RN:
Actually, I've been a very technical person since when I was a teenager. I always liked to modify cars and play with things like that and I don't just read Motor Sport News, I read magazines like Race Car Engineering, things like that. So, I am very heavily interested in the technical side.
That was one of the surprises for the teams, the Volkswagen team also, that they could not believe how much knowledge I knew the set-up of the car. And at one stage, like in the middle of the season, there was no engineer, I was driver/engineer also, setting up my own race car, and just setting up all the gear ratios, I actually did all that in the first year.
And the same with Team Astromega now. We have got very good engineers there, but he was also very astonished with my feedback, he said what he liked very much, he makes a little change and you could see it straight on lap time straightaway and my feedback is always consistent. So I don't think the technical side is a problem at all and, with regard to Mario, we always go in two different directions because of the new car, although we're working very well together. Sometimes I go to his direction and he finds the set-up and, sometimes, he goes to my direction because I find a better set-up, so it works both ways.
Q:
Can you just enlighten us on how you came to come into contact with Astromega? It is a well established name, they have been in the F3000 series for quite some years, but how did you first come to rub shoulders with them?
RN:
Basically, we decided we wanted to look for a team to test with and they were among the potential teams I would like to race for. The strategy for my first year was to look for a good team, a team that has good potential for winning and a team that wants to win, not just a team that makes up the numbers. At the same time, I don't want to go to a team that has a driver like Tomas Enge, just to be second driver. I think it would be too much of a difference to go to a championship-winning team and me have such (little) experience.
