The Secret to a Perfect F1 Driver-Engineer Partnership | with Rob Smedley on Massa, Lewis & Ferrari (E393)

0:01It's Lewis Hamilton but it's still very very different it must be uncomfortable right your boss has basically come out and told you to shut up in public felipe fernando is faster than you it's one of those that you look back and just wish that we had all done it differently on that saturday night you know we don't really know whether he's gonna make it my goodness sorry you're listening to high performance thanks to everyone who's already subscribed. If you've not, right now is the time because you'll get new episodes the moment they drop and your support helps us bring more world-class guests onto the show.

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0:50Rob, welcome to High Performance. It's nice to see you again. It is lovely to see you, Jake, and thank you very much for having me. Thank you for coming on. Not only is it nice to see an old friend who I used to spend a lot of time with but i can't wait for people to hear this conversation because you were central to one of the most dramatic ends to a formula untitled race ever yeah you've got a first-hand experience of working with michael schumacher first-hand experience of working alongside fernando alonso and kimmy reikinen you've suffered heartbreak in your personal life and in your professional life you've had the greatest of highs you've helped to transform williams in the last few years and I want to talk about all of it.

1:27Does that sound good? That sounds great. Let's do it. But I want to start by rewinding the clock right back to 2006 where you had not spent any time, I don't think, with Felipe Massa and you get a call from someone at Ferrari asking you to go and meet him. Take us to that moment. So Felipe joined us. I kind of knew Felipe. I'd watched him come on the scene and I met him in, I think, 2001, 2000, 2001 when he was just, he hadn't quite graduated to Formula One. So I kind of knew him to say hello to. And then he came to Ferrari and he did, I think, the first four, five races with a very competent engineer who had a really good run with Rubens Barrichello called Gabriele Delicolli, who's a mate of mine.

2:18Very good engineer, had a great career in Formula One. but it felt like they weren't gelling yeah right you know you you have a great relationship and a great working uh partnership with one driver it doesn't mean to say it's going to work with another driver so ross brawn who was my boss we um we both still lived predominantly in the uk and we used to get the monday morning flight back so this was after like the fifth race of imola and felipe had had five really bad races and Ross was giving me a lift back from Bologna airport so Ross always used to park his car there so he was driving me from Bologna airport to the factory in Maranello and we just used to chit chat mostly about work but sometimes it'd be about other stuff and then he said to me like what do you think of Felipe and I said well you know I think he's struggling but whatever and he said to me uh he just come out and he said well we want you to be his race engineer and I said okay like this is like fairly like it feels it feels like a natural conversation in the car but he's I thought well is he telling me or is he asking me and it felt more like he was telling me but he was very honest about it he said we think Felipe is very talented Michael had already started talking internally about whether or not he was going to retire within the next year, two years, three years or whatever.

3:51So they had to start succession planning. We think Felipe is very talented from what we've seen up to now. But if he carries on like this, he's not going to make the end of the year. So he said to me, so he kind of arrived in Marinelli, and he said, have a think about it anyway. And then literally about half an hour later, he called me and said, well, have you thought about it? okay i guess you're telling me so i said uh well yeah i said i'll do it i said it's a little bit in at the deep end when do we start he said we'll go home get your passport because we're going to nurburgring this afternoon for the formula one race so that's kind of how it came about and i i kind of had the the the the plane journey over there to think about it right which is all like two hours and think about how I was going to approach it and I didn't really have any idea about how this would go down so I they'd already told Gabriele that he wasn't gonna be the race engineer anymore and that I was going to get drafted in which I felt bad about right that's like kind of I'm in a situation that I didn't ask to be in and this is a guy that sits like in the same office as me anyway I arrive at Nürburgring and then Felipe arrives this was the wednesday and then felipe arrives and i went see him in the motorhome and i found this you know the little bit that i knew him he was like a little bit i knew of him up to that point he was like this cheeky chappy right he was like happy go lucky and we didn't have that version of felipe we had a really like uptight and nervous version of felipe and we just had a really honest conversation right um how were those nerves like showing themselves to you oh he was like all over the place he couldn't smile he was like his foot was tapping he was like not in in in a very good place and i said to him look like what do you want to get out of this like what are you trying to get out of it let's start from that like like what's the target here and he said to me uh well i want to beat Michael I said okay that's an interesting that's an interesting target to have you know you've got a seven-time world champion a guy who's like I guess Michael was like 35 37 something like that at the time like massively experienced de facto best driver in the world at that point in time I said okay you've just like kind of you've gone from Sauber to Ferrari test team back to Sauber and now you've kind of gone from you know in in in Formula One in in motorsport there is Formula One and everything else and in and in Formula One in terms of the the expectations there's Ferrari and everything else you know Ferrari is like a religion if when you work for Ferrari or you drive for Ferrari you you're you're playing for the national team so I was like mate you've got to like we need to bring this down a notch or two because I think if that's your expectations right now here today this weekend you know we're not going to get very far this is like I think we got to go back to basics and that was it we went back to basics I said look I believe in you I think you are really from what I've observed from the outside I think you're a really quick driver and you know I'd been doing Formula One for nigh on 10 years at that point so So I guess I knew a little bit about Formula One.

7:11I wasn't by no means an expert. And I said to him, as long as the speed's there, we can work with you, right? We can do everything else, but you're nowhere near a complete driver. You know, you haven't got any of the attributes that you need to beat Michael Schreiber. And what were they that you didn't have in your eyes? He couldn't put a race together. He was no good around the in and out laps. He couldn't read a race. You know, he couldn't look at a race and, you know, think, like, you know, I need to extend the tires a little bit or I need to, you know, I need to push this set. You know, he had no idea about how to use the tires.

7:46I mean, he'll probably listen to this and hate me for it, but, you know, he's like a little brother to me, so I'm going to be really honest. He just didn't have all of this, you know, and all the stuff outside the car as well. Like I talk about pressure, there's a massive amount of pressure in Ferrari to deliver outside of the car. You know, you are a national hero, right? And that brings with it a weight. So I was like, look, we can do all of that. As engineers, as your support team around you, we can do all of that as long as the talent is there. But let's get back to basics and let's start to do things in a really structured way.

8:21And that was it. We just added structure and gave, you know, the world didn't really operate around targets and KPIs and stuff like that back then. We were less objectively driven. But we just put targets in place of what we wanted to do race by race. And I think having someone believe in him and tell him that it was going to be okay, I think just brought the whole thing down and allowed him to perform. And I said, look, we just need to get through the weekend. Let's get through the weekend. We've got no time to prepare for this, but this is what we need to do during this weekend. And in fact, he became very, very good at execution.

8:58Like he became unbelievably good at execution. We used to call him the mechanical monkey because, you know, you'd ask him to do something, you know fast forward two years from that point you'd ask him to do something and he's as good as michael at doing it right an example an example is like you know a switch sequence in the car so you're doing 200 mile an hour um and upshifting and downshifting and you've got to do a certain switch sequence and you've got to do certain things with the car and he could do it all he could memorize it all you know much better than an average human being like me he could do it at the level of what michael could do and he started to get you know much more into the detail and understand much more about what was going to make him a complete driver and actually that weekend that first weekend in Nürburgring we we went through the program I don't think he'd been you know he hadn't approached the weekend programmatically before so we went through the program and he actually finished third so it was his first podium in Formula One I think Michael Bonnet I can't remember who was second and he finished third and what I can remember very clearly about that result was that Kimi Raikkonen who was in the McLaren had caught him and was much faster than him at the end and we just talked him through those final 10 laps and you could see him starting to make mistakes and then it was like starting to talk him through it and starting to get him you know telling him to breathe and telling him it was you know where he needed to push the car where he could like conserve the tires and he got through it and finished on the podium and i remember it was a really quite a proud moment for me you know and the team that had like kind of will come like you know there's not just a race engineer on the car there's a whole team behind that you have to manage so it was it was nice and then we just started to build from there and i'm really interested in that final few laps because you've only really had what 48 hours of intense time with felipe yet you've somehow worked out that what he actually needs you to be saying with a few laps to go is right to take a breath i mean I assume these are the kind of things you're saying, take a breath, just stay calm.

10:57We've got three laps to go. You broke a bit early into this corner last lap, so just think about that. Where did you get the thought from that that was what he needed, or was this you operating on instinct, do you think? Instinct, it's pure instinct at that point, right? You don't know the guy, but you can see what he needs. You can kind of see from the body language of how he responds. And I still do that with people now. You see very quickly how they respond. I think any kind of leadership involves, you know, you've got the old adage that you've got two ears, one mouth, right? Listen to people, but not only listen to them, like really listen to them.

11:34You know, 80 % of communication is listening and watching their body language to how they react to what you say. And you could see already like what worked and what he needed. But yeah, it's instinct, I think. You know, I didn't know the guy from Adam at that point. It's instinct and it's kind of seeing how he reacts. Like when you tell him something when he's in the car and he's got all of that pressure, how does he react to how you're talking to him? Yeah, and it was just guiding him through it. And then we became quite, we were a partnership that I would say was quite verbose. You know, we talked a lot on the radio.

12:09It was thankfully back in the day when the radio wasn't played out every two minutes like it is now. So you could have much more frank conversations. But we did talk a lot. I talked to him probably more than I'd talked to any driver before or since. And he needed that. He needed a lot of coaching and enjoyed a lot of coaching. And I think it really helped him.

12:35And little did you or Felipe know at that moment that this was the beginning of two people that would end up in Brazil in 2008 as central players to one of the most remarkable Formula 1 stories of all time when Lewis Hamilton wins the world title on the final corner of the final lap of the final race of the season. Yeah. But if we go back three or four days when you're making your way to Brazil, which of course is also Felipe Massa's home race, what was the mood inside the Ferrari camp like? You were behind in the world title. So did you turn up believing that you could be world champions that weekend?

13:09Well, I think we went into the penultimate race with the hope that we could kind of close the gap. And I don't think we did close the gap. I don't think that, I can't remember exactly what happened, but we ended up with a reasonable gap. I don't know what it would be in today's money, but it was like a 15-point gap that we went in today's money that we went into the final round with. There's a few things leading up to that point which had meant that we'd had a good season, but we hadn't had a perfect season. I think that overall he had performed very, very well. He'd performed like a world champion.

13:43from that Nürburgring story in 2006 to the end of 2008. We're talking about three years, and we had a complete driver on our hands. And so we went into that final race, I think... Seven points behind. Seven points behind, right? So seven points. In a period where you got 10 for the win. Where you got 10 for the win, that's right. So I think we had to finish, Felipe had to win, and Lewis had to finish sixth or worse. So if he'd finished fifth, he was world champion. so obviously that's a massively tall order right because even if Felipe wins by a country Marlon Lewis is probably just going to canter in behind him in second and get you know two point deficit back in those days and what I saw was that of the team that worked on Felipe's car there was despondency and I thought that it was my job to kind of lift the team back up and give them confidence And when did you see that despondency?

14:43We were on a roll and things were going okay, but the gap was just too big, you know. And I saw it like probably a couple of weeks before we actually flew out to Brazil. So what I did was I took all of the guys out. I used to do this quite often. So the engineers, the mechanics, technicians on the car, stuff like that. So we all went out and we had a really good night. We had dinner and a really good night and we got very drunk on Lambrosco. But part of that was to tell everybody, look, we can do this, right? It's not impossible. It's like he only has to finish sixth. Like anything can happen.

15:21We'll go there, right? We're going to go there. We're going to treat it like any other race, but we're going to win. And we are going to go there with outward confidence that we can do this. And we all have to believe that we can do this. And then what McLaren do, we can't control. but if we go there and we're very confident and we start to have a really good weekend from the get-go on Friday that starts to put, it's McLaren's to lose at this point and actually the weekend unfolded like that I would say that was literally one of the most perfect weekends I've ever done in any team in Formula 1 we were fastest in all the practice sessions the car setup was like almost perfect we didn't have to choose anything he qualified on pole i think lewis had qualified he didn't have a great qualifying he was fifth or seventh and again that was why was that that was down to pressure right you know there's no way that that car should have qualified seventh and this was his first world championship let's let's not forget um so he he had a lot of pressure on himself and then the race is one of those races where you have to have such fast footwork.

16:34It was wet, dry, it was horrible, it was all over the place. And between Felipe and the team we never really put a foot wrong. When we had the right tyres on and made the pit stops at the right time he was constantly in front. And then you've got those final few laps when it started to rain again and Luis I think at that point he spun on the first lap I think and that put him on the back foot. Then he made his way up. Then there was more problems and everything. we were just kind of going away at a canter. Was there a moment in that race where you thought, oh my goodness, we're going to do this?

17:06No, I never allowed myself to think that because I think that means that you've lost focus on the job at hand. My job was to help Felipe win that race dominantly. And the more dominant we were and the more out of reach we were, that would, the only tool we had in our armory against our rival at that point was what we had control of, which was winning, and how much pressure that could put them under. And they didn't have a great race, I can remember that, and I can remember just being fully focused. And people kept talking to me on the pit wall about it, and I kept... What sort of stuff were they saying?

17:49Ah, like, you know, exactly that. Like, oh, we could do this, we might do this. and I kept politely in northern vernacular telling them to... Fuck off. Fuck off, yeah. Shut the fuck up. I'm doing my job. Thanks for allowing me to swear. So your message to Felipe before the race was also like, don't think about McLaren, don't think about Lewis. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Act like they're not there because it's, you know, act like they don't exist, right? But did you not see a moment where you looked at Felipe and they built up and thought, man, he is also feeling the pressure here big time?

18:22No, never. that was that was the thing with him in brazil he was so comfortable right he was he was so comfortable from the very first second of free practice one he was so calm he was that's what i talk about we had the complete driver we had the complete package by that point on the grid it looked like he was going out for a sunday drive you know you could see everybody else on the grid like you know the closest rivals they were feeling the pressure and we were walking around with smiles on our faces we were like well we're here to lose right we're going to lose the world championship like we're just going to have a good time you know outbound that was the that was the outward message obviously by that point in the weekend everyone was like we might do this we could possibly do this and and there was just a self-belief you know that he had not he's it was never it was a confidence never arrogance right there's two there's two you know arrogance comes with like there's usually no foundation it's a superficial thing confidence is because you know there's solid foundations i can be confident in what i'm doing and he had that even on the you know like i said on the grid like it was like a football stadium like honestly sao paulo in telagos that that weekend was like a football stadium they were just singing and cheering his name you know for hours on end literally hours i got there at say like eight o 'clock in the morning the grandstands were already full and they just sung his name for hours and hours and hours on end right throughout it's literally like being at a football match that would break some people that would break some drivers yeah he but but he he got like power from it and motivation from it you know he he felt like that that lifted him right because because he's always he's a very proud Brazilian, like a very proud, um, like country man.

20:11And we couldn't have done really anymore. I always look back on that and say like, and people say, oh, you lost the world championship. I said, well, yeah, but we didn't lose it in that race. That race was the most perfectly executed weekend that I've ever been involved in, in any, you know, and seeing Michael win world championships. We used to like, you know, back in the, like, you know, 2003, 2004, those years we were knocking world championships out like candy right we were wrapping the world championship up by by the summer break but this was just really perfectly executed under pressure and then you got those final few laps and the disarray of like you know the the rain coming down and then like you know Lewis was on the right tires and he came through and and beat Timo what I can remember about those final laps is that Felipe crossed the line and at that point around turn 11 Lewis was still behind Glock and at that point the team started to go mental There's those iconic images in the garage isn't there?

21:09Yeah Felipe's dad and the team celebrating the world title And they were all going mental and it was very dark I can remember that I distinctly remember it was very dark and I could feel the flashbulbs behind me you know like popping off and you know there was a lot of like melee and I was still trying to focus on these final few moments because I knew that Lewis was on the right tyre compared to Glock and I'm still trying to focus and what happened was people jumped on me and kind of like pulled me off the pit wall but I still had my headsets on and my cans and everything and I was going, get the fuck off me, I'm still working like get off, get off because they thought they'd won the world title they were trying to celebrate And I was trying to watch the GPS of where the two dots of between Lewis and Timo were.

22:00And they pulled me so far back that, you know, Interlagos is like where if you kind of look to your right, you can see the pit entry as they come up the hill to the start-finish line. And they pulled me back and I kind of looked down the pit lane and I thought, right, I can't see the TV anymore because they've like ripped me away from the pit wall. but I thought I can look down the pit lane and I was looking and I thought I just need to see which car's in front because probably whatever car's in front is whether we've won the world championship or not and I saw the silver car come past first and then Timo behind and I was like, we haven't won it and people were still going, we won, we won, we won and I was going, no we haven't and then everybody realised and then kind of the mood changes in a split second and then I kind of climbed back up on my perch and I started talking around the in-lap.

22:52What did you say? I just said to him, you know, we've done like, you know, the synopsis of the message was, paraphrasing the message was, look, we couldn't have done any more, right? In this event, we've done everything we possibly can. You should be like extremely proud of yourself. We are extremely proud of you. it wasn't that that one race and whether or not you've got a another world championship trophy or your first world championship trophy in in his case i guess in in the annals of time it becomes a bit meaningless it was the journey for me you know and and i talk about this a lot now even to the guys that i work with now like enjoy the journey right you've got to enjoy the journey if it's all about the destination you'll be miserable and actually enjoying the journey he usually gets you to the destination so you know we talked about that and then you know i think the way that what always struck me and always and told me that we did have a complete driver and an elite athlete at that point was the way that he reacted afterwards you know if you look at him on the podium and you know the humility that he showed when he was crying yeah touching his heart thanking and the Brazilian fans.

24:07Yeah. I suppose I watched that at the time thinking, I mean, I knew I was coming into the sport, didn't I? The next season. So this was me watching it thinking, I need to know what's happening here because I'll be talking about this with people like you in a few months' time. But I remember watching that thinking, that's the public display. What happens when the silence arrives and the door closes and the two of you are sitting there in a quiet driver's room and the actual dawning realisation that you were seconds away from a world title actually appears yeah well i i didn't see him for quite a long like relatively quite a long time afterwards that that afternoon and what i found because he had lots of media commitments and things well yeah he had tons he was on the podium and then he was here there everywhere i started to feel like really emotional um which i hadn't really done at work before.

25:02I'm not really a person that gets particularly emotional. But then what I found was that I kind of went and sat somewhere and I cried for about an hour, literally cried for about an hour, you know, and it was just a weird feeling. You know, I called my wife and I talked to her and, you know, I called my dad and I talked to him and I literally couldn't stop crying. What I realized a long time afterwards, you know, when I was a little bit more self-aware was that when you're in a dogfight like that, and it's only sports where this is relevant. I don't think it's relevant in the business world. I think, I think sport is a, is a crucible of pressure.

25:44Like elite sports is a crucible of pressure. And I think you can't allow when you are trying to perform at the very highest level, you can't allow emotion to come into it. You can't allow emotion to be part of your decision making. You know, you have to, of course you have to like be empathetic and you know, all of those things, but you can't allow emotion to come into it. So, and I think it was just pent up, you know, 10 months of a world championship, pent up emotion. We knew we went into that world championship with a good chance of winning and therefore from the get-go, from the time, you know, the lights went out in Australia at the start of the season, 18, 20 races later, whatever it was um it's just a huge amount of emotion and it all come out in in in that hour and then I was fine I think I can't remember what we did afterwards I went to see him and he was I think again the overriding sense for him on that afternoon was he was just incredibly proud right of what he'd been able to do himself and why I love Felipe and why we've remained such close friends all this time afterwards was that even then at that point he was well regarded to be one of the top drivers in formula one but hubris never crept in you know there was never any hubris there was always a humility about him there was always this you know what all elite sportsmen need is this confidence but with a nagging self-doubt you know the imposter syndrome that we all have and you know that's what he kind of he maintained that from from from that day onwards and I think you know the again like his his emotions were of course he was you know very emotional and you know I would you know I comforted him when I finally got got to see him he was crying as well I guess yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely um you know same probably the same thing as me you know he'd carried that you know buried those emotions for for 10 months because you can't allow them to come out you can't you know whatever it's not a weakness that would be absolutely the wrong way to describe it, but it can cloud your judgment.

27:53So, you know, and he, he was, um, you know, in, in quite a bad state, but then we went out and got pissed and it was, it was fine. You know, we took the team out and we all had a few beers and, you know, same thing as, as, as you would after any kind of celebration, there was a lot to celebrate. There was more to celebrate. And I think this is about enjoying the journey. There's often more to celebrate than there is not to celebrate, you know. And if you don't celebrate moments like that in your life, you know, coming within one point of a world championship with a driver that three years previous, his employer was considering whether or not to keep him employed, when there was people in the paddock that give this guy no hope whatsoever, you know there was a journalist who to me off camera once described him as a rock ape and said he wouldn't win a Grand Prix back in very early 2006 and I said we'll see you know we'll see whether that's true or not this guy you know but for you know a couple of meters more or less in a race would have been a world champion so you know that was just a yeah it was a proud moment of what we were able to do and look I hope you don't mind me mentioning at this point your daughter, Minnie, who you'd lost in 2007.

29:16Yes. And since then, obviously, your wife, Lucy, and you have done a lot of work to raise awareness and funds for stillborn children. I wonder the impact that had on you in this moment because it probably provided a reminder that there are much bigger things in life anyway than winning and losing world championships. I think you're absolutely right, Jake. I think that's what we were. I think, you know, you kind of grow up, you go to school, you go to university or you go to work, whatever it is, you meet someone, you get married until, and this probably sounds, I don't want to sound pious here, but until you have kids, you know yourself, you kind of just, that kind of flips the switch for me for when you grow up.

30:07because all of a sudden now you've got dependence and responsibilities and all the rest of it. And I think going through that tragedy and losing Mini really brought like a kind of focus but also a kind of calm to my life. It put things in perspective that, you know, up until that point had been Formula 1, Formula 1, Formula 1 and like, you know, everything was going to like just in the wake of everything just got like you know wrapped up in this wake of formula one yeah like that happened and i had to take some time away obviously and i have to say like i still to this day like have to thank ferrari for how they handle that as well you know ferrari were unbelievable about it and that's when you see you know talk about like ferrari is a family and family family family and all of that right which sometimes it's true a lot of the times it isn't true in moments like that there was a real empathy and a real circling of the wagons to look after me and and and and lucy but it did put things in perspective you're right it did change me as a person it 100 changed me as a person it made me grow up overnight and it made me much more like like i said like have have perspective on things right because at the end of the day okay we're living and breathing ferrari it's world championships we're working or playing for the national team or whatever way you want to look at it you know we're in this privileged position there's 20 drivers there's 20 race engineers i've got one of those spots but at the end of the day you know it's not as important as those things you know as as kids and family and life and death it's none of those things and i think that did help me it did help me to be it definitely helped me to be better at my job because it took a lot of pressure off me because up until that point i'd kind of live with a lot of pressure and the pressure went away like that why because i just put it in perspective and i could also start to quieten out the noise you know any high performing team or business it will operate at its peak under pressure but it also has to be a psychologically safe space and i think a psychologically safe space is created by the culture in a business but it's also created by yourself as well i think you can create your own psychologically safe space and in ferrari in formula one in general or in any elite sports team it can be very needly right you know you're always on display people are always looking to to to you know if you're on a pedestal to knock you off it somebody younger more intelligent better looking whatever is going to come and take your place and kind of all of that just went away or the majority of it went away i would say i wouldn't say all of it went away but the majority of it went away i was just like you know if i can in terms of like all of that noise i don't give a fuck anymore right just gonna be good at my job right and there's gonna be noise noise will always like disruptive noise is always gonna be there kind of reacting to it and being you know you know psychologically reactive and cognizant of it and it affecting your decisions and what you do and how people view you is a really really unhealthy way to try and be good at what you're doing right because you spend 50 % of your time thinking about that and 50 % of your time trying to be actually good at your job.

33:48So yeah, it just put things in perspective where I cared deeply about my job and I cared deeply about performing and I cared deeply about the people that work for me. And I cared deeply about results and winning races and pole positions and winning world championships. But I didn't care anymore what people thought. It just kind of went away. It just literally went away. And then like, you know it tended to zero over the next few years i think there was another you know few years where pressure was still on at ferrari and all the rest of it and and i think what that does is it is it also like so there's a whole cycle here where you know that happened with mini that happened to my psychology um and the way that i approach things and then what i started to notice was people like kind of looked at me and they were like oh you're in this really important position but you appear from the outside that like you're like, again, to use the vernacular, you don't give a fuck.

34:43And I was like, no, you're very wrong. I just don't care about the things that are unimportant. And then you kind of have to also like, I don't know, temper your behavior, but temper your external brand, because people start to look at you and think, is this bloke serious about what he's doing? But I was just enjoying it. I enjoyed all of my time in Formula One until the point that I didn't enjoy it anymore. And then I stopped. You know, it was clear to me, and I always used to talk about people that, you know, I used to work with people and see the amount of pressure that they used to put on themselves.

35:16You know, you talk about the pressure of Formula One and the external pressure and, you know, the pressure from the team and all the rest of it. It's like, that doesn't touch the sides for like elite, like for like people who work in elite sports teams. That doesn't touch the sides of the pressure that you put on yourself, right? But the pressure that I put on myself can be a positive pressure. I'm not going to put negative pressure on myself. There's the niggling self-doubt and the imposter syndrome and all that shit that everybody has. It's so well documented. All of that's just, I think, in small doses is healthy.

35:53But the positive pressure that you put on yourself is way, way higher than what anybody else could put. So it's like, don't bother putting pressure on me. like don't bother coming with like any negativity because it doesn't matter right i can do this myself the reason why i thought it was very important actually was because also you know when you when you lost your daughter you were engineering felipe at the time so he would have been on the phone to you wanting to know about your family news what's going on has your daughter been born is she healthy what's her name and the news you had to give him was um we've lost her like she's you know she's not with us so i think that's a reminder of the fact that actually the relationship between anyone actually but I think particularly in your sport was an emotional one rather than a physical one I think your job and the job of the of the an engineer for a Formula One driver is to be psychologically there for them as much as from a strategic perspective where would you put the balance of um how much of your to be a great race engineer how much is about working on the brain of a driver and how much is working on the technical skills of a driver I think it's honestly 50-50.

37:01And I think it's like from a little bit that I know the inner workings of other sports, football, rugby, whatever. I think it's always 50-50 when you work with the athletes themselves. What is a race engineer in a Formula One team effectively for that driver? He's like the head coach, right? so you can't come and have no idea about you know the technical aspect of the job you know that's really really important that you understand how the car works how that driver interacts with the vehicle how do you optimize that whole package you've got to know all of that but if you come and you don't understand that you have you know a human being in the car and an athlete with all of the foibles that you know all of us mere mortals have then it's never going to work you have to work on both and they have to work on both concurrently and and they both have to work in harmony as well we can't be just off doing like the the driver psychology or the athlete psychology bit and the other bit like we've forgotten about and actually the car's quite slow but we're telling him he's great and like he can he can win races or you know we've completely messed up the strategy or whatever it is equally you can't be fully focused on just that technical side and forgetting about the athlete themselves i guess honestly with you know i talked about 50 50 it might even be slightly higher in in in formula one on the psychology side on the psychology side because don't forget the big difference in formula one compared to say a team sport is that you've got another 10 or 14 players, whatever your sport is, on the field who are all there.

38:48You're there to work as a team, right? As in the athlete, you know, the front of house athlete team. With a Formula One driver, there's one of you, right? And when that driver goes, when the visor goes down, there's an inordinate amount of pressure on that single athlete. You know, it's up to him to deliver as a Formula One driver at that point. The team is behind them. They will support them but that's the end of the chain where they need to deliver you know there's a whole like raft you know myriad of work of of a thousand women and men that go into that but for those two hours on a sunday afternoon the crucible is fairly you know in in their hands and they have to deliver so i think you know there's times when you have to really ramp up the you know how how you support psychologically you know the athlete in that moment and definitely I was always a race engineer that talked and talked and talked, we talked about this before with Felipe, you know I would talk him around the lap almost, even in qualifying What sort of stuff would you be saying?

39:51Oh we'd talk about everything, like you know, well not everything we'd talk about stuff relevant to the race obviously but there would be very technical stuff I would be telling him like where he was compared to you know the plan if you like I would be telling him how he needed to manage the tyres I would be telling him how he needed to manage certain corners whether or not he was braking too early, too late where to carry more speed how to extract more performance from the tyres how to save the tyres more where we were on that particular stint How frank would you be with him if he's not delivering?

40:28Oh, like black and white Like an example, what would you say? He's done a bad lap, he's under pressure and you would say... Well, I mean, it depends. Are we at the start of, or do we know each other? This is when you're fully in bed with each other, you know each other inside out. I would... You've already sworn, so I'm not going to ask you if I can, but I just say, what the fuck are you doing? Like, put your head in order. Like, that's not good enough. Like, and here's what you need to do the next lap. And he would turn it on and do it. See, because I think we don't know this dynamic, right, between driver and race engineer because we don't get to see it.

41:04Therefore, what we do see, we think we almost make the wrong interpretation. I think of Max Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiassi. The number of times I've seen people say, oh, they obviously hate each other. Oh, they obviously don't get on because they're so frank on the radio, particularly Max back to the team. What do you think when you see those type of radio calls from Max? I think that Max and GP, who are both people that I dearly like, I think they have a great relationship. I think that that is the one relationship that I see. It's kind of like an old-fashioned relationship. But don't forget, they've been at it for quite a while now.

41:42Is it nearly 10 years? Yeah, it will be. 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. You know, they wouldn't have stuck together for nine years. You know, you're going to be in a ball ache of a relationship, like a professional relationship for nine years and carry on.

42:16Of course you're not. They get on like a house on fire. And I think you've got to be able to speak frankly to each other. I think if you don't have honesty, especially in the very, very high pressure situations like that, whether it's sport or business or whatever it is and you're kind of fannying around like trying to say something but not really saying it it's just not going to work it really won't work and i see this now like when i listen to you know when i watch formula one races and i listen to some of the engineers and their drivers talking together um you know the engineer can be it's almost like it's too subservient it's like get on the front foot tell them what you want you know i don't hear the whole conversation so i'm kind of like you know listening to this as as a fan from the outside it's like tell them what you need like they're in a very very high pressure situation like okay this is like a superstar they're paid you know tens of millions of dollars a year they're an elite athlete they're one of 20 in the world and and and but now you're at work and you need to deliver for them just as much as they need to deliver for you and for for for an engineer to deliver for the driver you have to be frank you have to be honest you have to be open and and i think if you don't have that you know even out of the car you know felipe and i i would be like very very frank with him you know when he fucked up i'd tell him he fucked up like it's not good enough right what are we doing and he would do the same with me and sometimes on the radio like i said like thank god like not all radio was played like back then but you know he would quite often like tell me to shut up and i would say no you shut up like we get this argument like it's like tete-a-tete so when you watch a race and you hear you know and Max is the one that everyone talks about when it comes to modern drivers and being blunt on the radio when you hear him swearing telling the team it wasn't good enough questioning the team you actually look at that and think that's the sign of a healthy relationship between driver and engineer and driver and team totally totally yeah yeah yeah I mean look like it's in the heat of the moment he's driving a car at 200 mile an hour Gian Piero's sat on the pit wall usually air conditioned nowadays days so of course Max is a winning machine right so of course he's going to kind of sometimes overstep the mark but I know that you know I would suspect because this happened with me at times I would suspect that he later on that day when he's out of the car and acting more like a normal human being there would also be look you know sorry about that like perhaps overstep the mark isn't that healthy as well though yeah and that's the end of it that's the end of it yeah that's the end of it you know i mean you're not going to sit there and bear a grudge like you know i i never did that you know when felipe sometimes you know overstepped the mark and i did it with him right we just say yeah sorry about that was a bit of an arse you know but like whatever let's just get on with it and i think that is the sign that you can have an open and honest and really healthy relationship and you you should have that whether or not you know it's it's a it's a race engineer and a Formula One driver or a head coach and a centre forward or whether or not it's a CEO and their CFO, right?

45:21You need to have that with the team around you. Otherwise, what are you doing if you're not honest with each other? If there's always like a little bit of honesty kept back because you don't want to hurt each other's feelings or anything. I'm a great one for frank talking, you know, and I think you have to be frank and open and honest in those situations. And as someone who knows Lewis Hamilton well because you battled against him, in the peak of his powers and someone who knows Ferrari inside out and arguably from a race engineer perspective probably better than anyone else on the planet at the moment when you see Lewis's struggles and I thought particularly that radio call do you remember when he said they were trying to work out what to do and Lewis said oh maybe we have a cup of tea while you're at it remember how much do you read there into what that what that tells us about what was going on behind the scenes and obviously Riccardo Amati his race engineer has now you know stepped away yeah I think you know just as we talked about like Max and GP if you look at Lewis this year Lewis is very new to the team the relationship with his engineer is very fledgling so if you're having those type of comments on the radio I guess the relationship is not quite fully formed and And that's where it can be not healthy.

46:35This is a very clear presentation that his frustrations are boiling over. I do think it's the job of the race engineer, by the way, when the driver asks a question, you need to know enough about the car and be some level of expertise in all areas and be across your job enough that when the driver asks a question, again, they're in the car on their own, they're driving the car at 200 mile an hour when they ask you a question answer it quickly it really pains me when i you know we'll get back to you and all the rest of it it's not a call center you know the guy's trying to perform at 10 tenths of their performance like answer him like give him confidence let them know that you know what you're doing you know otherwise it's like i'll get back to you i need to go and ask an adult and at that point it's kind of like these are these are the tiny things that erode confidence and trust, you know, and that's when the relationship starts to become more touchy and more difficult.

47:39And how do you get back from that? You know, we're talking about, you know, the guy at Ferrari who's had a very long career in Formula One, very successful. Recommended to Lewis by Sebastian Vettel, wasn't he? There you go. Great, you know, relationship and career with Sebastian. They won lots of things together. But it's like the Felipe story in 2006 when it doesn't work and it doesn't gel. it doesn't work. And when it doesn't work, why doesn't it work? I have a very clear theory on this. I think it's up to the race engineer to adapt their approach and their personality to suit the athlete. I don't think it's the other way around.

48:15I think if it's the other way around, the race engineer is they haven't really got the meaning of their job or even life. Because it's kind of like, come on, mate, like you're the engineer. You're the one who gels the whole thing together, right? You've got this athlete, this driver in the car who has all the foibles that we have as, you know, all as like mere mortals have, but they are focused on doing their bit. You have the bandwidth to, you know, they're focused on delivering driving. You have the bandwidth to kind of step back and understand what it is that they need. You know, what is their psychologically safe space?

48:56Psychological safe space. How do you create that for them? How do you create a comfortable zone for them to work in? I think that's the job of the race engineer. So I think when it doesn't work, it's because the race engineer either hasn't recognized it and can't make it work, or they're not prepared to compromise that far. And just sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. Would it have pained Ferrari to have gone, look, we've spent a hell of a lot of money on Lewis Hamilton, I mean, 60 million a year is what they're talking about. Would it have hurt them to go and spend another three or four million and also hire Pete Ponington, who was Lewis's race engineer at Mercedes, and they knew each other inside out, upside down.

49:36Yeah, I don't know the inside story there, and they might have tried to do that, right? I honestly don't know the inside story. They might have tried to hire Pete, and then Mercedes might have given him a counteroffer. I don't know. But he got a promotion, right, when Lewis left. So that makes you wonder whether maybe that did happen. Yeah, there was probably a little bit of that going on, and then Mercedes probably put it to bed. you know does Pete want to follow Lewis and then be attached to Lewis because there is a risk of doing that with a driver because you know the the drivers the the the driver's tenure in a in in a team can be much more transient than an engineer's so do you want to wedge yourself to a driver even with that relationship you know that that longevity of relationship and success that there are do you want to do that and then if Lewis leaves after one or two years you are part of Lewis's team and you're probably not you know you've been brought in by the driver and that's a that's something it's kind of it's a little bit like nepotism right fortunately I've never had to deal with that but I watch people deal with it you know and and through no fault of their own at times you know if Peter had followed Lewis to Ferrari that would have been done purely on merit right but there would be a lot of people there that would have thought and and the outside world that would I would have thought, well, this is kind of just another form of nepotism.

50:59And do you want to live with that? Is that something that you want? Or do you want to have the headspace just to do a great job? It wouldn't be something that I, even though I know you're going to ask me about this probably, it wouldn't be something that I want to do, which is to follow a driver. Would you not? No. Not really. Not really. I don't think so. I mean, a lot of people think that I followed Felipe to Williams. I was about to say, but didn't you go to Williams because Felipe went there? That was what I assumed had happened. No. So what happened was I'd been talking to Williams for about 12 months and then I finally decided that I wanted to do it.

51:37There was a few things that happened that kind of made my mind up. Like on the positive side, on Williams' side. I said money there. You missed me saying that. Oh, money. Money. I mean, that always helps, right? Like we shouldn't shy away from the fact that that always helps. So that was helpful, and there was a few other things, and I thought, okay, the timing is right. It was right for me personally as well at that point, from a family point of view. And so I signed a contract with them, but part of signing the contract with them was that we needed better drivers than what they had. And of course, my recommendation, knowing that he was going to be out of contract the year after, was Felipe Massa.

52:21So I actually introduced Felipe to Claire. He followed you to Williams. You didn't follow him. He followed me to Williams, desperate to keep the partnership alive, I would say. No, but he followed me. So I can definitely say I've never followed a driver. And on the subject of him changing teams, I'm very interested in the fact that we don't really understand quite what it would have been like for Lewis to have gone to Ferrari this season. why can someone who is a seven-time Formula One world champion eight-time world champion in some people's eyes why would it be such a struggle for him aside from what we've spoken about which is that new relationship with his race engineer like why is it so hard to change teams and drive a different Formula One car?

53:09Well I think there's two things going on there from what I can see from the outside and maybe just talking to people as well since the hybrid era started Lewis has been less comfortable with the cars and you've seen his teammates get a lot closer to him. So, you know, it's still the hybrid era now with this, you know, when he went from Mercedes to Ferrari it was still the same generation of cars. So I think Lewis was less comfortable than he's been when he won all of those world titles. And then the other thing is, is it is a big change in environment. I don't know Mercedes well, I know Ferrari very well, and I know other teams very well.

53:56And the environment within Ferrari is very, very different. So there will be, for sure, technical differences, right? The way they approach a weekend, the way that they set the car up. So straight away, you've got something that you ask, Mercedes and Lewis were, you know, Mercedes fit Lewis like a pair of old slippers, right? He knew it. It was his team. everything had been molded around him then you go into this team that has this hundred and odd year history where everything hasn't been molded around you and in fact there's a very particular way of doing things so like all of that suddenly feels uncomfortable then there is the inordinate amount of pressure that you get right you know it's a great so i he's lewis hamilton he's lewis hamilton but it's still very, very different.

54:44It is very different to the pressure that he will have felt in any other team. And I can say that because I've lived it. I lived and breathed the pressure of Ferrari. And like we talked about before, when I first went there and in those first years, I felt the pressure a lot. It was overpowering at times. And you see there's very few people who have longevity of career in Ferrari in senior positions because of that, because of the pressure. You see that they just cave. And then we had, you know, like my personal circumstances with like losing Mini and it all changed for me. And that's how I think that made me survive there for so long.

55:29I don't know how Lewis has reacted to that pressure. And it's not only the pressure, it's not just the pressure because of course he's an international sports person as you've just said, you know, he's got, you know, more accolades than you know most other drivers could ever dream of and having lived through like pressure and all the rest of it but it's also the like the different way of doing things and like how does he communicate with the team what sort of relationship has he got with the very senior management in the team you know the relationship between him and toto is is is well documented right but what's his relationship now now he's got to build a relationship you know you're going from something where everything is very comfortable.

56:09You don't even have to, I was talking to an old colleague of mine last night down the pub actually about this. When it's been really good in Formula One, you don't communicate, right? There's no, you don't have to communicate. Sounds weird you don't communicate. Communication is like the key to success. You don't have to communicate about the small stuff. Of course you communicate about the biggest stuff, but you know what somebody else is going to think. You know how somebody else is going to react. You know what they're doing, what they're thinking of when there's a group of, you know, 10 to 20 of you that are the architects of, like, you know, the real success in a team.

56:44Lewis was part of that Mercedes. He's now gone into something where he doesn't know any of that. So it's a destabilizing environment. And then there's different ways of doing things and different relationships. As I said, he was uncomfortable. He's been less comfortable with the hybrid, you know, that's documented. You can see it from the results, the hybrid cars. I also think you know when the chairman came out and said our drivers need to talk less I remember seeing that and thinking Ron Dennis is never saying that about Lewis Hamilton Toto Wolff is never saying that about Lewis Hamilton I think that's the first time in his career that a senior leader in the team he's driving for has come out and been critical of him yeah and it's destabilising right so you can live with all the pressure in the world up to that point but until that happens for the first time it's a great point Jake it's the first time right so and and the first time for everything is you got to learn how to cope with things and how did he cope with that i don't know but it must be uncomfortable right your boss has basically come out and told you to shut up in public um it was pretty clear that was the message the problem with that team at the moment i don't i thought this anyway i don't think it's the drivers i think you need to look at the car you know what i mean got two very good drivers you haven't got the fastest car on the grid no that's right they haven't got the fastest car on the grid and of course that brings more and more pressure so how do you deal with that how do you like keep the team focused and not focused on the negatives and there's execution mistakes you know it's well documented you can it's not for me to say i watch it on a sunday afternoon i see it um they're improving in certain areas other areas um less so so that whole thing creates this environment especially in ferrari where this there's the the pressure like grows and grows and grows it's difficult to describe what it's like when you're inside of it you know i've seen i have seen people very very good people really good engineers very very competent being broken by it i guess lewis isn't impervious to that but the car needs to improve as well you're right the car and the team needs to improve they have got two really good peddlers there you know charles is a superstar he's always been a superstar lewis needs no introduction he's got you know he's a seven star general there's a lot of work to do there and i don't think the drivers would be the first place that i was looking if i was running the team before we go back to you and your career if i could give you one formula one driver on the grid today to race engineer who would you choose oh that was a quick why because he's just he's he's my type of driver and he's just a competitor that's what he he is running my own business now like and i and i like you know when you interview people and you know how much of a self-starter are you you know what a ridiculous question like who's going to answer and say i'm not a self-starter right i can't do anything you're gonna have to tell me what to do like 24 hours a day max is the epitome of somebody who brings his own motivation and drive every hour of every day right he's so motivated he is a winning machine he wants to win he is so competitive right so there's never any doubt about that right of course every driver wants to win but how much can they bring it of every hour of every day how how much can they be motivated to be the best not only to be the best but to put a big gap between me and the next best right because that's what he wants to do that's his somehow he finds that motivation from somewhere like the gap to the next best driver on the grid isn't big enough i need it to be bigger and I need to outperform myself and I need to drag the team along.

1:00:16And that is, that is a powerful drug when you have somebody on your side like that, you know, who is so self-motivated. You have to have all the competency and, you know, all the ability and all of that. That's kind of a given, right? Formula One driver. But having that extra edge of, you know, self-belief and being able to motivate yourself and being able to motivate those people around you, you know that to me is what a complete driver is. Look how he ended 2025. I mean like just metronomic winning everything. Metronomic pressure. And he shows no signs also of letting up on his desire to be successful does he?

1:00:55Yeah that's it right. He still wants it. He still wants it 110%. He wants it more than anyone else. It's clear he wants it more than anybody else. You know as much as it'll probably pain the other 19 to hear this. That's why he's so successful. because he gets up every morning and he brings it, right? And he is motivated and, you know, you give him, he's the classic driver that you give him an inch and he'll take a lot more from you, right? And what does that do to all his other competitors? That sets them even further back, right? Because he just keeps going and going and going. I'm sure most of them are looking at him thinking, come on, Max, just have a day off, right?

1:01:32Just one day. Please just have a weekend off. So like we can all like do this. but he doesn't because he is it's not enough to beat people almost to the point where he wants to humiliate people and i don't mean that in a negative way i don't mean that in a nasty way but that's what goes through his mind he is the ultimate competitor the question was which driver would i want as a race engineer it's him because that's what i want because i that's that's how i feel at work you know i want to like to the point of being unhealthy at times in my life i've had to like check myself, I am so unbelievably competitive.

1:02:07You know, everything is a race. Even now, like, you know, as a, uh, you know, in, in, in my middle age, right. I'm still like, everything is still like a little competition.

1:02:49I think even the great Max Verstappen, in the world at whatever your chosen thing is. If you don't have a psychologically safe space and you don't have honesty and you can't work as a team, you won't perform, right? Forget it, forget it. Whatever your chosen field is, whether you are a Formula One driver, Premier League footballer, whether you're a CEO of a FTSE 100 company, a Fortune 500 company, right? If you don't have all of those things, right, you're not going to perform, forget it. especially the honesty bit right and and was with the whole way that that team was shaping up in the middle of the year and everything that happened the year before were they all being honest with each other or were the factions it's clear factions they've come out and said it right if one thing um helmet is uh is is is if he's good for one thing he's good for honesty right and he's come out and told the world about the factions within that team how can you perform at the highest level when all of that is going on.

1:03:48And of course, even somebody as great as Max Verstappen, he's not able to do it. Teamwork, honesty, psychological safe space. Let's go back to your career. So 2008 comes to a kind of brilliant but also disappointing end. Hugely emotional for you. Hugely emotional for Felipe and the whole team. 2009 starts. And I remember, that was my first season hosting everyone for the BBC and I remember seeing an unreliable Ferrari that was slow and weird things were happening. I remember there was a moment where you thought you were low on fuel, so slowed the car down, right, and then realized that you weren't actually having an issue with fuel and ended up speeding up towards the end of the race.

1:04:27Do you remember that? I can't remember. All sorts of stuff was going on. And against that backdrop, we have Hungary 2009. And you've seen this as well. And I was very early in my Formula 1 career, but the paddock is busy and it's buzzy. I mean, even more so now, but even back then it was busy, but loads going on. And as a member of the media, we were like searching for places to watch the coverage, which is a weird thing to say, isn't it? But you can either go back to the production office, which is where all the producers and everyone were, and watch your own coverage on the television, or you can go into a team motorhome, or you can often stand in the paddock with your own monitor and just watch the sessions.

1:05:07And crashes happen regularly. Yeah. And sometimes a crash happens where like a silence, I think almost comes from the crowd, right? They realise it's not a normal accident and that filters towards the paddock. And I remember this moment actually in Hungary was my first ever experience where David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan, who I was working with at the time, and some of the producers and production team who'd been in Formula 1 for a long time, I saw were suddenly acting really different. Like we were almost getting ready to go back on air, even though we were in the middle of a session. and I'm saying to the guys, there's like half an hour left of this session.

1:05:41And they're like, no, we might be coming back any minute. And I'm thinking, what's happening? Something strange has happened here. That was my first realisation that Felipe being in the tyres wasn't a normal incident. Yeah. What was your first understanding that something abnormal had happened? We'd just started the lap. Well documented, he was following Rubens up the hill. Rubens was in the Braun car. and in fact we were like as much as we were having like as much as the car was an absolute dog i think for me the team like in terms of operations had taken another little notch upwards from 2008 he'd taken another little notch upwards from from 2008 he was consistently performing and performing really well and i think that was a race definitely which probably suited the car and I thought that we would probably get a decent qualifying out of it you know even though the car was awful in in real terms he was always inside like the top 10 in qualifying and we so we just started the lap I think it was qualifying two he just started the lap he's going up the hill to turn five and then it looks to me because I'm what I'm I watch the squiggly lines right I watch the TV, but a lot of the time he's not on the TV.

1:07:00Most of the times I'm watching the squiggly lines, like the telemetry. So I'm watching the telemetry and I see him like start to slow down. It's not an accident. It's kind of like slowing down. And I'm like, oh fuck, the engine's broken or gearbox broken. It's classic, like the car just like coming to a stop, but a little bit faster. So I'm looking and as he's slowing down, I jump on a radio and go, oh mate, like what's happened? There's no response. So then I immediately think, oh, he's pissed off. He doesn't want to talk. Like, he's in the middle of qualifying. Gearboxes broke, engines broke, something like that, right?

1:07:34And then I kind of see him, like, come to an abrupt halt. Like, you know, the line goes down. So then I'm like, oh, he's crashed, actually. He wasn't just slowing the car down. Now he's crashed. But he's kind of slowing down. Then he crashes. I'm like, all right, this is weird. So I was like, what happened? No response. Then I'm asking the guys back in the garage, I'm saying, hang on, what's happened here? And one of them says to me, well, going up the hill, he's kind of like started to press the brake and started to press the accelerator at the same time. But he's like hard down on the brake and the accelerator.

1:08:12I'm like, oh, this is weird, right? And now like this is a completely new situation. You're not understanding anything. And then it shows the in-car camera of him. it flashes to that, still haven't heard from him, and it shows the in-car camera, and he's got his hands on the wheel, right? He's got his hands on the wheel, but he starts to veer over to the left-hand side of the road, then he goes over the curbs, then he goes over from one side of the track to the other, bounces across the gravel into the tyre wall. I'm like, he's just driven it into the wall, right? His hands are still on the wheel, which is really weird to watch anyway.

1:08:46When you see a driver go into the wall, you'll always see at the very last minute, they'll take the hands off. so we're still like in this state where we've got no idea what's going on yeah total confusion right confusion from the garage confusion from me nobody knows what's going on and then at that point is radio opens and there was this like awful mo like guttural moaning you know what i mean somebody in a lot of pain yeah like a lot of pain has he had to press the button for the radio to come open at that point i don't know i i don't think he's in any fit state i think he's been fumbling round he's come to he's been fumbling round and somehow he's just out of instinct has pressed that button and he's opened it he hasn't saying anything he is there's just an awful guttural moaning and there was this sudden realization that this is this is not normal and thankfully what i could do is i could turn his radio off which going back to lighter times like when he sometimes used to annoy me on the radio i had i got the radio guys to set it up so i could turn his radio off if he was talking too much so i turned it off but sort of to protect him yeah to protect him also the team because the team could all hear it as well and everybody was like you know what the fuck is going on here believe it or not i watched the image like so many times and i just didn't see the spring right i just couldn't see it and then it was literally like a couple of minutes later that flavio briatore come along the pit wall and he had an image a still image and he's and you could just see this blurry thing like the in-car camera so up here on the roll hoop he's driving along and you could just see this um like black image you couldn't it was so blurry and we thought it was a bird and we were like oh my god he's had a bird strike right and you start to think well it's knocked him out right a bird would knock him out like because a bird is you know it can be a reasonably sized thing and you know but it but thankfully it's kind of made of cells and flesh and stuff like that.

1:11:00So it's going to kind of make a mess of his helmet and be a big impact and knock him out. And then it started emerging that maybe something had come off Ruben's car and then it came out that, you know, all of this is going on, that actually it was the third spring off the rear suspension, 800 grams, a kilogram, something like that. You're like, oh my God. And then the image came out. There's a very famous image of when he gets out the car and his helmet is completely destroyed down this left-hand side, visors up, and you can see he's in complete shock. And did you see that image then at the time that it was happening?

1:11:43No, no, no. We couldn't see anything. They put the... So you're still really unawares whilst they're working on him and the medics are with him? No idea. You've had no information? No idea whatsoever. however he got taken to the medical center they sedated him they give him a tracheotomy like all of that type of stuff um and they airlifted him out and we really had no idea um absolutely no idea and then like me and like the performance engineer on his car were not really in any fit state to work so they took us to the hospital but there wasn't really a great deal you could do you could just sit and wait and he was being operated on it was the spring it come through the helmet like this big big thing like huge thing and had you been told anything about his condition because i think the worst thing in this situation is and i don't know this the wildfire that spreads in the panic i mean we were told on the bbc don't repeat this please to the public but that his life is is really in danger he's yeah you know this is a life-threatening accident yeah yeah it was it was so we got there and thankfully by some stroke of like luck there's a military hospital in budapest and it has some of like the world's leading technology and doctors for head trauma and so he got this guy who was amazing but on that saturday night it was you know he's in theater and we don't really know whether he's going to make it.

1:13:21My goodness.

1:13:26Sorry. They put him in an induced coma and then I think by the Sunday night, things were, you know, he was a lot more stable but it was still, you know, it was still kind of touch and go. I went to the track on the Sunday, probably shouldn't have done because I wasn't very present, but I went there to support the team. And then he slowly started to emerge. And I think at that point, if you've been through stuff like that, there's always a lot of noise about, you know, will he ever get back in a car and it kind of like well that's not important right now right his wife was pregnant with um little felipe and it's like is he gonna make it and then it's kind of like you start to think like a long long way down the line like you know will he get back in a car and like is it important anymore and all the rest of it the the funny thankfully part of the story was i went back to work they flew i so so So Montezemolo, Luca di Montezemolo, who was the chairman of the team at the time, came over on the Sunday night, and then we spent the Sunday night in the hospital, and then the Monday, and it looked like, you know, things were, he was more stable.

1:14:52He was critical, but stable. But you still couldn't have spoken to him after? No, no, no, he was in an induced coma. So we flew back to Bologna, and then I went to work, fairly difficult week at work. And then the following weekend, they flew me back out to Budapest. and when I went in the room so I went in the room and and by that point we knew he was out of the coma and he was like recovering and I went in the room and it was quite shocking to the point that it was funny because his head was literally about twice the size of what it normally would be and it was all black and blue like literally his whole head was like black and blue and uh he first started talking portuguese to me then he didn't know i was then he thought he drove for mclaren and then i think the next race was like in two weeks at that point because it was the first of the summer break so it was in two weeks and then when he kind of worked out who i was and who he drove for he kept saying to me tell jean i'll be back in the car or stefano i think stefano was in charge at that point like tell us to give stefano ring and tell him i'll be back in the car next week I'll be I can come testing on Monday I'm feeling a lot better now like okay so that was that was we look back on that with fond amusement um but at the time horrendous you know and and thankfully for me what happened was there was the the summer break and actually I went with my family I didn't want to travel I was so tired of traveling so we just went down to Dorset and it was a typical summer holiday on a dorset beach like sat in your your ski gear and i remember like thinking to myself i don't know whether i want to do this anymore really yeah it was quite an emotional time for me and i just thought i don't know whether i want to do it anymore because you know just as i'd gone through with mini you know this is a guy that I'd got very close to.

1:16:52We had and still have like, you know, almost like a family bond.

1:17:00And we're just at work doing our job. And then you think, you know, do you want to be involved in something where that can happen? And I come to the conclusion that I did want to do it. I wanted to carry on. And I'm glad I did because I thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of my time in Formula 1. But there was a lot of soul searching and a lot of talking. And I was very clear with Ferrari as well. I said, I don't know whether I want to do it anymore. I guess what you're saying is, as any parent does before their child is born, you've already given them your heart and your love, right? Your heart was broken when your daughter passed away.

1:17:44you then give your heart and your love to the driver because you didn't have a normal driver-engineer relationship and again the fear was that your heart could have been broken if you'd have lost Felipe and this was just a price too much yeah yeah totally like nothing's worth that right and that was kind of how I approached it I didn't really like you don't want to go to work with the chance that you know you can lose a colleague you know of course that's just can be life like you know your colleague goes under a bus but like what's the heightened probability of this happening well you know it's much higher in formula one and am i ready to accept that is it worth that and i come to the conclusion that i did want to carry on and it was important to me and and and as much as it was important to me i also knew that he would want to come back because i just know that the person that he is and he did and we carried on emotional very very yeah tough yeah and what was it like when he when he made the decision to come back because obviously you don't know if you're gonna have the same racing driver he doesn't know if he's going to be the same racing driver the team don't know either how did your relationship as engineer driver change at that moment well i think i think the big unknown at that point is is he like how much is this has it affected him yeah how much does this put him on the back foot up until that moment in in qualifying in budapest we had had the complete driver so what what's going to change when he comes back and the reality was you know there was a lot of trepidation around that and we set up some private tests for him we did a private test at fiorano then we did a private test at barcelona and I can remember you know talking to Stefano Dominicali who was the team principal at that point and him saying to me you know what do you think and like you know like keep me informed and like you know if you see anything different because it's really important that we're honest about the situation you know for him and for the team and all the rest of it and I can remember very distinctly he went out on his first run and I remember watching the telemetry and we were you know I can't remember the reference lap was but there was some like fairly handy test driver and I remember just watching him against the reference lap I remember Stefano calling me during that that very first run I don't think he knew like where we'd be on the program we were actually in the middle of the first run and Philippe hadn't even come back in and he said to me or what do you think what do you think have you have you seen anything and I said no change he's exactly in terms of speed he's exactly the same driver that he was and he was and it was kind of like I think that then the environment that he came back into in 2010 you know it was a team that you know Kimi had left Fernando had come in it was less of an environment that was molded around him as it was at the end of or in the middle of 09 at the end of like 08 and I think that he perhaps struggled with that more than anything but as a driver as pure ability he was there was no difference between the guy that you know before and after the accident wow i mean was there a moment where physically he was able to do it again but psychologically that was that was a barrier i think i think the psychology came into it jake but not because of the accident i think the psychology came into it because the team at that point was very much focused on fernando that was just like how we were and fernando was a machine like fernando at that point was like having max in the car so of course they're gonna they're gonna focus on that of course all this had happened while felipe was away like yeah he left and fernando arrived whilst felipe is recuperating and suddenly things are different right things are different you come into a different environment it's exactly what we just talked about with lewis so you walk into a different environment you come out of something that was very comfortable that he had built around himself and the team had obviously migrated towards him because he was the guy that was delivering and then you come back into a very different environment and you're like oh this feels different and that relationship feels different and like the focus is less it's not 80 on me anymore it's now it's even swayed the other way and like and all of those things are destabilizing and that was probably the first time as a top driver that he'd had to go through that and you know we spent a lot of time and that was that that was that was a difficult period for him you know that that 10 and 11 season you know trying to get back on terms and Fernando is a driver that again you know he's a guy that I've got a huge amount of respect for you know as a competitor he's very much like Max he just brings it every single day he never has a day off so coming in into a different environment with a very very fierce competitor I think that's where the the the psychology played against Felipe in that period when you talk about Fernando being a fierce competitor paint a picture around that for us what does that look like in real terms that people like me and our audience could understand you are fully focused on your mission of winning you know that Fernando Alonso wins the race.

1:23:11You know, Fernando comes into every single race weekend 100 % focused on that mission, right? And 100 % focused on the bigger prize as well, the world championship. You have an inordinate amount of confidence, right? Not arrogance, confidence, because it's founded in fact. You know, it's not a superficial thing. You just are very, very good at your job. it's that motivation and focus on on beating everybody which you know unfortunately for Felipe also meant his teammate um it was very much trying to beat you know Seb and the Red Bulls at that point but it was you know included everybody else and you know he was he found himself that the team like rallied around him very quickly and he found himself in an environment that really suited him you know he speaks perfect italian as does felipe by the way but everything kind of worked around him and then that you know a little bit of success at the start of that that the of that trajectory it's like we talked about before like nurberg ring 06 it creates more success and it creates more momentum and momentum is a drug and all the rest of it and you just keep going and going and going until you've got this guy who like max verstappen you know in 2025 is just a beast right is just a winning machine they never have a day off right they never give their competitors you know the tiniest of millimeters because they're just too strong you know and even if they do have even if there is are a few chinks in their armor like they're because they're humans at the end of the day it's such a fleeting moment that you know everybody kind of rubs their hands together and say oh that's it you know now we're going to see the downward turn and then the next you know the very next session or next race or next event or whatever, they're back.

1:24:58And then you're like, oh, fuck, when's this guy going to have a day off? Was there a behavior or a moment from Fernando that you saw and you thought, okay, that is an example of pure brilliance? 2012 Silverstone. We had a bit of a dog of a car. It certainly wasn't the best car. It was a decent car, but not the best. It was damp. so you know tricky changeable conditions start the race it was damp he got away and he got in front right which we shouldn't have been in front i can't remember where we qualified but it wasn't anywhere near the front and we had kind of on paper no chance of winning the race i remember around that first lap just listening to some of the talk on the pit wall about not like negative talk but pragmatic talk about once the Red Bulls got in front and how we could like stay close to the Red Bulls and I can remember kind of half listening to this but watching him go around the lap and looking at his mini sectors and looking like you know because he was at his telemetry up as well as Felipe's telemetry and comparing them and thinking I think this guy's going to run away with the race I don't think you need to worry about when the Red Bulls get in front and of course he did it he just the the car was probably if it was anything it was good enough for third and he ran away and won the race at the canter you know like easily he just dominated that day and i think there's moments like that when you see just pure brilliance you know when when the driver outperforms the car and that's i think we don't see enough of those moments in formula one because usually it's the it's the car that is all dominant right you know lewis won a lot of world championships he was in the best car at the time that's not to take anything away from Lewis he's he's you know one of the all-time greats when you see a season like what Max has just done where he's consistently out performing the car that's when you just see the pure brilliance of these athletes and and that's what Formula One fans want right and me like I could almost watch that race even though I was watching it from the Ferrari pitwall you know that's when you kind of know you feel like a fan again because you're just watching pure brilliance unfold in front of you um yeah and he won the race there's probably tons of incidents like that but that was a big standout one and the most famous incident involving you Felipe and Fernando you know what that is don't you I can't remember Jake are you going to tell me well I'm hoping you tell me because it'll be great in the trailer uh the radio call the famous radio call which was Felipe Fernando is faster than you and a lot of people have that on their ringtones um yeah yeah yeah especially when I'm at races people go listen to my ringtone so this was at a time when team orders weren't allowed right yeah so when someone says to you on the team oh by the way can you tell your driver to drop behind Fernando before you deliver that very famous radio message arguably one of the most famous ever in the sport are you not having a battle on the pit wall to say no that actually can't happen because it's against the rules or I refuse to do it because it's against sporting integrity or it doesn't feel right because I have a bond with the driver you're asking and this is going to break him?

1:28:11Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, our mutual mate, DC, has David Coulthard for the non-F1 fans, has a very clear view on this, which I agree with. I don't think that should ever be delivered by the race engineer, right? I think that the race engineer's job there is to maximize the performance of their driver, right? And you can't ask them to do that for six days a week and then ask them to, like, deliver real bad news messages that, by the way, isn't, like, my decision on the seventh day of the week. So first of all, I would make that statement. I do agree with David on that. In that particular moment, look, I think that we all work for, like when we all get paid, including the two drivers at the end of the month, it says Scuderia Ferrari on top of the paycheck.

1:28:56That's a very clear covenant that we work for Ferrari. So it's not about like Felipe Massa. It's not about Fernando Alonso. It's not about Rob Smedley. It's not about anybody else. It's about Ferrari. but where i don't think we were very clear on that day was that that was going to happen right and why that needed to happen and i think that's where the conversation that was more what the conversation was based around on on the pit wall so what were you saying to them well i was asking why we needed to do that because you know at that point it was like oh he's he's he's a lot faster so you know and then like i asked felipe if he had any more pace and he delivered a bit more pace and i was like it doesn't look like he's a lot faster it just looks like felipe's controlling the race at the front and so this was like the conversation that was going on and then in the end you know we decided that this was the the message that had to be given so i gave the message you know felipe was very upset about it what did he say to you we we had some choice words um i mean he was he was super upset with everybody um was he upset with you yeah he was because like i'd had to deliver the message i was part of the team that had done that and that's where the bit i think that's the bit that i probably would disagree with then you go back and say we were delivering at that point a message that perhaps wasn't within the sporting regulations it just played out in a bad way it's one of those incidences incidents that when I look back on it, you know, there's a lot of things that, you know, I look back and I am human.

1:30:39I've been in high pressure situations, even not high pressure situations. And as a human, I've fucked up, right? Many times, right? And I look back on that and I go, that was great because that was learning and I wouldn't change a thing, right? Even the pain that I went through at the time, I think at that time, it's one of those that you look back and just wish that we had all done it differently you know that us as a team and the way the drivers were and the way that Felipe was and the way that I was and everything like that is the one time the one professional time in life that you kind of look back and say yeah I wish we'd we'd been able to do that one differently.

1:31:15Would you do it again if you were put in that situation now would you just refuse to deliver the news? I think I think if there was perfect sliding doors we would have talked about it we would have all understood what the situation was that that's actually you know the outcome of the race the outcome that we wanted as as you know the company wanted and at that point when it's all clear and it's all communicated there's what recourse is there you know let's just get on with it let's just deliver the plan whether or not that's Felipe wins or Fernando wins doesn't really matter and we all know and we all go into it with our eyes wide open I think that's what I would like to change when you go back.

1:31:51And then me delivering the message and executing the plan is much easier at that point. There's much less emotion to it. There's much less confusion to it. And what about Fernando behind closed doors after that moment? Because that's also a fascinating insight into the mindset of a world champion. Yeah, I think Fernando at that point, I remember talking to him very briefly, you know, afterwards, like after the race and then after, and then I think wherever the next race was, we were chatting. And I think he even came to the factory and we were chatting about it as well. Fernando is very good at, like I talked about before, when you have, like, you know, kind of releasing that pressure of, that negative pressure at least.

1:32:32Fernando is impervious to that as an athlete. He never feels that, right? As long as he's got the people around him that he needs, which doesn't always have to include the team, by the way, from what I've observed. He's totally impervious to it. So Fernando was like, you know, to him it was like, I don't even know what we're talking about. Like, what were we even discussing? Like, did that happen? He's just on to the next thing. He just wants to win. So he wasn't like apologetic or anything, like, oh, I'm really sorry this had to happen. No, as far as he was concerned, the team had made a decision and he was, you know, he was a part of that execution.

1:33:10Like, you know, everybody else was part of the execution of that plan and he just did his part and Felipe did his part and I did my part and I'm like, what are we even talking about? Let's focus on winning the next race. It'd be very different if it had been Felipe overtaking Fernando, I bet you. I think so. And was he a contracted number one driver, Fernando Ferrari? Oh, I couldn't tell you that. I bet you could if you wanted. No, I... I bet you asked the question though. Of course I asked the question and the answer that I always got very, very clearly was, no, he's not. like we've got two equal drivers like everything is equal between the drivers but whether or not the contract said something different you know I don't know that because I never saw them what do you suspect?

1:33:56I suspect that we did actually have two contracts that were fair to both drivers I suspect that but I suspect also that Fernando given his brilliance there was a natural tendency to want to you know get him as many points as possible knowing that we probably didn't have the fastest car to give ourselves the best chance of winning the world championship. And I think that then puts the team in a very difficult situation because how do you keep your other driver motivated knowing that every point on the table has to go to the other guy regardless of whether you're having a great day or not. And regardless of whether it's race one or race 18, we're kind of going into this season knowing that we've got to back one of you because we don't have the car that we can just let it battle out like McLaren did in 25 and the one that we've chosen is Fernando so I suspect that's probably how it went down but I don't know because you know I was too busy doing my job to kind of worry about that from that point on and of course correct me if I'm wrong but I get the impression that Felipe would have thought hold on I've nearly delivered you a world title did everything I could have done I've almost died in the car to be successful for Ferrari I've gone away done everything I can to get back to being the best Formula One driver I can and I've come into a team where I'm being treated in a different way.

1:35:17Is that a good summation of what Felipe's mindset would have been at that time? That is a good summation of what his mindset was, definitely. So what did you then do to keep him operating at the very best that he could? We kind of went back to basics because what started to happen to Felipe in that moment was he started to overdrive, he started to overthink, he started to you know try and rail against you know rage against the machine if you like and it was kind of like taking it back to basics with him again it was almost like an 06 moment where let's get it back to basics let's like start to deliver on what we can deliver and let's start to build this back up to something that you know is going to be where we can get you back on on a much more even keel um it's about a lot of times in life it's about you know not trying to control the things that you can't control.

1:36:07If everybody is, you know, it's the most popular kid at school, right? You can't control that everybody else, you know, thinks the most popular kid at school is the most popular kid at school. It's all you can do is do your best, right? Or the kid who, you know, at school who gets all the favors off the teachers, right? You can't control that. You can't control like what they're doing. You can only control what you're doing. And it was a lot of talking with him professionally and as a friend about that type of stuff. And also like technically like bringing it back to basics right okay let's stop over trying here let's because you know the more you know we're already trying at 120 percent and it's not working and so now you're going to try 125 percent and it's going to work even less let's just try and get it back to working at 10 tenths um so yeah there was a lot of that that went on and and it's moments like that like we talked about before like you know what's the psychology uh between the you know the the technical coaching and the psychological coaching, definitely in moments like that, you're almost 80 % psychology, 80, 90%, some days 100%, you know, because you know that the biggest, your biggest performance center at that point is the driver.

1:37:19And if you can get the driver back on track, you know, whether the car's like one or two tenths faster or whether or not he's optimized with that car and blah, blah, blah, that's like much less important to where the driver's at right now. I can't let you go without talking about two things. The first one is you You then, after leaving Ferrari, went to Williams. Yeah. And the team was struggling, regularly finishing 10th in the championship battle. You go and suddenly you're right at the center, if not the front of the midfield, just behind the biggest teams. What did you see at Williams when you arrived?

1:37:52And I know this is tricky in a couple of minutes, but the sort of the message you gave them that you think made the biggest difference. And maybe we should do part two of this podcast at some point and go a bit deeper on this. Yeah. I'll be up for that. So what I saw, the biggest thing that I saw is that they weren't being honest with themselves. The bit that I wanted to get sorted as soon as possible was how we operated at the track. And I saw that it was a team that was not particularly honest with themselves. And the most stark presentation of that to me was my second race, which was the Chinese Grand Prix, and we did a 60-second pit stop.

1:38:31and I always flippantly describe it as like watching Morris dancing. I mean, it was awful. It was awful. And I remember sitting on the pit wall thinking, what the fuck have I done here, right? You're going from Ferrari where like, you know, you might not have the capability within the car, but every year there's an expectation you can win the world championship to a team that had finished 10th and 11th and 11th or something in the past three years. And now I'm looking at this pit stop thing, you know, my God. And what I found from that, that was really like, a catalyst for me because i started to talk to all the individual stakeholders in the factory and in the race team and like say like why do you think we did a 60 second pit stop and all of them were very clear that the bit that they were responsible for was great right but there was something else somewhere else in the in the ether where it hadn't worked and that's why we've done a 60 second pit stop and you go back to basics and just pair it back and say like guys what are we trying to achieve here are we trying to achieve our individual targets that i've designed the best wheel nut or you know i've delivered the best wheel gun or something or are we trying to do the fastest pit stop because that's what's important here and if we want to do that we've got to be really honest with ourselves that we're just a bit shit right and that's not to say that you know that that's a really flipping comment we're a bit shit but we're certainly not at the level of where the top teams are and then you know that was kind of a microcosm i think of of how we operated as a team and it was like let's just be honest with each other it's fine that we make mistakes right this is a really high pressure environment but let's create a psychologically safe environment where we will be you know we will be praised as as individuals for holding our hand up and go oh i made a mistake here please note that down because we don't want to do that again.

1:40:23And that's what we did. We just started to work from, you know, on, on the technical delivery of the weekend of the team itself. Um, we started to be very open and honest with each other. Like when we made mistakes, like, you know, it was almost a culture like six months in where people were like, you know, couldn't wait to like be the one that were, well, I made the biggest mistake. You know, I made the biggest fuck up during the weekend. And, and by the way, like when there's a mistake like that, you, you always get the poor woman or man holding the hot potato right but there's always a chain of like a hundred events that's brought them to like this person holding the hot potato and that could have started like four weeks ago so that was another like you know let's start attacking the source problem not like blaming the guy who's holding the hot potato so it was just a lot of like creating like trying to gel the team trying to bring like more technology and and more technical excellence but creating that culture that we've got to be honest with each other right if we're not honest we're never gonna like move out of where we are.

1:41:22So that was a really interesting couple of years. And yeah, we had some good results. Certainly, I think, and I'm sure James will be upset with me saying this, but James Vowell, who's the current team principal, the most successful period in Williams since 97. So there you go. He did okay. And your focus now for people who are thinking, I'd love to see Rob Svodley back in Formula One, either on a pit wall or in some kind of leadership role. what fills your time now is based around what you learned and what you garnered in Formula One. But I think from the time that we spent together today, fulfills you in a different way, maybe it's how Formula One did.

1:42:03I knew that it was time for me to step back from Formula One. I didn't know whether I wanted to retire from it fully, but I knew it was time to step back because I wasn't as motivated by it as I had been. And that was around like 2017, 2018. To be fair to my employers and everybody else, it's time to step back. I'm not coming to make up the numbers. I'm not coming to do Formula One. It doesn't interest me. So I stepped back. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I had been incredibly fortunate from the background from where I'm from. I'd been really fortunate to have this amazing career.

1:42:42And I wanted to find some way to give back. And that's where the whole karting league started. and to bring that level of, you know, everything that we've talked about in this podcast, all of that focus, all of that continuous improvement, that culture of excellence that exists in Formula One. How do you bring that down to the grassroots? How do you change it? How do I go from like a thousand kids involved in karting because it's so expensive? How do I change the system to get literally hundreds of thousands of kids involved, which we've got now? And that's what I'm focused on. So, you know, Fat Karting League, which is I run it in collaboration with my business partner, Ferdy Porsche of the Porsche family.

1:43:20It's a fun thing to do. It's a fun thing to get kids into the sport. But I think I'm taking everything that Formula 1 has taught me over a long career in Formula 1 and applying it down at the grassroots. And that's not normal, right? People don't step out of Formula 1 and go, well, I'll go back to the very beginning, the very lowest tier of motorsport. But for me, it's like super fulfilling. Like, will I come back to Formula One? I think I will at some point. I think I'm a little bit too old now to do the old race engineer, chief engineer, head of performance bit. I think that I would come back, you know, has to be on my terms.

1:44:01And I don't want to sound like a twat by saying that. I don't mean to sound like a twat, but it needs to be on my terms. It needs to be a project that I'm interested in and I need to have some ownership as well. You know, I can't just come and work with somebody, not after working for myself for five years. I'm unemployable well join the club it's been great to sit down and chat I've got such fond memories of our time together and you know thank you so much for being so honest so open and giving us such amazing value it was fantastic thank you thanks so much for having me it's been a pleasure I've loved it top man Rob thank you mate if you enjoyed this conversation there are so many great Formula 1 chats that you can find Carlos Sainz Fernando Alonso David Coulthard Jenson Button Christian Horner Toto Wolff Susie Wolfe Lando Norris and so many more if I read them all out we'd be listening to this for another week don't forget we release new conversations every Monday you can also watch these episodes on YouTube but please if you love this hit follow and maybe pass this episode to someone that you think would love it as well thanks for listening and I'll see you next time