Autobayng News Team
Former Ferrari race engineer Rob Smedley says the team must improve how it communicates with its drivers and stop telling them “we’ll get back to you”.
He said he was “pained” by some of last year’s exchanges between Lewis Hamilton and Ricardo Adami, who has been replaced as his race engineer for the upcoming season. Smedley said it was clear the relationship between the pair was “not quite fully formed – and that’s where it can be not healthy”.
The tensions between Hamilton and the pit wall became clear at last year’s Miami Grand Prix where he told his race to “have a tea break” while they were discussing whether to swap the running order of their two cars. “This is a very clear presentation that his frustrations are boiling over,” Smedley told High Performance.
“It’s the job of the race engineer,” he continued, “when the driver asks a question, you need to know enough about the car and have some level of expertise in all areas and be across your job enough that when the driver asks a question – they’re in the car on their own, they are driving the car at 200mph – when they ask you a question, answer it quickly.
“It really pains me when I hear ‘we’ll get back to you’ and all the rest of it. Mate, it’s not a call centre. The guy’s trying to perform at ten-tenths of their performance. Answer him, give him confidence, let them know that you know what you’re doing. Otherwise it’s like: ‘I’ll get back to you, I need to go and ask an adult’.
“These are the tiny things that erode confidence and trust and that’s when the relationship starts to become more tetchy and more difficult.”
Smedley said Max Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiase are the best example of a strong relationship between driver and race engineer in Formula 1 today.
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“That is the one relationship that I see which is kind of like an old-fashioned relationship. But don’t forget they’ve been at it for quite a while now, nearly 10 years, so it’s quite an old-fashioned race engineer and driver relationship.
“If the perception is that they don’t get on, I think the way that they can be that frank and honest with each other tells you exactly the opposite. They get on really, really well.
“And I think that Max knows that GP has been a big part of his success. Of course, he’s never going to get the accolades that Max does.”
“When I watch Formula 1 races and I listen to some of the engineers and their drivers talking together, the engineer can be almost too subservient,” he added. “Get on the front foot, tell them what you want. I don’t hear the whole conversation, so I’m listening to this as a fan from the outside. But it’s like: tell them what you need.”
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