Two Pierres on the interaction of a rider and his engineer

Pierre Gasly and Pierre Amlin, his racing engineer, each in their own way participated in the AlphaTauri podcast about how they work together to achieve the desired results, and how important it is to achieve mutual understanding among the many specialists of the team.

Pierre Gasly: ​​“Pierre is the one who helps me to go fast. In short, we work in a very close relationship. Pierre is also French, grew up in France and is the first person I contact in the team for work issues.

When I’m driving, he’s generally the only one I talk to. He gives me all the necessary information in all sessions of the weekend – during practice, during qualifying and the race. He is the one who is responsible for the correct configuration of the machine.

Of course there are hundreds of engineers on the team and Pierre, who works with them, collects all the information and then embodies it in the settings of my car before I get behind the wheel. I would say this: Although he is behind the scenes and no one sees him, for me he is the most important person I have constant contact with.

Even without sitters there are about 600 people working at the base in Faenza, the team is made up of different departments, and when we are on the track there are about four or five dozen engineers working with the car. They work together and it’s up to Pierre to put all the pieces together.”

Pierre Amlin: “I have been working as a race engineer since 2015 and my job can be described as follows: I can be called a kind of continuation of the racer, the link between him and the team. During the races, we try to combine all available information and adjust the car as quickly as possible, taking into account various factors.

Between the stages of the championship, we work on the simulator, participate in the creation of a new car, as well as in the modernization of the one currently used in races, in the development of the following technical innovations. It is also important to decide in advance in which direction we will move, do the settings – all this is done before we get to the track.

Of course I am in charge of the car, but we work with a whole group of engineers and mechanics, and this process can be compared to the work of a large orchestra, in which the conductor directs all the musicians so that in the end the piece of music sounds as it should be. It’s the same in our work: when we’re on the track, everyone in our “orchestra” has to hit the right notes.

However, the work of a race engineer is only partially comparable to that of a conductor, because he does not lead the other specialists of the team, but collects the results of their work in order to finally achieve the desired result.

Amlin’s story of his very first day on the track, when he was not yet a race engineer but served as one of the Lotus team’s performance engineers, is also curious in his own way: “I remember that day very well because the whole weekend turned out really well.

As is the case with all young engineers, before that I worked a lot on winter tests, on Pirelli tests and gained experience. But a baby was born in the family of one of the Lotus specialists, this performance engineer had to miss the weekend and I got a temporary promotion – I took his place for just one race weekend.

It was in July 2012 and I had to work with Kimi Raikkonen’s car. The difficulty was that it was the first such experience for me, and I had to immediately show that I could handle it.

It turned out that Kimi was very pleasant to deal with, there were no problems at all. Lotus had a very competitive car that season and the Finn finished second in the Hungarian Grand Prix. The story is remarkable because in 2012 it was my only race and at the end of the year the team started calculating: in which position the cars that this or that engineer worked with finished on average.

Since I was only in one race and Kimi was 2nd at the time, my average finish position was so high. I remember many in the team didn’t like it!”