, and also a very expensive one, and a very fast one. That was a really special moment, but then once you do your first laps, then naturally you try and push the limits, find where the limit is, and try and go faster. So that was a really awesome day.

You know, I started out racing, and I still go racing because I love it, and even when you don't think there's much to learn, there's always something to learn, and that's probably the biggest thing, is just never stop trying to improve.

Because quite frankly the other people on the grid are also fast racing drivers, so you need to have all those extra bits nailed as well, because they're not extra bits anymore, they're the bits that you need, and you need to look after yourself well.

You need to be a good team player, you need to work with, not just the team of around you, but the hundreds of people at the factory as well, so you need to be a lot of things. But you can be all of those things, and if you're not fast, then it doesn't really matter, but it would be nice to think that I wasn't just, you know, a driver in a time of success for the team.