STRENGTHS AND HIGHLIGHTS
What were the biggest strengths you found in him when you got hold of him?
His strength is outright speed. He has got a real raw talent when he gets in the car and I still don’t think at 35 years old it is always apparent to him how he’s doing it. But there’s double and triple world champions up and down this pit lane, there’s others who are of a similar ilk that they doesn’t really know what they're doing, they gets in the car and it’s just pure raw talent. They don’t really work at it, they doesn’t really put the hours in and pore through the data, but really good guys are often like that. That’s definitely where his strength is.
What was your best moment with him?
The best out and out moment for an engineer and driver - the actual physical moment, not something that had culminated over a year or series of races - was qualifying 2008 in Monaco when he was on pole position. I can remember when I started race engineering him and we went to Monaco in 2006 and he said: “I’m pretty good everywhere, I can do a good job everywhere, I’m confident everywhere, but the one place where I’m absolute shit and you’ve just got to accept it is Monaco”. And that was the one thing I didn’t do, I didn’t accept it.
We went to Monaco in ’06 and actually he was fairly appalling. But there were the flashes of putting a series of corners together where you just think: “You can be good here”. We went back there in 2007 and said: “It’s not true what you’re saying. Monaco is just another circuit with straights and corners, they’re all low speed, but so what? And you definitely can be quick here”. It was working on him between me and his performance engineer - Giuliano Salvi at the time - and we worked relentlessly really. Going through it corner by corner, showing him what he had to do and how he could be quick, doing that really in-depth driver coaching. It was giving him really what he needed back at the Nurburgring in 2006, that little bit of confidence.
By the time we went back in 2008 he was absolutely confident, so we’d gone from 2006 where he said: “I’m rubbish in Monaco and I’ll never, ever be any good” - every single time he’d been there in his vast experience of three previous times in a Formula One car against Jacques Villeneuve or Giancarlo Fisichella or whoever, he’d always been rubbish there and he just accepted that - to putting it on pole in 2008, against Kimi, the Monaco specialist. That for me was just an amazing moment.
That for me, the high you get from something like that, it’s a real collaboration of teamwork between what we’re doing on the engineering side and what he’s doing on the driving side. And it was right up to the very last moment, I think that’s why there was so much heightened emotion because it was right up to that very last run in Q3 and he got all of the circuit right but he wouldn’t brake late enough at Ste Devote. We were saying to him “Brake later, we can see that the car will brake later”. “No, no, no, I don’t feel confident, I don’t feel confident”. All the way through Q1, Q2: “You can brake later”. Just before his run in Q3 I went to see him and I said: “What the fuck are you doing, fucking brake later!”
“You’re not driving the car!”
“I don’t need to drive the car, I can tell you that you’re not braking late enough! Fucking brake later!”
I think that gave him enough anger when someone was telling him how to drive the car: “I’ll fucking show him, I’ll fucking show him how late you can brake, I’m going to lock both fronts at Ste Devote”. They were just on the edge of locking up. He didn’t brake a bit later, it was a full like 40 metres later in qualifying and we thought “Oh no, here we go…” and it just made the apex as well, but he did. It was just on the limit of locking and it was perhaps a little bit too much and he just made it and I think after that the whole lap was just him with a load of confidence. He probably came out of that first corner going up the hill going “Phew, fucking hell that was close, however there’s a load more front grip that I’ve got that I didn’t know I had”.
He was just brilliant all throughout the lap, massively quick though the middle sector against Kimi, through Mirabeau, then Loews and then Portier, he was giving Kimi like a tenth a corner in Monaco. Three tenths in three corners is a lifetime in corners like that. We came out of it and the funniest thing was me, Giuliano, him, the car crew, nobody really jumped up and down, it was like “Fucking hell, we’ve actually done it. We’ve taken the situation from black and made it white”. It was just a really good feeling.
Then there were loads of other times. His first, when he won in Brazil, coming close to winning that world championship in ’08… It always gave me a great deal of pride seeing him grow as a driver into something that went from “Why has Felipe Massa been given a Ferrari drive?” to “Felipe Massa genuine contender for the world championship”. It gave me a great deal of pride to have a tiny bit of involvement in that and to be able to have guided that in some way, shape or form, regardless of how little that was. There were lots of great moments really.
Was it crucial within those moments that they would give him confidence that he would then build on?
Yeah, definitely. He was and still is to a certain extent, he does lack confidence in certain situations. I always think it’s something to do with him being very naturally talented in that he gets in the car, sometimes he’s blisteringly quick, he doesn’t always understand why. And I think if you’re in that situation it must sometimes give you that question mark. “Why? Am I going to be quick this weekend? Will I always be quick?” Just because there’s not a great depth of understanding as to why he’s doing it.
Whereas you see the drivers who are slightly less talented but work very hard on it and they have a much deeper understanding. I think with Felipe one of the things that has always been a bit of an issue with him in 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13 at Ferrari, was confidence. But then he came here, people respected him, people rallied around him. He had a team that he knew were working hard for him and the management clearly appreciated what he was doing for the team both in and out of the car and all of a sudden that confidence comes back. It’s just a real shame that Ferrari didn’t get that in the final years he was there because he could have delivered a lot more for them there as well.
