RIGHT MAN, WRONG AGE, WRONG TEAM
It’s fair to say that Allan McNish didn’t fit the typical profile of a Formula 1 debutant when he lined up on the grid for the 2002 Australian Grand Prix with the brand-new Toyota team. Aged 32, the Scotsman hadn’t raced a single-seater since 1995 and was already well established as a top sportscar talent, having won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1998.
Two decades have now passed since McNish’s one and only season as a grand prix racer before Toyota unceremoniously dropped the axe on both him and team-mate Mika Salo. Reflecting on a campaign in which his best finish of seventh in Malaysia wasn’t enough to score points – 2002 was the last year in which only the top six were eligible to score – McNish concedes that “it was probably a bit too late coming in my career”.
“In the early 1990s if the momentum had taken me into Formula 1 then, I think it would have been a very different scenario,” says McNish, a McLaren protege before his career lost momentum with Lola’s disastrous T91/50 in Formula 3000, then a lack of sponsorship/mystery virus
