Videos and tweets have surfaced online of a GP2 racer dressed up as a Ferrari F1 car driving illegally on the motorway in the Czech Republic
Doing the rounds on social media at the moment is a video of what appears to be a Ferrari F1 car driving on a Czech motorway. Just to be clear, though, it’s actually a GP2 race car made to look like a Schumacher-era Ferrari F1 car.
Nonetheless, the low-slung, open-wheeled V8-powered car with no headlights or indicators is not road-legal. The mystery driver doesn’t seem fazed and casually drives it down the dual carriageway like it’s a completely normal thing to do. We’re not sure we’d have the balls to do that knowing what sort of high-performance equipment the Czech police is packing…
What’s even weirder about the open-wheel racing car sighting is that apart from a few squirts of the throttle here or there (where you get to hear that screaming, high-revving V8), the driver behaves himself on the roads for the most part. Still, it would be interesting to see how they’d tackle speed bumps if it came to it…
It’s apparently not the first time the driver has taken their racecar out onto public roads – reports suggest it happened at least once before in 2019, but the police were unable to prove the suspect’s identity given they were wearing a helmet covering their face.
GP2 cars look very similar to their F1 cousins, and they are somewhat related. GP2 was an F1 support series that was rebranded in 2017 as Formula 2. As GP2 was a spec series, the chassis, major components and engine were all the same, and reports suggest this car was likely built by Dallara, packing a 4.0-litre V8 capable of around 600bhp. That’s a lot of power pushing around a lightweight carbon-fibre monocoque sardine can holding a driver with their head at bumper-level to everything else on the road…
It’s not clear what sort of tyres the GP2 car was riding on, but if they’re anything like real F1 tyres, there are a few very good, very dangerous reasons why that’s not a good idea on public roads…
