By becoming the first driver from Ireland to participate on a Formula 1 weekend in 22 years, Dunne has established himself as one of the rising stars of Irish sport, and with that has come a growing fan base. <\/p>\n
He said he first noticed it after his feature race win in Bahrain, when an Irish flag with ‘Alex’ was displayed across from the podium in the grandstand, and it has only been enhanced since Austria. <\/p>\n
If he wasn’t aware of the support back home, he did after visiting the Mondello Historic Festival in August. <\/p>\n
Compared to a year ago at the annual event at Ireland’s premier circuit when he was racing in Formula 3, when he would walk about the paddock “almost like a normal person”, Dunne was the star attraction this time around and swarmed by attention.<\/p>\n
“That weekend was pretty crazy,” said Dunne with a grin.<\/p>\n
“In comparison to last year, a couple of people who knew me might have asked for a picture but I was able to walk around the paddock like I was part of the group. <\/p>\n
“This year, as soon as the big interview on stage finished I just got surrounded by everyone, but it’s cool to see. <\/p>\n
“Seeing little kids there makes it nice. When you see you are inspiring that younger generation to try and do the same thing that you’ve done, for me that’s the nicest thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By becoming the first driver from Ireland to participate on a Formula 1 weekend in 22 years, Dunne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-115813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}