Rob Smedley: An engineer must think like his driver.

      In the High Performance Racing podcast, former Ferrari race engineer Rob Smedley talked about the specifics of this job…

      Rob Smedley: “What makes a race engineer the best? Understanding the driver and the ability to optimize their position. It’s clear that a good race engineer must understand aerodynamics, tires, mechanical systems, and how to optimize all these elements to make the car faster. The race engineer must think like their driver. They need to understand not only their driving style but also their psychology.

      Drivers are athletes, right? You can’t just tell a driver: ‘Here’s the best way to optimize the car according to the simulator data, so let’s do this and that.’ They might say: ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work for me. I don’t like that. It causes severe understeer or oversteer.’

      You need to feel the thoughts in the driver’s head and be able to translate them from their language to engineering language. Drivers are not engineers. They weren’t taught that. Most drivers have learned the terminology just from their own experience. And each of them interprets the car’s behavior in their own way. The race engineer’s job is to convey this to the team.”