Sato: Revved up over Rahal deal
Takuma Sato's worst-kept-secret deal to join Bobby Rahal's IndyCar team was finally confirmed on Friday morning. In a full interview, Marcus Simmons finds the Japanese raring to go for 2012
We're going to start this story by looking back 11 years - just to give you a little illustration of the warm regard in which Takuma Sato is held by some of the movers and shakers of the motorsport industry.
When he won the British Formula 3 Championship in 2001, completing a unique hat-trick by adding victories in the prestige F3 classics at Zandvoort and Macau, Sato's successes set Carlin Motorsport on the road to becoming the all-round powerhouse of junior single-seaters that it remains to this day.
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Marcus Simmons is the Deputy Editor of Autosport magazine. As a child he was a regular on the chalk banks of Thruxton – hence his unhealthy obsession with 1970s Formula 2 and F3 – before he became an MSA timekeeper at the age of 17. At 19, his reporting debut for Motoring News arguably overshadowed Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal as the sporting moment of June 1986, and he joined the staff in 1990 after graduating from his degree course in Plymouth. A parallel Formula First career – which was as incident-packed as his childhood exploits in show-jumping and hunter trials – finished when he wrote off his car and put himself in hospital in 1991.
Marcus moved to Autosport in the summer of 1996. Since then he has had two stints as a freelancer and a brief spell as editor of Motor Sport magazine, during which the revered green cover was revived, before he rejoined Autosport in 2008. He lives in Teddington with his wife (who, gratifyingly, grew up within earshot of Castle Combe), daughter, stepson, dog, cat and guitars, and additionally has an adult daughter and stepson.
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