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Home » Blog » Allan's Blog » Fitness training...Tincknell impresses...Florida testing...Back racing!
09 April 2010 | Posted in Allan's Blog
Hi everybody, it's been a month or so since I last spoke to you, and I'm now at Paul Ricard in preparation for my first race of the year and boy, oh boy, that's a great feeling. The opening round of this year's Le Mans Series is an eight hour race on Sunday which will give everyone at Audi Sport valuable information and data concerning our new R15 TDI "Plus". We've obviously been busy testing it in recent weeks but this will be our 2010 car's first real blast and will allow us see what it can do in a race environment.
Anyway, turning the clock back a few weeks, I returned from Audi Sport's annual fitness training camp realising that we were all in pretty good shape. But that week, each year, is really important as a get together with all of the Audi Sport drivers from DTM and our Sportscar programme as well as monitoring our fitness. My fitness regime through the winter was certainly a big push because not only are the cars getting more and more difficult to drive, we are having to drive them absolutely on the edge for longer. That definitely makes the old heart rate go a little bit higher, never mind the fact that you know that you are going have to be absolutely at your peak for the course of the race.
I'm also involved with a young driver named Harry Tincknell. He finished third in the opening rounds of the Formula Renault UK Championship over the Easter weekend at Thruxton. I recently attended one of his tests for the forthcoming season. It was important for me to go along because he's going through all the same learning processes that I did some 20 years ago.
He is in his second full season of single-seaters having graduated from karting and I'm trying to impart some of the basic information that I've accumulated in my career, but which is new to him, so that he is as prepared as possible. Look out for the name of Harry - I'm sure he is going to progress and be up there.
As you may recall, I'm also involved in the North America-based Jim Russell Racing Drivers' School "Future Driver Search" programme. The 2010 Driver Search winners, Gary Carlton and Alex Ellis, have been testing out in Sonoma at the Infineon Raceway or Sears Point as it was formerly known as. Both will contest the Jim Russell Championship Series this year and have been adapting to the School's impressive FJR-50. It's basically a Formula 3 chassis and pulls three G through the faster corners. They'll need to concentrate on getting the braking right, the balance of the car and their consistency.
There have been a lot of things going on in recent weeks and one was the Audi UK presentation of the R8 Spyder in London. It's just a beautiful car, absolutely stunning, and I don't think photographs do it justice. When you see it in the ‘metal', especially in white, which I'm not normally a fan of, it looks fantastic.
I was kind of jealous to be honest when I stood and watched the journalists jump into their R8 Spyders at the very swish West London Audi facility, the world's largest Audi Centre, and drive off for a week of fun with the hood down. In between two of these events for Audi UK, I was also jumping into a ‘Spyder' to have a week of fun and entertainment with the ‘hood down' but it was the R15 TDI ‘Plus'. We were at Homestead, just south of Miami, in Florida, for our first basic run with our 2010 car and it was good to actually get back in to a racecar again.
It had been over a month since we'd tested at Sebring and it was nice to get back into it and also to get back into what will hopefully earn us to some silverware this year. The Homestead test was basically a systems check, making sure that everything worked as we thought it was going to. But you know those first laps are also quite good just to give you a sense and a feel for the car.
Our goal, of course, is that we win the big trophy and not allow it to stay in France this year but last month's Sebring race confirmed Peugeot have got the same idea, so it's going to be a pretty titanic battle I've got to say.
Dindo and I were joined at Homestead by our car's fellow co-driver Tom Kristensen. "Tommy Boy" is writing a kind of ‘blog' for Audi this year in the build up to the 24 Hour race - you can read them every week on Audi UK's website (http://www.audi.co.uk/audi/uk/en2/experience/Motorsport/Motorsport_News.html). I read in a recent blog that he had to pay for our coffee at Starbucks. For anyone that read this particular blog I can assure you it's pure fantasy and I'll put the record straight! Take it from me, and remember that this is a Scot talking about a Dane, this ‘boy' is the ‘tightest' guy in the world. He could have swum the Atlantic with an Aspirin in his hand and it wouldn't have dissolved by the time he had arrived in New York. Buy a Starbucks? You must be joking, I don't even think he brought his wallet with him - I even searched his bag for it. Joking apart, it was good to see that TK was making a good and speedy recovery.
It was a shame we [Audi] could not race at Sebring the following weekend. Through the course of the week, I didn't think about it too much because I was busy with the testing. We were focussed and had things to do keep our minds very occupied. I was getting titbits of information about how things were going on up there but on Saturday morning, Dindo and I found a TV and watched the start of the race. It was sad not to be there but that's the way things are sometimes.
On the other side of it, it was good to see that our former sports-prototype team-mate Emanuele [Pirro] was chasing down the Peugeot early on. It was a shame for Marino [Franchitti], "Brabs" and Simon Pagenaud, that having blasted off into the lead of LMP2, the car then suffered mechanical failure. Tom, Dindo and I had a similar experience in 2008 after brake problems and you just see this big Sebring trophy disappearing to one of the other teams as you sit in the pits. That's a hard thing to take but it was good to see that Marino had immediately settled into the Highcroft team and was the star of the show putting it on pole position.
It was interesting to see the way that Peugeot ran the race. They were certainly not taking any risks. Admittedly the two cars seemed to be fighting each other and obviously there's still some areas of weakness in there with Bourdais spinning off close to the end. However, I think we are going to have to wait until Spa or maybe Le Mans to see them really stretch their legs and know what they actually can do and that's quite tough for both Audi and Peugeot to monitor each other and wonder exactly what the other's real performance level is going to be
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