From Budapest to Guadalajara With Mexico's F1 MEGASTAR

FORMULA 1 drivers like to say that there is very little race car driving involved in driving race cars these days.

Spend a pre-race day with one of the 20 world-class athletes at the top of motorsport and you will understand just how true this can be.

On a Thursday in late July, a few days before the Hungarian Grand Prix, Red Bull driver Sergio Pérez, best known as simply Checo, one of the most famous athletes in Mexico and all of Latin America, arrives in Budapest via private jet from Madrid and is greeted by a stacked calendar of promotional duties. After he checks in to the Four Seasons, where throngs of Hungarian F1 superfans gather all weekend, he is ferried to a photo shoot for one of his sponsors in an abandoned apartment building in downtown Budapest.

Here Pérez is prompted to shuffle through a stack of old photographs and recite memories of various stages of his racing career.

As one of Formula 1's preeminent journeymen, there is plenty of history for Pérez to draw from. So much history, so much racing over the past three decades, that it's all begun to bleed together. "I will not remember most of them," he warns, holding the stack of photos. "It's one I don't remember, really," he says, looking down at the first photo. He draws a blank with another one in which he's holding a trophy. "I don't remember, but I had just won a race," he says.

Suddenly, though, the past comes into focus. "This one, I won the national race, a very important race in Monterrey," he says, studying a photograph from a karting event from his youth in Mexico. "A big race with a lot of very good drivers." "

Is it unusual for a Mexican to win a race there?" the cameraman asks him, trying to drag more material out of the exceedingly concise driver. But this question elicits the most direct of responses: "Yes."