How well would he do in a F1 car? He's won ROC 3 times now Then again, Heikki won ROC too, so .....

1, His name is Mattias Ekström.
2, He always dreamed of becoming a rally driver, with Toruing Cars as #2.
3, He's won only five races in the past four years in the DTM.
4, He's been beaten by a team mate two years in a row.
5, I think he'd be like Luca Badoer.

You don't like him do you? He is a natural talent but never showed much interest in F1. He is 2 times DTM champion which is a very competetive series. Last time he was champion was 2007. Five races? There are 10 or 11 races a season and he has posted a lot of podiums as well. I think he was leading the last race when he got a puncture. Google him, wikipedia him - he has awesome talent.

Judging a driver's potential based on how well they have done running around a Scalextric set?

I think Mattias has found his niché and is particularly suited to driving tin-tops, and as mentioned already, hasn't really ever expressed an interest in jumping behind the wheel of a single-seater has he?

Didn't he test for Sauber in the early 2000s? Or am I thinking of someone else?

EDIT: No, I was thinking of Marcel Fässler .

I read an interview once where he said something along the lines of "I just race in DTM so I can afford my hobby". His hobby was apparently to drive rally around his house
He won a WRC competition once? In group N?

I have followed him in DTM and he is definitely one of the fastest, probably the fastest, driver in the series, but he had some bad luck. I think he is happy with his situation though, racing for money, racing for fun and plenty of living in between. I envy him

A similar thread from a few years ago http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=81196

I know, I'm Swedish too, and I've been really disappointed with his season. He just gets himself into carnage all the time, and qualifies too badly. Had he only learned to smooth out the rough edges he would have won it four times.

Ekström is awesome talent. In rallying he was setting very competitive pace with Skoda Fabia in rally Sweden 2006. To my knowledge Ekström's developement in rallying is unparalleled (only Räikkönen's developement-rate has been in the same class). I firmly believe that Ekström would challenge Loeb in wrc after 1-2 year practice.

If I was team-boss of Formula 1 team I would hire that guy. With Ekström's raw talent he would beat most of F1 drivers very soon.

In the modern ROC Ekström has been the most impressive driver. He has beat Schumi twice in the finals and also Loeb driving with Citroen Xsara! I bielieve that ROC is far from irrelevant when we are considering drivers abilities on track. It's no accident that superstars like Schumi and Loeb can show their skills also in ROC. The fact that Kovalainen has won ROC don't diminish the value of event. Afterall we know that in one lap Kovalainen can often beat even Hamilton and race of championship is about showing speed in one lap.

That's easy for you to say with your fancy Scandinavian keyboard layout.

You just have to accept that people are going to leave off the accent and it's nothing to do with disrespecting him or being arrogant or ignorant of other languages it's because they don't know how to use their computer!

On the laptop I'm using now I'd either have to change my keyboard layout and loose access to my localised layout or I can enter ctrl+shift+U+00F6 which I had to go look up on wikipedia. It's easier on a mac and some PCs are set up with international layouts but most users have trouble with the euro symbol let alone accented chars that aren't printed on their keyboard.

It is the same for Kimi... accented his name is Räikkönen, but a lot of people end up writing it as Raikkonen, including me.

As FonzCam says, it's down to the keyboard layout. The standard British keyboard layout is not really set up for accenting letters, The 'Alt Gr' button plus a vowel will give áéíóú, and that is about it. For typing a simple forum post I'm not going to go into character map to get the accented letters I need, nor am I likely to remember that another way of getting ö is to use alt+0246. There's no disrespect at all towards the drivers, and indeed in many british publications the accents are left off including Autosport... the article on Mattias' RoC win for example: http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/80010.

On topic for this thread though, I don't think the RoC holds much relevance to driving an F1 car, so you can't really say from a number of RoC wins how his speed there would translate across to F1.

Yes it's far from irrelevant. If people actually wanted to measure individual driving skills and adaptability, the rules in F1 should be similar to those in ROC - that is to quickly rotate drivers in equal cars. Cars should also be various types (like ROC) and of course the tracks should also vary. That's the formula which would measure individual driver talent and adaptability, not team efforts as a whole like we have today. Too bad people are so reluctant when it comes to change.

On Windows you have the "charmap" tool. Just saying in case you didn't know about it.

Ekström is one of the greatest talents to come out of Sweden over the last decade together with Fredrik Larsson and Alx Danielsson. I have no doubt that he would have made it in F1 if he had put his mind to it. He had the connections and the name to do it but I guess he prefers a roof over his head. I think he is wasting his talents in DTM as it is and he seems to lack a bit of the sparkle he used to have. It's time for him to try something else.

The point is that I don't blame you for failing to put the ö in, the point is in fact that too many Brits pronounce names like Räikkönen and Ekström completely crazy. Räikkönen starts with a Ray, the there is the same a as in "an", plus nen= Raykönen The constantly failed letters in the pronounciations are the only thing annoying me! Ekström's ö is pronounced in the same way, just like "a" in an!

The Swedish keyboard settings are marvellous! I can write the names below without any problems. German ü:s are very easy too, due to a functions of two dots beside the enter button

Héctor Barberá
Oriol Servià
Éric Hélary
Didier de Radiguès
Luis Díaz,
Niccolò Canepa
Jan Kopecký

Yes, the Nordic keyboard layout is good for typing most of European names. And when it can't, there's always some sort of tool for names like Mads Østberg, Tomáš Enge, Krzysztof Hołowczyc or Miloš Pavlović...

As for Östberg (the Swedish version of the name )the Norwegians and Danish can...

I still thinks Ekstrom, Raikkonen, Hakkinen, Muller, Brack and Hulkenberg and such is a bit lazy for a respected paper such as Autosport. At least it could implement ü, ä and ö when Germany, Sweden and Finland use them in their names, all common motorsport nations.

And of course we can't forget the most hyped young star in F1 just now, 小林 可夢偉.

Never seen him before. I heard that he's good also

That Ekstrom won the ROC proves was that he was the best in general with the cars that were used at the ROC. Nothing more, nothing less. In 1973 Mark Donohue won three of the four races of the International Race of Champions (IROC), where all drivers used the same Porsche 911's. Wiki says: 'The drivers invited were from a broad range of racing disciplines: NASCAR, Indy cars, sports car racing, and on rare occasions, WoO, and drag racing. Criteria for invitation was very loose, but typically consisted of recent season champions of the respective series, and individual winners of big events (Indy, Daytona, etc.).'

Does that mean he was the best of all those drivers? I don't think so, however I admire the man. He was just the best at that day, in that car, in those specific circumstances.

What about these fellas?


Sato: 佐藤琢磨
Haga: 芳賀紀行
Ide: 井出有治

But, really, there is a borderline somewhere

What about this one:

トヨタはお金のため、彼らのF1撤退短いものだった
(Toyota was short on money, so they pulled out of F1 )

One thing is certain, if I was repeatedly beaten by someone in different vehicles and on different tracks, I would definitly consider that person being a better driver. Never admit it loud of course, but I would know. What RoC have is different cars, but it is a Micky Mouse track with no speed. The speed is of course the biggest difference between driving perfect in a buggy and perfect in a F1 car. But apart from that, I think RoC is currently the best measure of overall driving talent. Mark Donohue and the others all had the same car, on top of that a Porsche which is a car you simply have to get used to. Now they use cars from completely different categories and Mattias beat Schumi in the open wheeler.

I must say that I am impressed that Schumi and Button takes part, specially Button since he... well, he will never win. Schumi is fast enough, but he is a legend that must win. Luckily, he does not see it that way and it honors him. Kimi, Alonso and Lewis does not seem to have that courage.

You know, Google Translate makes this stuff too easy...

But in general I hope a major motorsports magazine would write foreign names as accurately as possible - at least the names in Latin script. Autosport should have enough resources to write Ekström or Räikkönen - at leat I am accustomed to my daily newspaper writing on Radovan Karadžić's rather than Karadzic's trial, even though the journalist can't find those letters in his keyboard. On a BB like this Ekstrom and Raikkonen are of course acceptable, and even the grammar or spelling of English is often neglected.

F1 Racing does, and has always done so, and my credit goes to them

I never really thought about it, but I had a look around yes, Äutospört do indeed omit the umlauts. That is weak, because most names, in the native language, sounds very weird if you pronounce them as the read after the umlauts is removed. In these days of UTF-8, there is also no technical reasons to leave them out.

So a big for Åutösport

and yet people say ms would never take an equal status teamate

Old habits I guess, since his F1 days ;)

sorry for the typo

old habits? maybe...
or maybe all his team mates looked poor because he was indeed the "thing"
I doubt he really has fears of going on head to head with somebody

No, sorry, was just making a bad joke. I could see it in front of me. A tea party. Schumi grabbing the best chair, the best cup. One muffin more than anyone else

Stephane Sarrazin.

It's weird that he's never really done open wheel racing, only karting if you count that.

Winning N-group in Swedish rally for a track driver is something truly special, I in fact think there aren't many drivers in the world who could at the moment be on the same level on track and rally as he is. Maybe Räikkönen, but we have yet not seen enough and of course Loeb but we haven't seen enough of his track abilities yet.

Mattias Ekström is possibly the best Sweden can offer at the moment. One of the best all rounders.

Unfortunately he's not close to the really great swedish drivers like Stig Blomqvist, Björn Waldegård, Per Eklund and Ronnie Peterson. I wish there would be more swedes on top of F1 and rally, so that we cold get real nordic rivalry instead of having to put up with those whining latinos round every corner. Bring on the real finnkampen to motorsports as well.