Ecclestone woos the new world

It's an index of how far Formula One still has to go in some areas of the United States that Michael Schumacher – five-time world champion, winner of the greatest number of grands prix and the holder of the record number of victories in a season (10) – can still go unrecognised.

"For a couple of days in California recently I could watch the people rather than have them watch me," he joked, omitting to mention that when he recently queued behind punters at Texas Motor Speedway for the chance to drive a Nascar stock-car racer nobody had a clue who he was. Other greats such as Jimmy Clark and Mario Andretti have similarly sated their curiosity by driving the giant saloon cars, but this time Schumacher gave up as the queue was simply too long.

If he can escape such things undetected, it is less the case for arch-rival Juan Pablo Montoya, who remains a hero over here for the daring enterprise and oppor-tunism of his drives in the now beleaguered Cart ChampCar series, and his victory in that crown jewel classic, the Indianapolis 500. The Colombian, shrugging off chat-show host David Letterman's resurrection of his old nickname "Zorro", loves Indianapolis. "It's nice coming back," he said. "I know a lot of people here, it's pretty special."

Formula One needs America, and with rival series Cart and the Indy Racing League creating turmoil on the national single-seater front, America needs Formula One. But it also needs more drivers the public can recognise.

Tony George, whose family owns the International Motor Speedway and most of Indiana, is aware of the need to grow fresh talent. On Friday night he and his family sat unobtrusively in the public grandstands at nearby Indianapolis Raceway Park watching his stepson, Ed Carpenter, race in the Twin 25s midget car championship race. No luxury suite or other airs and graces, just open-air enthusiasm and affection for a sport cruel enough to see the youngster pitched unharmed into the fence in the early stages.

Hard to envisage some of F1's powers that be watching, say, the Formula Three support race at Silverstone from the public enclosures. But George, who welcomed the launch of an initiative by the Red Bull energy drinks company to nurture American talent for F1, took the Fifth Amendment when asked if he also has a lien not just on the Indy F1 race – a masterstroke from powerbroker Bernie Ecclestone to bring F1 back to America's self-styled"capital of auto racing" – but also any other F1 race in the United States.

Traditional events such as the San Marino GP at Imola and the Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps may pave the way for events in Bahrain and China, and possibly a second US GP. An American F1 driver would help that. Cart refugees Bryan Herta and Townsend Bell are working to that end, and on Friday IRL racer Sarah Fisher became the first female to drive an F1 car at a grand prix meeting since 1992 when she demonstrated Kimi Raikkonen's spare McLaren.

It was a tough call in front of 50,000 race fans. "Any race-car driver in America will tell you the ultimate is to drive these cars for a couple of laps," she said. "There's always going to be differences in every car you drive, but the biggest difference between an Indycar and a Formula One was acceleration and deceleration forces. The first time,the acceleration throws you back in the seat.

"It was great fun. I didn't get to light it up very much. I only had three laps, and by the third lap I'm thinking: 'OK, at Turn Four I can go in a bit deeper there,' and then on the radio I heard: 'OK, park it down on the bricks, you're done.' "

On the racetrack so far Michael Schumacher has done nothing to suggest that win 11 of his runaway season will elude him this afternoon, but team-mate Rubens Barrichello had a scare when a tyre problem put him hard into the innovative "soft" safety wall in the banked final turn on Friday morning, doing his Ferrari a power of no good. With Montoya lying way down the times with engine problems in his BMW Williams, it wasn't a hot day for Schumacher's rivals.

"You can't always have reliability, and we'll use a different engine today," Montoya joked prior to qualifying on Saturday. But the bulletproof nature of Schumacher's car – he has finished the last 20 grands prix, 19 of them on the podium – makes him the favourite yet again.

Who knows, if he wins here maybe they will send him to the front of the queue next time he sneaks into Texas Motor Speedway.