Hakkinen

The Formula One star's departure from racing after this season is more like a vacation. Like Michael Jordan, if Hakkinen misses the competition enough, he might be back.

"Being in Formula One for so many years, you start getting to the time when you're getting tired and you kind of really cannot 100 percent focus anymore," Hakkinen said Thursday. "Then you don't do any good for yourself and you don't do any good for the team."

The two-time Formula One champion, second to Michael Schumacher in victories among active drivers, will take at least a year off after the U.S. Grand Prix on Sunday and the season-ending Japanese Grand Prix on Oct. 14.

"I'm going to see what it feels like, and I have all the doors open. At the moment, the plan is just take it easy. But I think after a few months, four or five months, I could start feeling that way and want to come back. We'll see," he said.

In the meantime, Kimi Raikkonen, another Finnish driver, will replace Hakkinen as David Coulthard's teammate with McLaren next season.

"There's definitely plenty of different elements, and we really haven't sat down to talk about it," Hakkinen said of possible help he might give the 21-year-old Raikkonen, who won the British Formula Renault championship last year.

"Certainly, I have plenty of experience in the past with the team and Formula One in general, so certainly there could be a lot of help I can give."

Raikkonen, driving for the Sauber team this season, has two fourth-place finishes among his 15 starts as a Formula One rookie.

"They're waiting. They're expecting lots of things from me," he said of his move to McLaren next season. "But I also had a big push this year, coming from Formula Renault to Formula One. So I think it's not going to be any bigger pressure than this year."

Qualifications for the U.S. Grand Prix on Saturday and the race Sunday will be on a 13-turn, 2.6-mile course that uses part of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's famed oval and a twisting road course through the infield.

Other drivers include defending champion Schumacher and two former winners of the Indianapolis 500, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya.

Montoya, a teammate of Schumacher's younger brother, Ralf, is coming off his first Formula One victory two weeks ago in the Italian GP. Including that race, Montoya has started from the pole in three of the past four races.

"The Indy 500 is a completely different race," said Montoya, the 2000 winner. "It's a long race. You have to take care of the car most of the time and you try to sprint right at the end."

Although Montoya has been fast since joining the Williams-BMW team, his Formula One development his been gradual.

"I think the biggest adjustment I had to make was really getting my hands on the car, to really work with the team to maximize what I needed on the setup," the Colombian driver said. "When the setup has been right, we've been competitive."

Montoya has failed to finish in 10 of the 15 races. Besides the victory in Italy, he was runner-up twice and fourth and eighth in the other races he completed.

"Every time you're out there, you're learning something new," he said. "So you're always evolving and becoming a better driver."

Villeneuve left the CART series for Formula One in 1996, the year after his victory at Indianapolis.

"It's a fun track to drive, but it's not very interesting. There's no corner where your heartbeat goes up," Villeneuve said. "It's more like playing with go-karts with your friends, but you have the long straight, so that's a good thing.

"The infield isn't exciting," Villeneuve said of the slow, tight turns. "But you can work yourself closer to someone to have a shot at them on the straight. ... If you were just quick in the straight but very slow in the corners, then you couldn't race anyone, and vice versa. So that made it actually a lot of fun."