My racing dream ended - now I drive an Aston Martin in a unique F1 role

One racing driver’s aspiration to reach Formula 1 looked to be over - until a unique opportunity arose to drive a crucial car.

Portugal’s Bruno Correia grew up karting in the 90s then progressed into the Spanish Formula Renault Championship, which he won, but reaching F1 was beyond him.

Now, however, he drives the F1 Medical Car - fulfilling the requirement for a professional driver to speedily transport doctors to the scene of an on-track incident.

Correia “stopped with the dream of becoming a professional racing driver” when he won the Spanish Formula Renault Championship, and he was given the chance to drive the Safety Car in the 2009 World Touring Car Championship.

Correia drove Safety Cars across various series including Formula E until a new job arose when Alan van der Merwe was ruled out of driving the F1 Medical Car during to Covid at the 2021 Turkish Grand Prix.

Correia, oddly yet in an important role, was driving on the F1 grid.

“It's always a kid's dream, but I was not 100% fully focused only on this pathway,” he told F1.com.

“My dream was to be involved somehow in motorsport as a driver.

“Everyone knows that, arriving in F1, it's quite an achievement. Coming from Portugal, it's even a bigger achievement, because we are a small country, so it's always a bit more difficult to find the means to reach such a high level, and it's an expensive sport, the most expensive sport in the world.

“It's always a dream to arrive at this level being a professional racing driver, and if it's in F1 – better.

“But I always had that clear, that it will be quite difficult, so to find a different way to be a professional driver was probably more realistic at that time.

“I never thought that I would be sitting on the grid at the start of a race! [It’s an] achievement!”

The F1 Medical Car is an Aston Martin DBX707.

“It’s like a dream car,” Correia said.

“The DBX707, it's a quite impressive machine. I mean, we are talking an SUV, the fastest SUV in the world, 3.1 seconds [it goes from] zero to 60 [mph].

“It’s a quite powerful car. On the other hand, what really impressed me is the handling of it.

“You never expect an SUV, a big car with that amount of power, to handle the way it does. It's super comfortable for our duty.

“It has the room that we need to bring the doctors and also the medical equipment, which is a lot, and also always a spare place for a driver, in case you need to pick him up on the track.

“[I’m] really proud to be involved with Aston Martin, also with Mercedes, obviously, but the car itself, it's unbelievable, and it sounds amazing.”