May
11
Jason Bright: Team dynamics
Team dynamics were on display in Formula One last weekend, with Williams engineers pointing fingers in pit lane and a despondent Felipe Massa looking side-lined at Ferrari.
The most interesting to watch in my opinion was Mercedes-GP with Schumacher and Rosberg, both new to the team, with reputations to build or maintain and no benchmark on the car.
At the start of the year Rosberg seemed to be doing a better job but Schumacher has a very successful formula that has worked well for him in the past and I’m sure he’s trying to get back to that. There’s a fair chance that, whether it’s the way the car’s set up or the particular engineer he’s working with, Schumacher’s set-up might not be working the same as it has in the past, but he’ll get there. It takes time to get the set-up working in the direction you’re aiming for and then hone in on what makes a car extremely successful.
What you aim to achieve is something that can be competitive at all circuits and in all situations and to do that sometimes you’re better off starting with a clean sheet. It’s frustrating, but it’s also very rewarding and something I’m quite experienced at after six developmental years in V8s (1998 at SBR, 2001 at HRT, 2005 at FPR, 2007 at Britek, 2009 at SBR again and now 2010 with BJR).
The first thing you look at when you move to a new team is obviously the car’s pace and how it responds to changes; basically whether it’s in the window and responding as it should. After that there are a lot of other factors that you need to get right to win races that aren’t so obvious but can all lose you a race. Things like accuracy and efficiency in the team and decision-making all play a large factor over a race season.
I’ve been lucky that the majority of teams I’ve stepped into have been happy to go in the direction that I want to take them, although it seems from the outside that Rosberg is not happy with Schumacher’s new direction.
I would say to Rosberg that he should try and make it work for him because ideally a team wants the cars set up similarly; that’s when they’re most successful. If he can’t make the Schumacher set-up work for him, he needs to find some compromise because otherwise the team may decide to find two drivers that are better suited.
I do have some sympathy with him because in 2001 I had a similar situation when I joined HRT. My team-mate Mark Skaife had been there for three years and was extremely successful after developing the car to suit him. Even though I had some success very early in the season, winning at Clipsal, I struggled to get that car set-up to work for me at many of the other venues over the next six rounds.
After several rounds trying to drive the car the way it was I finally managed to convince the team I needed something different and the parts turned up on the Saturday morning of the Bathurst 1000, just before the shoot-out. I did a 2:08.763 in the warm-up that morning, a new lap record. The time was more than a second faster than anyone else and I didn’t seem to have the same issues wanting to go my own way anymore! In fact Skaifey actually went in the same direction the year after, when he won the championship.
I moved on to FPR after that for yet another developmental year and got the team’s first pole position at Winton in 2006. V8 Supercars is racing at the North Victorian circuit again this weekend and I feel in a much better position at BJR than I was in any other developmental year I’ve had.
The good thing about going to Winton is that when you go to a track where you know what to expect it’s much easier to develop the car. We saw a lot of that at Queensland Raceway because we weren’t second-guessing some of the issues, like track surface or bumps. I would expect this track to suit us better than any other so hopefully fans won’t be waiting the full year before results start to come in.
