Dan Wheldon: 'Winning at Monaco would be great, but it's nothing next to the Indy 500'

An English driver is the favourite to win the world's biggest race on Sunday, but his name is not Lewis Hamilton and the race is not the Monaco Grand Prix. It is the Indianapolis 500, which in terms of attendance and general razzmatazz is unequivocally the world's blue riband motor racing event.

This Englishman, moreover, has won the venerable race before, in 2005, and last year was denied the rare achievement of back-to-back wins only by an untimely puncture. In the early practice sessions this time he was again the fastest man round the Indianapolis track. Off the track, meanwhile, he is followed everywhere by a posse of autograph-hunters and groupies. He is the pin-up boy of his sport; he has guested on David Letterman's talk show; he has thrown the opening pitch for the New York Yankees. And yet, were he to walk through Milton Keynes, the town closest to the chocolate-boxy Bedfordshire village of Emberton in which he grew up, he would do so unrecognised.

It is this curious anomaly that takes me to St Petersburg in Florida to interview 28-year-old Dan Wheldon, Indy Car superstar, champion in 2005, runner-up in 2004 and 2006. We meet near his home in the Vinoy, a grand resort hotel overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, where he is sufficiently well-known for the chef to know precisely how he likes his Eggs Benedict. Wheldon is boyishly handsome, compactly framed, and has an accent that is two-thirds affluent Bedfordshire to a third cool-dude American. When eventually he retires, he says, he wants to give a "liddle" back to the sport that has made him a multi-millionaire.

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"It's not like soccer, where you just need a pair of soccer boots to play," he says. "If you're talented you need to be in a good car, need to be supported financially. So I would like to invest money into someone who would not have the opportunity otherwise, and help them through, like Ron Dennis did with Lewis."

His mention of the wunderkind Hamilton makes me wonder, as plenty of others have, whether Wheldon too has a glittering future in Formula One? It was the sport that obsessed him as a boy - he idolised Ayrton Senna - and what team, looking for a new driver, would not fancy a man who can do what Wheldon did for his team Ganassi in Miami last season, fearlessly driving wheel to wheel with his opponent for the last 16 laps, with the slightest contact likely to propel both cars into a concrete wall at over 200mph, before triumphing by 0.0147 of a second? For Wheldon, however, the F1 dream has been pushed aside for now.

"It was very difficult to start with," he says. "Formula One is everything when you're brought up in Europe. It's what you aspire to. All I knew about Indy cars was Nigel Mansell, who came out here when he was forced to leave Williams. But when you come here [as Wheldon did in 1999, to drive in Formula Ford 2000] and your heart's still set on Formula One, it detracts from your programme. It was affecting my performance and there came a point where the team owner sat me down and said 'you have to commit, otherwise you will lose what you have here'. So I am committed, I turned down an opportunity at the end of my last contract [to join BMW-Sauber]. I enjoy the racing scene out here."

And the racing scene enjoys him. Even though America likes nothing more than a home-grown winner, Wheldon is articulate, approachable and photogenic, and when he won the Indy 500 was duly clutched to the nation's bosom (as well as the real thing, I dare say; he once admitted that he preferred socialising in America than Britain because "it's easier to get laid").

"It was nuts," he says, of his life after becoming the first Englishman since Graham Hill in 1966 to win in Indianapolis. "I was on Letterman, Good Morning America, I probably covered every state in terms of radio interviews, I threw the first pitch out for the Yankees, the Mets, the Cubs. I got in the car for a rest." How's his pitching arm? "Not bad, because I played cricket at school."

Wheldon went to the fee-paying Bedford School and passed all his GCSEs despite, with his parents' blessing, repeatedly taking time off to race. He began karting aged four, and his father was wealthy enough to fund him, but after some success in the junior formulas, and a keen rivalry with Jenson Button, a level of investment was required that his parents could not provide. That's when he went to try his luck in the United States.

That luck has held even in high-speed crashes. When testing at Homestead in Miami this year he suffered an incredible smash into a fence. "I asked a lot of the car and it swapped ends on me," is how he puts it. "It took a few days for my internal organs to settle back into their original spot, which sounds nuts, but that's what happens, you can kind of feel that everything's shifted slightly. But I didn't want anyone to see how much I hurt, so the next day I got back on the track and went even quicker. My team told me to get up to speed slowly. I said 'hey, the last time I checked, I'm paid to drive. Just make sure the car is good, and I'll take care of the rest.' My first time round was flat-out."

This sounds perilously close to arrogance, and Wheldon does not mind admitting that humility is not his greatest virtue. When I ask him what his frailties are as a driver he thinks for a while and then says: "Harshness to people off the track, I guess. I put everything into my racing, and I expect the same back. If I see people who aren't giving it I'm not afraid to say so, but that sometimes comes out a little brash. That could be improved a little bit. But it's like being a player at Chelsea or Manchester United. The backroom guys stay for years, and see players come and go. For me, the player if you like, I have to extract everything from this fairly brief opportunity, even if that means being tough on a mechanic or somebody. I don't want, 10 years down the road, to think that if I'd only said this or that, things might have been different."

He also deploys this impressive self-confidence to intimidate other drivers. "It gets to people, I know that. I don't do it deliberately but I know that when you strut around, looking very confident, that affects people."

He thinks it likely that at some point he will strut over to the higher-profile world of Nascar racing. "Each game Manchester United play is very big," he says, continuing his rather useful football analogies. "Nascar is the same. Every event is truly an event. There are 150,000 spectators each race. In terms of fans and sponsorship it is the biggest championship in the world, and I would like to compete against guys like Juan Pablo Montoya, who's moved across from Formula One. Also, Nascar have 36 races a year, and that would suit me. It's not like I have a wife and kids. I like to be in the car."

For now, though, there is only one car on his mind, and only one race. "It would be great to win Monaco, or the Daytona 500 in a Nascar, but the heritage, even of Monaco, is nothing like the Indy 500. Everything I do is geared to helping me at Indianapolis, and I still remember the sensation I had there during qualifying in 2004, going at 234mph into turn three, because at that speed the car is affected by everything. Most people would have lifted out of the gas at that point, but I like stuff like that. You could put me on the highest roller-coaster in the world and it wouldn't faze me. I love speed. I have six or seven cars at home including an Aston Martin DB9 and the new Jaguar, the XKR. But what drives me more than the speed is the competition."

On Sunday it will be ferocious, which is the way he likes it.

Sky Sports shows each round of the Indy Racing League exclusively live, including the Indy 500 this Sunday