It was just a case of you’d just get in the car and drive it so the first year in Formula 3 was quite a big step for me because I had to learn about developing a relationship with your team and your engineer, and you know, being pretty close to your engineer so you can tell each other what’s what and be able to actually tell each other when you’re not happy with each other.
In FPA, you know, you had your own hospitality and you had lunch laid on and not everything is like that in F3 but I’m sure next year SRO will be making more efforts to promote the Championship and of course we’ll be racing at a couple more Grand Prix circuits which I think will draw a lot more attention onto the Championship.
Crash.Net
How did you adapt to telling an engineer what you want or them telling you what you need?
RL
In some ways I think I may have been a bit of a blessing for the guys at T Sport because I think that in the past - I personally don’t think I’ve got too much of a technical know how of the cars. I understand the basics of what to do to a car, like softening the rear end of the car will give it a bit more traction but I couldn’t tell you what bar setting does what or anything like that.
I think now there are a lot of young drivers that will go in there and try and tell an engineer, you know someone who’s been to college for four or five years, and they’ll try and tell an engineer what they’ve got to do, and I’ll just literally just go in and tell the guys what’s going on. They’ve been doing this for years and this is my first year doing it so I’m just picking things up off them.
I don’t think I’ll ever really aspire to actually start bolting things onto the car. I mean it wouldn’t be a bad idea but I'm not going to get in their way and try and tell them what’s what. So I just tell them where I'm struggling with things and what’s going on and they just try and work things around me
Crash.Net
Speaking of circuits, do you find that you’re still learning circuits?
RL
Well I think I’ve raced at pretty much every circuit in the UK now. The only ones that I hadn’t raced at up until this year were
Thruxton and the
Silverstone Grand Prix circuit so I’ve driven pretty much everywhere now. I think I’ve got a bit of an advantage next year because I’ve driven at Monza before and I’ve raced at Spa a couple of times as well. I’ve never been to the Nurburgring before though. But every year I think I’ve improved and it gets a lot easier to learn the circuits and of course when you’re a lot more comfortable with the car you’re in it’s a lot easier to learn where the circuit goes when you’re comfortable with the environment your in and you can just get your head down and maximise the car to what the circuit needs.
Crash.Net
Thanks for talking to us.
