Heading into his hometown race, James Hinchcliffe isn’t just the most popular guy in racing. He’s a serious threat.
Drivers with an extensive background in Formula 1 are tough to outfox when they can smell victory. James Hinchcliffe had that fact confirmed on the second-last lap of IndyCar’s Sao Paulo 300 in May when he tried to sneak past race leader Takuma Sato on the outside of a hairpin turn. The savvy Sato, who’d won the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach two weeks prior, choked Hinchcliffe off. So, with the checkered flag about to start rippling and bridesmaid looking like the best he could hope for, Hinchcliffe took a final stab on the last corner of the race. He tried to lure Sato—known as a late braker—into overshooting the turn with the threat he would, again, challenge on the outside. When Sato took the bait, Hinchcliffe snuck through the sliver of track created on the inside before blasting his No. 27 Go Daddy car to its second win of the season.
Hinchcliffe’s gutsy move in Brazil was further evidence that his brand-building personality is underscored by a searing talent. Driving one of the circuit’s signature cars for a team that expects to compete year after year has intensified the already bright glare Hinchcliffe’s charismatic approach creates. But if anyone is equipped to handle the attention, it’s the flag-waving Canadian whose on-track confidence is growing, and whose mind has always churned a mile a minute.
The 26-year-old Hinchcliffe entered the 2013 IndyCar season—his third on the series—as one of the best-known drivers on the grid thanks, in part, to having filled the vacant Go Daddy cockpit when the circuit’s biggest draw, Danica Patrick, bolted for NASCAR last year. He often jokes about having “big heels to fill,” but his camera-friendly looks, engaging personality and heavy social media presence are a perfect fit for an edgy company looking to connect with a young audience that expects more out of its athletic heroes than the occasional canned interview. “It’s not phoned in,” says Hinchcliffe of his approach to spectator interaction. “Fans these days, they’re so good at seeing through the BS, the PR speak, it’s a much more educated audience than it was 10, 15 years ago and, whether you’re a happy-go-lucky guy, the guy everybody loves to hate—whatever your persona is—as long as it’s real, people will connect with that.”
Hinchcliffe—named the 2011 rookie of the year while driving for the now-defunct Newman/Haas team—had no trouble winning over fans, who voted him 2012’s most popular driver. What he hadn’t done through two years of IndyCar competition was win a race. That changed at the first event of this season, when he held off Helio Castroneves at the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg. Hinchcliffe acknowledges it was a crucial win in many respects, including helping to satisfy the high expectations of Go Daddy and his team, the powerhouse Andretti Autosport. Carving that first notch on the steering wheel also does wonders for a driver’s confidence, which can lead to bold moves like the one Hinchcliffe broke out on Sato. “Once you get the first win, for some reason, the rest of them come just a little bit easier,” says Ryan Hunter-Reay, the 2012 series champion who calls Hinchcliffe a good friend as well as a teammate.
Breaking the goose egg also served to show every wrench-wielder keeping Hinchcliffe’s car in top form that crafting clever hashtags and growing his profile will not come at the expense of champagne baths. Though even the self-styled mayor of “Hinchtown”—a fan-friendly website bearing the hallmarks of Hinchcliffe’s playful character—admits the line between on- and off-track responsibilities can be tough to walk, the financial realities of motorsport help keep things straight. “It’s really easy to tell which members of the crew have been on teams that have succumbed to lack of sponsorship,” Hinchcliffe says. “They understand better than those who haven’t that, hey, if you have to step outside the engineering office for 10 minutes to do an interview, do it, because that’s what the sponsor wants and we have to keep the sponsor happy. If the sponsor is not happy, we could be the best damn racing team in the world and we’re not going to go racing.”
Going racing is something that’s thrilled Hinchcliffe since he got his first kart at age nine. His father, Jeremy, grew up a motorsport enthusiast in England and passed that passion on to the youngest of his three children. When Hinchcliffe was growing up in the Toronto suburb of Oakville, the race-day routine with his dad was to start Sunday mornings in the basement watching F1, surface for some lunch, then head back down in the afternoon for the IndyCar race. By 11, Hinchcliffe was convinced he would become a professional driver, says Jeremy, and the evidence to support his belief went beyond an ability to navigate vehicles powered by lawn-mower engines. Placed in a gifted program at school, Hinchcliffe was a voracious reader with a tacky mind. That, coupled with the fact he was a very small kid until his mid-teens, prompted a rebranding from his dad. “My nickname for him was ‘Little Man,’” Jeremy says. “He was like this little wise old man.” Not long after turning his attention to the history of racing, “Little Man” was flush with facts. “I would look at him and say, ‘How the hell did you know that?’” Jeremy recalls.
The ability to process information was perhaps never more critical than in 2005, when Toronto area–based AIM Autosport submitted an application on behalf of Hinchcliffe for one of six scholarships BMW was offering for a new series bearing its name. He was selected to test in Valencia, Spain, and though many of his roughly 20 competitors were a bit more seasoned, Hinchcliffe, then 18, was granted a spot. “The test was not to find out who was the fastest kid; the test was to find out who was the fastest learner—who could listen to instruction, absorb it and practise it,” says Jeremy. “That’s just James all over.”
Being an attentive student continues to help Hinchcliffe, who was always adept at handling fast turns but has improved his ability to aggressively manoeuvre the slow corners that dot street courses. And while there’s a definite link between Hinchcliffe’s success and the high-level team supporting him, it’s also key that in a sport that’s seen more than its share of divas, Hinchcliffe doesn’t let ego get in the way of learning from the triumphs of Hunter-Reay or fellow teammate Marco Andretti. “It’s not [a case of] James is lucky because he’s on the best team,” says David Empringham, who served as Hinchcliffe’s driver coach in lower series. “James is smart enough to use the strengths of the team to his advantage.”
The education, of course, is ongoing, and it’s happening in the face of expectations he will continue to do what he did that day in Sao Paulo—calculate with his mind, then accelerate with his confidence. “James is a driver who can win on any given weekend,” says team president and CEO Michael Andretti, a couple of weeks before Hinchcliffe won his third race of the season—and first on an oval—in Iowa. “That’s what we liked about him when we brought him into the family. He’s come a long way, he’s done a great job for us and we expect more wins out of him before the end of the year.”
Hinchcliffe makes his home in Indianapolis because that’s where his team is based, and he now shares it with Aussie girlfriend Kirsten Dee, winner of the 2012 Miss Indy Australia pageant. But the international flavour in his life has done nothing to dampen the affection he has for his home country, something that, along with his love of motorsport, he may have inherited from his father. In May 1974, Jeremy came to Toronto to visit a friend from university and was so taken by the city that he went home, applied to immigrate and was living there by October of the same year. James was born in 1986, the year Toronto held its first IndyCar event, and the pair were fixtures at the race when James was a kid. Hinchcliffe loves to reflect back on those formative experiences at the track, though as an adult, he’s resolved to do things a little differently than some of the prominent Canadian stars of the time.
“I grew up when Jacques Villeneuve was winning IndyCar and F1 championships and Paul Tracy was winning IndyCar championships and, I hate to say it, but I didn’t really see a ton of them paying back to the country and the sport back home,” he says. “I never understood that. They were perfectly happy to drive their fast cars, take their paycheques and be on their way. They got a lot from the sport and—in my opinion, anyway—did very little to give back, and that’s not a category I want to fit into.”
Right now, Hinchcliffe can be categorized as a driver who already has two street-course wins this year and is as good a bet as anyone to notch his fourth overall victory in Toronto. It would mean the world to him, and the world would know it.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.