Piquet not typical truck driver

Nearly every driver in Saturday's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race has his own website.

But Nelson Piquet Jr.'s is the only one that offers translations in seven languages.

Internationally, Piquet is the most famous driver entered in Saturday's Smith's 350k at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Piquet, a 25-year-old who was born in Germany and raised in Brazil, saw his worldwide following escalate in 2008 and 2009, when he raced for Renault in Formula One, the world's most popular racing series, and logged one podium finish.

Being the son of legendary racer Nelson Piquet, a three-time F1 champion in the 1980s, also helped the younger Piquet gain notoriety.

He will make his fifth start in the truck series and fourth in the No. 15 Toyota of Billy Ballew Motorsports on Saturday. He has finished in the top 10 three times with a best of sixth in his debut race in February at Daytona.

Piquet, now living in Miami, is successfully shifting from the aerodynamic 1,367-pound F1 rockets to the boxy 3,400-pound pickups. Instead of navigating long, winding road and street courses, he now spends much of his time running in circles.

"It's very much different," Piquet said. "But this racing is a lot more fun. Ninety-nine percent of the time we're racing somebody, touching somebody or getting very close."

Piquet's promising international career was cut short after a controversial 2008 race in Singapore in which he said his Renault team ordered him to crash intentionally to bring out the pace car and help teammate Fernando Alonso win. Piquet was fired after the incident, and Renault was reprimanded for its actions by an international sanctioning body.

While F1 is racing this weekend back in Singapore, Piquet will be running for the first time on Las Vegas' 1.5-mile speedway oval.

He is committed to one day being worthy of racing in NASCAR's premier Sprint Cup series. But, unlike some other drivers who have rushed to switch from open-wheel racing to stock cars, Piquet is investing time and effort to make the proper transition.

"Many of those drivers started wrong. They wanted to go straight to Cup and were skipping what a lot of NASCAR drivers had done for 15 or 20 years. They didn't take the right approach to moving through all the levels."

Two weeks ago, Piquet placed eighth in his first Late Models stock car race at a track in Hickory, N.C. He has also competed this year in three regional ARCA stock car races with one top-10 finish.

His first foray into the Nationwide Series on Aug. 7 produced a seventh-place finish on the road course at Watkins Glen.

Hickory and Watkins Glen are a far cry from F1 venues such as Monte Carlo and Monza, but Piquet is genuinely enjoying the world of NASCAR.

"The NASCAR environment is much better," he said. "The other drivers are a lot more approachable and so are the fans. It's a big, big change for me."

He recalls being in his race car hauler at Daytona when Kurt Busch walked in.

"I had no idea who he was. He said he just wanted to introduce himself and gave me his phone number to use if I ever had any questions," Piquet said.

"All the drivers I've talked to have been helpful. I've already had more help this year than I had in my whole racing life before this."

Contact reporter Jeff Wolf at jwolf@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0247.