Nelson Piquet joins Massa's go-kart event (updated)

Nelson Piquet Jr has been invited by Felipe Massa to join his charity go-kart event at Florianopolis, Brazil this weekend. This will be the first time that Piquet has raced against many of his former F1 rivals since the torrid Singapore race fix saga, that saw Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds leave Renault’s F1 team earlier this year.

The ‘International Challenge of the Stars’ kart race features drivers such as Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Tony Kanaan, Giancarlo Fisichella, Antonio Pizzonia and Christian Fittipaldi. It will mark Massa’s own return to competitive racing since his life-threatening injury during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix.

To make the event more interesting, we have some behind-the-scenes pictures from Rubens Barrichello starting with a frightened Tony Kanaan travelling on the mini-bus to the press briefing. We’ll update this page with more images from the event as we receive them.

Driver Tony Kanaan seems woried about meeting the press.

The press conference – from the perspective of Rubens Barichello.

Rubens and Felipe

Lucas Di Grassi’s kart

Nelson Piquet Jr out on track

Massa exits the pit garages

Schumacher out on track

Rubens all suited up, with Tony Kanaan ‘helping’ his race engineer.

Schumacher praying that he’ll be the quickest German

Schumacher reviews setup with his race engineer

Live timing – Piquet isn’t doing too bad..

Michael Schumacher’s kart

Rubens gets ready for a practice session

Massa’s kart