#  good game

**Published by:** [rivahart.eth](https://paragraph.com/@rivahart.eth/)
**Published on:** 2024-03-26
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@rivahart.eth/good-game

## Content

Sign up for notifications to the latest Insight features via the BBC Sport app and read the latest in the series here. Eyes blinded by a blend of floodlights and blurry bodywork. Eardrums drenched in the whirring neighs of 1,000 mechanical horses. Nostrils stained with the stench of burning brake ducts. Spine rattling to-and-fro against the rhythms of the road. Limbs and neck wrestling relentlessly with immense gravitational force. Firing a Formula 1 car around a racetrack at top speed is one of the most intense sensory experiences a human can undergo. During races, drivers can suffer motion sickness, light-headedness and vision glitches. They can lose up to 3kg in under two hours while at the wheel. With the success and failure of their split-second decisions laid bare for the world to witness, a driver's existence can be isolating as well as physically draining. But an F1 driver is never racing entirely alone. They are accompanied, always, by the guidance of a softly-spoken ally at the other end of the team radio system, aiming to maximise the driver's result at race end. That voice belongs to the race engineer. Weather changes, tyre wear, gear shift advice and details about rivals' weaknesses are among the technical information passed from the race engineer to the driver. But the engineer must also harness their more human-centred skills, suppressing the driver's concerns and emotions so they are free to operate entirely in the present. Key highlights make it to TV broadcasts, but most of this dialogue goes unheard by fans. Given the amount of time the driver and race engineer spend in each other's company, and the faith they must collectively construct, their relationship is one of the most intimate in elite sport. "What you are trying to do is to take a lot of cerebral thinking away from the driver so that he can just be in the moment, focusing on the next corner and maximising the potential of the car," says McLaren's Tom Stallard, a race engineer who first joined the team in 2008 and currently works with Australian hot prospect Oscar Piastri. "We are the translator that bridges that gap between the technical department and the driver - we find the best way to get the information between those two parties." In turn, the driver must have total confidence in the competence and character of his pit wall connection. There is almost always at least one generation between a driver and his race engineer. They often come from completely different parts of the world and do not share a first language. A big effort to understand each other's backgrounds, personalities and motivations is key to building a successful relationship. "I always try to meet a new driver in a non-professional environment - at a restaurant or wherever else we are disconnected from Formula 1, to understand his personal side," says Jorn Becker, who spent eight years as a race engineer for Sauber until a recent change of roles with the team. "We spend a couple of hours together, just talking about normal things in life - hobbies, his family, his education - to understand his culture. "At the same time I am observing his reactions on a human level. "You maybe even have to adapt your own personality to deal with the driver you get. "Probably the most important part of [being] a race engineer is the human aspect. You need a good level of emotional intelligence and empathy." Stallard, who has worked with Carlos Sainz, Stoffel Vandoorne, Daniel Ricciardo and 2009 world champion Jenson Button in his time with McLaren, agrees the formative days with a new driver are crucial. "I am a big believer in the importance of building that social connection," he says. "You don't necessarily have to go out - just hang out together, ask questions and tell stories. "With Oscar, we developed that relationship by spending time together - a couple of times out for meals and stuff, but a lot of it just at the factory having coffees - and talking through racing situations from early in our careers. "We had a lot of conversations around things we messed up in the past in order to share some of those painful F1 life lessons. "That is a way of adding a real-life, humorous element to preparation - because when you look back years on, you can laugh at your mistakes." Not every driver-engineer pairing has a full winter of preparation to develop an understanding, though. When now-triple world champion Max Verstappen was first promoted to the Red Bull team mid-season in 2016, race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was tasked with moulding an 18-year-old possessing both supreme talent and a frank demeanour with only a few days' notice. "I had experience working with multiple drivers before Max, and that was one of the biggest helps in terms of hitting the ground running with him," Lambiase explains. "I think if I would have been a newbie to my role - I won't quite say he would have eaten me alive, but I'm not sure he would have had that respect for a junior engineer." Their relationship was an immediate success. Verstappen became the youngest race winner in F1 history, finishing first on his debut at the Spanish Grand Prix. But, generally, the first few years of Lambiase and Verstappen's partnership were spent chasing perennial frontrunners Mercedes. "Max learned some really harsh lessons in the two or three years before 2021," says Lambiase. "His racecraft really was something that we focused on, making sure we were just picking up points when it wasn't possible to win a race. "We were concentrating on building his consistency, needing to be finishing every race, maybe not putting himself in a situation where he can end up in a 50/50 accident with another driver." That spectre of an accident is a fundamental part of the relationship between the two.

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