shellylove10:

THE FIRST MEETING

I’d obviously seen him and watched him during the 2002 season when he
first came in. So I first took an interest during the 2002 season when
he was in that Sauber and I was at Jordan as a race engineer. I kind of
did a little bit of background on him – his speed against his team-mate –
and it wasn’t always entirely obvious how good he was because he used
to crash a lot. But one thing that was absolutely clear if you took the
time to look at it was how quick he was. He was blisteringly quick,
especially over a timed lap. That was his forte when he was a kid, it
was the one timed lap special.

I remember saying to Eddie Jordan that he was really interesting and
we should have a look at him and Eddie – one of the few times that he
ever did – listened to me and got him in for a driver fitting and we
were going to have a test with him. So I actually met him on the eve of
the 2003 season. So I think he’d been fired from Sauber at the end of
’02 and he was free. I said to Eddie: ‘We’ve got have a look at this
kid, he’s really, really quick’.

So he came in and had a seat fitting. Eddie said to me “Would you
take care of the seat fit and we’re going to run him in some test over
the winter”. So going into ’03, he came in and he was an immediately
likeable character. He was really like as young as his years betrayed,
maybe even a bit younger in the head. Very happy, very lively and I just
liked him as he was more of a kid then and I just liked him from that
point of view of being young and a bit refreshing to the sport.

Imagine that if he’d gone to Jordan, taken some Banco do
Brasil money or whatever he had at the time, had a year there in a
shitbox car, paled into insignificance and that would have been the end
of Felipe Massa

Anyway, the test didn’t come off and Eddie signed Ralph Firman
instead. Then Felipe got a contract with Ferrari as a test driver,
effectively. He became their test driver for 2003, so that really was –
and we often reflect on it – the luckiest escape that he’s ever had!
Imagine that if he’d gone to Jordan, taken some Banco do Brasil money or
whatever he had at the time, had a year there in a shitbox car, paled
into insignificance and that would have been the end of Felipe Massa.

Anyway, it wasn’t. So he went to Ferrari in 2003 and then I joined
Ferrari in 2004, entirely unconnected obviously, and he’d gone back to
Sauber at that time. So I used to see him round the paddock and because
we’d met at the end of ’02 I used to chat with him, and he’s very
infectious. He was very infectious at the time, just a really young,
likeable lad. ’04 and ’05 were really great seasons for him in the
Sauber. I think he was starting to mature a lot, he was nowhere near the
finished article but he was starting to mature a lot. He crashed much
less, I think that was the biggest differentiator between his first
season in 2002 and then in ’04 and ’05. He crashed much less and because
he was able to keep it on the track was beating his team-mate.

Then towards the end of 2005 he had a test in the Ferrari and it was
apparently based on … I can’t remember the reasons for it but it then
became apparent some months later when Ferrari signed him as a race
driver. I wasn’t his race engineer to begin with actually, there’s
another story behind that as well. His race engineer was a good
engineer, a guy called Gabriele delli Colli. Effectively at the start of
that season him and Gabriele didn’t really hit it off, so after the
first four races I had to go and see Jean Todt.

I had to go to Jean Todt’s office, I’d only been at Ferrari for a
couple of years and I’d spent as little time in Jean Todt’s office as I
could. In there were Jean and Ross [Brawn] and they said to me: “We know
you came to Ferrari because you wanted to stop racing”, which I did. I
had a test team job, and I was really happy with what I was doing not he
test team. I had kind of got sick of racing at Jordan in a short space
of time. “We know you came to Ferrari because you wanted to go on the
test team but what we’d like to do is we’d like to offer you a job back
on the race team as Felipe’s race engineer. So what do you think?”

And it was typical Jean in that I went: “Err, err, well, err … I’m
quite happy with my day job to be honest!’ And he said: ‘Yeah? Well,
alright, I’ll ask you the question again! What do you think?’ I said:
“Well are you telling me to do it?” And he said: “Pretty much, yeah.” So
I said: “Right, well I’m doing it then aren’t I? I’ve got no choice!”

I went to the Nurburgring which was the first race. He’d had some
fairly poor results and he just needed calming down, he was absolutely
on the ceiling. I remember going to the Nurburgring and he was entirely
agitated and nervous about his results and thought he had to beat
Michael Schumacher and had to win races. I was like: “That will come,
but you’ve got to do the groundwork first or you can’t do it”.

If I can be a-modest for a while, the thing that I probably did for
him was set him realistic targets and say: “These are the targets and
this is what we would like to try and achieve over the coming period”.
And he just changed completely because somebody had put their arm round
him and said: “You can do it. There’s an awful lot of work to do for you
to be the finished product but you can do it and this is how we’re
going to achieve it”. That first race we got a podium, Michael won it
and Felipe got a podium and then it just clicked and things fell into
place after that.

STRENGTHS AND HIGHLIGHTS

What were the biggest strengths you found in him when you got hold of him?

His strength is outright speed. He has got a real raw talent when he
gets in the car and I still don’t think at 35 years old it is always
apparent to him how he’s doing it. But there’s double and triple world
champions up and down this pit lane, there’s others who are of a similar
ilk that they doesn’t really know what they’re doing, they gets in the
car and it’s just pure raw talent. They don’t really work at it, they
doesn’t really put the hours in and pore through the data, but really
good guys are often like that. That’s definitely where his strength is.

What was your best moment with him?

The best out and out moment for an engineer and driver – the actual
physical moment, not something that had culminated over a year or series
of races – was qualifying 2008 in Monaco when he was on pole position. I
can remember when I started race engineering him and we went to Monaco
in 2006 and he said: “I’m pretty good everywhere, I can do a good job
everywhere, I’m confident everywhere, but the one place where I’m
absolute shit and you’ve just got to accept it is Monaco”. And that was
the one thing I didn’t do, I didn’t accept it.

We went to Monaco in ’06 and actually he was fairly appalling. But
there were the flashes of putting a series of corners together where you
just think: “You can be good here”. We went back there in 2007 and
said: “It’s not true what you’re saying. Monaco is just another circuit
with straights and corners, they’re all low speed, but so what? And you
definitely can be quick here”. It was working on him between me and his
performance engineer – Giuliano Salvi at the time – and we worked
relentlessly really. Going through it corner by corner, showing him what
he had to do and how he could be quick, doing that really in-depth
driver coaching. It was giving him really what he needed back at the
Nurburgring in 2006, that little bit of confidence.

By the time we went back in 2008 he was absolutely confident, so we’d
gone from 2006 where he said: “I’m rubbish in Monaco and I’ll never,
ever be any good” – every single time he’d been there in his vast
experience of three previous times in a Formula One car against Jacques
Villeneuve or Giancarlo Fisichella or whoever, he’d always been rubbish
there and he just accepted that – to putting it on pole in 2008, against
Kimi, the Monaco specialist. That for me was just an amazing moment.

That for me, the high you get from something like that, it’s a real
collaboration of teamwork between what we’re doing on the engineering
side and what he’s doing on the driving side. And it was right up to the
very last moment, I think that’s why there was so much heightened
emotion because it was right up to that very last run in Q3 and he got
all of the circuit right but he wouldn’t brake late enough at Ste
Devote. We were saying to him “Brake later, we can see that the car will
brake later”. “No, no, no, I don’t feel confident, I don’t feel
confident”. All the way through Q1, Q2: “You can brake later”. Just
before his run in Q3 I went to see him and I said: “What the fuck are
you doing, fucking brake later!”

“You’re not driving the car!”

“I don’t need to drive the car, I can tell you that you’re not braking late enough! Fucking brake later!”

I think that gave him enough anger when someone was telling him how
to drive the car: “I’ll fucking show him, I’ll fucking show him how late
you can brake, I’m going to lock both fronts at Ste Devote”. They were
just on the edge of locking up. He didn’t brake a bit later, it was a
full like 40 metres later in qualifying and we thought “Oh no, here we
go…” and it just made the apex as well, but he did. It was just
on the limit of locking and it was perhaps a little bit too much and he
just made it and I think after that the whole lap was just him with a
load of confidence. He probably came out of that first corner going up
the hill going “Phew, fucking hell that was close, however there’s a
load more front grip that I’ve got that I didn’t know I had”.

He was just brilliant all throughout the lap, massively quick though
the middle sector against Kimi, through Mirabeau, then Loews and then
Portier, he was giving Kimi like a tenth a corner in Monaco. Three
tenths in three corners is a lifetime in corners like that. We came out
of it and the funniest thing was me, Giuliano, him, the car crew, nobody
really jumped up and down, it was like “Fucking hell, we’ve actually
done it. We’ve taken the situation from black and made it white”. It was
just a really good feeling.

Then there were loads of other times. His first, when he won in
Brazil, coming close to winning that world championship in ’08… It
always gave me a great deal of pride seeing him grow as a driver into
something that went from “Why has Felipe Massa been given a Ferrari
drive?” to “Felipe Massa genuine contender for the world championship”.
It gave me a great deal of pride to have a tiny bit of involvement in
that and to be able to have guided that in some way, shape or form,
regardless of how little that was. There were lots of great moments
really.

Was it crucial within those moments that they would give him confidence that he would then build on?

Yeah, definitely. He was and still is to a certain extent, he does
lack confidence in certain situations. I always think it’s something to
do with him being very naturally talented in that he gets in the car,
sometimes he’s blisteringly quick, he doesn’t always understand why. And
I think if you’re in that situation it must sometimes give you that
question mark. “Why? Am I going to be quick this weekend? Will I always
be quick?” Just because there’s not a great depth of understanding as to
why he’s doing it.

Whereas you see the drivers who are slightly less talented but work
very hard on it and they have a much deeper understanding. I think with
Felipe one of the things that has always been a bit of an issue with him
in 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13 at Ferrari, was confidence. But then he came
here, people respected him, people rallied around him. He had a team
that he knew were working hard for him and the management clearly
appreciated what he was doing for the team both in and out of the car
and all of a sudden that confidence comes back. It’s just a real shame
that Ferrari didn’t get that in the final years he was there because he
could have delivered a lot more for them there as well.

LOWS AND LEAVING F1

I think I know the low point…

When he nearly died in Budapest in 2009. From a professional point of
view of course, but an order of magnitude more than that, from a human
point of view. We had become friends by then, good friends, and seeing
that with your work colleague but more importantly a really good mate of
yours is devastating.

It’s very, very hard at that time. I still had a job to do even
though the car wasn’t running because – again being slightly a-modest
for a while – I think the car crew at Ferrari, one of the things that I
tried to do at Ferrari was to build up that car crew and to make that a
really strong unit around Felipe and a strong unit that felt we were all
fighting for each other and we all had each other’s backs. They looked
upon me as a leader and it’s nice actually because they still call me
boss now when I walk past them. All my old car crew they all go “How you
doing, boss?” in Italian obviously!

So therefore that weekend, as you do when you lead people, you have a
job to do. I really just wanted to get on a plane and go home. You’ve
got your mate in a coma and it’s touch and go whether he’s going to come
out of that coma and the first thought in your mind is: “Do you know
what? I don’t do it for this, I’m not paid enough for this, whatever it
is I just want to go home and be with my family”. But you couldn’t, you
had to stay there and reassure the guys and that first 24/48 hours was
absolutely horrendous. But we got through it and he came back and he was
as good as ever.

That’s the thing that is really disappointing when you look back on that period because he walked back into a different team

That’s the thing that is really disappointing when you look back on
that period because he walked back into a different team. That was a
team that was very fairly balanced between him and Kimi when he had his
accident, it was very fairly balanced and when they beat each other it
was on merit, and he walked back into a team that was very
Fernando-centric as Fernando is very good at doing. I’m not saying
that’s right, I’m not saying that’s wrong, it’s just fact that Ferrari
became Fernando’s team and he walked back into it and really struggled
to cope with that in the short term.

He wasn’t always dealt a fair hand and knew he wasn’t always being
dealt a fair hand despite the words coming out of people’s mouths. I
think that was fairly hard for him to deal with but he got on with it
and he still had some really good results there in not a great car, but
came out of it, came here to Williams and has had the final part of his
career. It’s been good for him and it’s nice that he’s going out on a
high.

How important was it for him to leave Ferrari and come to Williams to finish in that way?

Very important. He could have retired. If you talk about what he has
achieved as a driver, the money he has made – if that’s important, all
of those things that count, that are status in peoples’ mind if that’s
how your mind works – he’d already done all that. He’d got all of his
medals, he didn’t need to do anything else. I think it was really
important for him mentally to come here, to have a really strong
team-mate like he’s got in Valtteri and pit himself against him. And to
help the team grow as well from being something that was absolutely in
the doldrums to getting it into being at the front of the midfield.

He’s done that, he’s done his bit. He came here and he’s done exactly
what he’s asked of him and I think it’s absolutely the perfect time for
him to retire. All the conversations he and I had leading up to that
were definitely along those lines. It was the best thing to do. Where
else is he going to go now? Is he going to get a drive at Mercedes? Is
he going to get a drive that is guaranteed race wins? Very, very
unlikely, so what’s he doing? Get out of it while you’ve still got a
great reputation and a really good career – a fantastic career in
Formula One – and go out of it on a high.

It’s the best way to do it. Don’t be hanging on at the back of the
grid, moving from where we are here as the third-place team over the
next few years down to the tenth-place team and eventually have a
microphone in your hand interviewing drivers on the grid. It’s just not
good and he deserves more than that.

Are you going to miss him?

Professionally yeah. Part of what I’ll miss is he cracks me up at
times, he just says the daftest things and he doesn’t know he’s saying
it. He’ll think he’s saying something really profound and I will just
find it really, really amusing. And he’s like “What are you laughing
at?!”

“I’m laughing at you!”

So I’ll miss him from that point of view, yeah. And I’ll miss how
good he is. He’s a safe pair of hands, if the car is good enough for
fifth and sixth then between him and Valtteri they’ll get fifth and
sixth. Of course I’m going to miss him because he’s a bloody good
driver. Professionally.

Personally not because we talk every couple of days anyway on the
telephone, and as the years have progressed and I’ve become less
directly involved with him and we’ve grown as men it’s more usually
about earache from the wife or what the kids are up to or where we might
be going on holiday and stuff like that. That’s not going to change,
when we go on holidays he’ll just have to work it around the Formula One
calendar!