Pat Symonds , current technical director of Formula 1 , worked with three world champions during his time with ‘Team Enstone’ from 1980 to 2008.
With Toleman, the forerunner of the Benetton and Renault teams in the 1980s, Symonds was one of the team’s top engineers when Ayrton Senna joined the squadron.
Symonds was Michael Schumacher ‘s race engineer in his first year – 1994 – and into 1995. Remaining at Enstone after the German moved to Ferrari , Pat Symonds worked with the Spaniard who would go on to become world champion with Renault in 2005 and 2006: Fernando Alonso .
At the Autosport International held in Birmingham in January, Symonds drew a parallel between the three world champions: “I worked with Ayrton, Michael and Fernando,” said Symonds. “The interesting thing is that I worked with each of them about ten years apart. The same happened with Ayrton in the 1980s, with Michael in the 1990s, with Fernando in the 2000s”.
“What you have to remember is that what is expected of a driver in these three separate periods is very different. A decade is a long time in any business, but in motorsport it’s like a century – everything changes very quickly.” Symonds spoke about how teams’ expectations of drivers have changed during that time.
“When I worked with Ayrton at Toleman, we didn’t have data collection devices yet. At that time, we were building our first engines. So we put a lot of trust in the driver on a lot of things: what rpm he was doing at the end of the straight, whether he was in the right gear, the water and oil temperature, whether he bled the radiators correctly and things like that.”
“We had to think about all of that tactically as well as driving fast. In the Fernando era, we knew a lot more than he did in terms of these details about what was going on with the car. The most important thing at this point is to find the driver who can interpret how you adapt the dynamics of the vehicle to him.”
“Michael, for example, was a lover of unstable cars. Even if you have a very fast vehicle, you need to be a very good driver to drive it. We used to tune [Michael’s] car quite unevenly and his teammates would struggle because of that. So it’s really difficult to judge a driver, who is fast and why, given the conditions at the time”, he concluded.
