In Rombo, an Italian racing magazine, there is a great article about a young Ruben. Barichello.
The article is an interview of Adriano Morini, the president of Draco racing. Draco ran Barichello in Opel-Lotus in 1990. Draco won that championship 4 times, with Barichello, Lamy, Crinelli and Campos. The team almost always ran Brazilians. Draco moved to F3000 in 95 with it's driver Marco Campos and now runs 2 Brazilians in Italian F3000. I met Morini in 94 when I looked at doing Opel-Lotus and he was very nice…He liked drivers who had enough will to move to a foreign country to race.
In the article, Morin describes Barichello as a very sweet, innocent, shy, extremely well mannered, 17 year old boy. Barichello came to Italy and stayed at the Morin house near Florence after a season of Formula Chevrolet in Brazil at age 17. This was his first season of racing in Europe. He tells stories of Barichello being so sad and homesick that he'd wake up Morin in the middle of the night just to talk. Morini says that it too Ruben months to get used to the time change. He also talks about a time that Barichello's dad came to a race from Brazil but had to leave unexpectedly on Saturday, and Ruben started crying like a little kid. Also, it talked about this one time when the team were expecting Ruben at 10 am and then when he didn't arrive at 4pm they went home worried that something bad had happened. They thought he may be late, because he was tired, so they didn't panic until late afternoon. They found Morini's German Shepherd barking at Ruben's bedroom door. Ruben was afraid to open the door! Barichello himself describes that when he lived at the house he'd spend the day with the mechanics at the shop. Then when they all left, and Morin was out of town, he'd get lonely and drive to the Autogrill (on the side of Italian freeways) and eat dinner by himself, watching people…
Ruben still talks to Morin all the time. He calls Morini his second father…
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