If you find yourself left cold by the latest, Herman Tiljke-designed modern
Formula 1 track, antiseptic beyond belief, translatable to anyplace, anywhere in the world, you would enjoy talking with Justin Wilson.
The tall Englishman is one of those guys who are a bit of a throwback. For one thing, he’s a gentleman, well-mannered and sparing with his words. He never whines or complains and just tries to get on with his job regardless of circumstances.
Wilson has raced in Formula 1 with both the Jaguar and Minardi teams, of course, and over the past three years he’s become one of Champ Car’s leading lights, finishing second to
Sebastien Bourdais in last year’s championship with Carl Russo’s RuSPORT operation. But Russo pulled out of the sport last year and Wilson is having a bit of an uphill struggle this year with the reconfigured RSports team, co-owned by Paul Gentilozzi and Dan Pettit.
“This joint team under RSports has taken a bit of time adjusting to,” Wilson commented. “There have been a lot of personnel and team changes. For the first four races there were changes every race to the personnel and how things work, and it just slowed our progress down on working with the new car. It’s been a very tough situation. Fortunately, all the crew on my car are the same and my car has been very reliable considering it’s all-new. We’ve had one mechanical problem which was at Vegas in the race.
“Other than that, we’ve been on top of reliability but we’ve been a bit slow to get on top of the performance. We’ve been a little bit hit and miss. We’re not consistently there. We’re still working on that area. We don’t know enough things for certain about this car. There are still a lot of question marks.”
As anyone in Champ Car will tell you, this year’s Panoz spec car has taken more time and money than was imagined to get running reliably and well.
