by Russell Atkins
TO HEAR THE INTERVIEW IN FULL: CLICK HERE
Gary Paffett is entering in 2008 his third season as a full-time test-driver for one of Formula 1’s true grandee teams,
McLaren Mercedes, and he will likely be dovetailing that role with an all-out assault on DTM tin-top honours, a championship he clinched for Mercedes three years ago.
The Briton is well aware that he has a busy campaign ahead, but as he told
Crash.net Radio, that’s nothing he isn’t already used to…
Q:
Gary, McLaren suffered a tough year off the track in 2007. How easy will it be for the team to fight back this year do you think?
Gary Paffett:
Quite easy I think. It was obviously a very hard year, but the good thing was the car performance was very good and both drivers performed on the track very well. We missed out on the drivers’ championship by one point with both of them, but it was a very close year and as I say the car was very competitive, so I think it should be quite easy to forget what happened last year and move forward.
We’ve got a new driver line-up, and I think we can just look forward to making sure we’ve got a very competitive car. I don’t think it will be too difficult to get over it – it’s obviously going to have its impact, but hopefully we can be winning races from the start and be challenging for the championship again.
Q:
The winter season is often called the off-season, but in
Formula 1 it’s also frequently said that if you stand still you move backwards. How much hard work has been going on at McLaren since the end of the 2007 campaign?
GP:
A massive amount of work; as soon as the season finished we were away testing, and already at the first test it was without traction control in preparation for this year. The work for the 2008 season began back at the start of 2007 with the preparation at the factory and the engineers and designers getting to work on the new car. It’s just constant development; you have to constantly keep pushing your team and your staff very hard to get the best results.
