HAVING been the first human to break the sound barrier without vehicular power, Felix Baumgartner knows all about speed, and while he won’t quite be clocking 1,357 kilometres an hour when he drives at Mount Panorama next year, he will still be pushing the limits.
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In yet another coup for the Bathurst 12 Hour, the Austrian will contest the 2015 edition of the endurance event for Phoenix Racing.
“I have never been to Australia. It is the only continent I’ve never visited,” Baumgartner said.
“So it would be a great opportunity to race there and visit your country.”
While Bathurst motor sport fans were busy thinking about yet another Great Race victory for Jamie Whincup in October 2012, Baumgartner was tackling something even more testing than racing 161 laps of Mount Panorama.
He notched up an incredible sky-diving record as part of the Red Bull Stratos project, free falling 38 kilometres as he became the first human being to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle or powered craft.
That added to a resume which included being the first man to sky dive across the English Channel, jumping off the hand of Rio de Janeiro’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue, doing a parachute jump from Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers and, in 2007, being the first person to jump from the Taipei 101 building.
But Baumgartner will not be contesting the Bathurst 12 Hour purely as a promotional exercise – he is not only good at jumping off things.
He made his racing debut last year in the Nurburgring 24 Hour race, one of the most prestigious endurance events in the world.
Not only was he part of a team which finished the race, the Audi he shared placed ninth in a field of 165 cars.
Baumgartner did three stints and, at one stage, was running as high as position six.
“It was impressive. Had quite a lot of traffic and twilight was really hard,” he said of the experience.
Baumgartner took part in the 2014 Barborka Rally in Poland on Sunday and drove his Subaru to 35th place in another example of his talent behind the wheel.
At Mount Panorama he will be back in an Audi as he joins the experienced Laurens Vanthoor and Christopher Haase in the number 16 Phoenix Racing entry.
That duo will more than make up for Baumgartner’s lack of experience.
Haase, one of the world’s leading Audi drivers, has a Nurburgring win and victory in this year’s Petit LeMans in America on his resume.
Vanthoor has already experienced the challenge of Mount Panorama, the 23-year-old having placed fifth for Phoenix Racing in this year’s Bathurst 12 Hour.
That trio will carry a special livery on their Audi R8 LMS Ultras – crocodile graphics – which is a nod to the brand’s R8 LeMans Prototype entry that won the Race of 1000 years American LeMans Series race in Adelaide 14 years ago.
They form part of a two-car entry from the team, the other to be steered by German Rene Rast, former Formula 1 driver Markus Winkelhock and Italian Marco Mapelli.
“The track is one of the most spectacular ones worldwide. The 12 hour race has long become a classic and in 2015 we’re expecting to meet with a larger number of rivals than ever before,” said Romolo Liebchen, head of Audi Sport customer racing.
“Our aim is to battle for our third victory, even though this will probably be the toughest race we’ve ever contested there.”
The 2015 Bathurst 12 Hour will run from February 6-8.