Exploring the human connection between Race Engineers and their Drivers.

Exploring the human connection between Race Engineers and their Drivers.

Here we take a look at the relationship between Jake Hughes and his talented Race Engineer (a.k.a The Voice of God), Pierre-Paul Fery – known to the rest of the team as “PP”.

We sat down with PP post Shanghai to reflect on the season so far and pull back the curtain on one of the most important relationships in a race team…

Q: Can you walk us through the main qualities needed to have a strong and healthy working relationship between a Race Engineer and Driver from your perspective?

PP: Trust is the number one component. Trust and then open communication. Everything else comes from this. Adrenaline is at an all-time high during sessions and particularly during the race, so a big part of my job is making sure that Jake is in the best possible headspace to focus on his race-craft.

Coming into Shanghai off the back of a tricky double-header for him in Tokyo, his confidence was a little low, which is understandable. I decided to focus on building back his faith in the simulator between the races and encouraging real and honest dialogue regarding what worked and more importantly, what didn’t work for us so far this season.

Due to the amount of adrenaline and high emotions after sessions, when we debrief as a team, we don’t always get to the bottom of any issues as time is short and tempers can fray. We’re all human and even if we all try our best and give it our all, we can make mistakes, sometimes owning those mistakes and taking accountability can be really hard in the heat of the moment so my job is to pick the right timing for any feedback and discussion. Positive or negative.

Q: So, how do you earn that trust?

PP: It takes time, there are no shortcuts. We’re all different and working out how to get the best from someone in high-pressure situations can be trial and error. Not one technique works for every driver.

For example, when I was engineering Edo (Mortara), he liked to be pretty much left alone to get on with things, that’s how he focused best – he knew where I was, but he rarely wanted or needed input during sessions. As a rookie, Jehan (Daruvala) was a completely different story – he was learning the car and championship from scratch and it’s one of the most difficult racing cars in motorsport to drive so he understandably needed a very different level of support.

With Jake, because we worked together previously in Macau, we already had a baseline dynamic to build on. Like any relationship mutual respect is a non-negotiable and Jake knows that whilst I have his back and I expect him to have mine, we are both fully responsible for our own performance during a race weekend. It’s mine and the team’s job to give him the best, most competitive possible car and then it’s his job to bring his A-game during the race.

Trust is a two-way street and, it’s important to remember that we can’t see absolutely everything in the data – feelings aren’t so binary. I will always trust Jake’s feedback when he says he feels something in the car – he’s the one out there pushing it to the limit and my job is to give him the confidence to do exactly that.

Whilst our working relationship in the garage and at HQ is super important and we need to be professional and focus on performance, it’s also important that we find time to relax and unwind together – not just Jake and I but as much of the team as possible. We have all-team dinners at every race event which sound like a bit of a chore but honestly, they can be a really nice way of reconnecting with some of the team that you don’t work alongside day to day. The banter is usually pretty light hearted, and we can all laugh together at the end of the day. Keeping perspective is essential.

Q: What’s the hardest part of your role?

PP: Hard truths and accepting when things aren’t working despite your best efforts. Motorsport is brutal and the stopwatch never lies. There can only ever be one winner so whilst we always aim for that top spot, I have learned to be “nearly” content when I know we have left nothing on the table. But this has come through years of practice!

Building confidence in your driver and the team around you so that people come on the journey with you and they’re willing to try new things is really important. Sometimes despite what the data tells us, I have a gut instinct, and I want us to try something different. More often than not, this pays off – when we’re not hampered by bad luck, racing incidents or other situations out of our control. That’s where I get the most satisfaction, when I take a calculated risk and Jake and the team’s faith in me pays off.

Of course this job can be really frustrating at times, take this season for example, we know we have a competitive package but getting the tyres in the right operating window has been really, really difficult for us and this, plus some technical issues, is reflected in our points haul. But it’s not a true reflection of Jake or the team’s capabilities. Jake is incredibly fast over one lap and the team are really strong strategically – take Stoffel’s win in Tokyo as an example of this. But in Formula E, you need consistency, and we just haven’t been able to achieve this as much as we needed to.

Q: What’s next?

PP: Jakarta didn’t end the way we wanted it to with both cars unable to finish the race. We weren’t the only ones to experience these issues but that’s not what we came for. We want to be fighting at the front. We have four races left now over two race weekends in Berlin and then London and we are fully focussed on giving it everything we have left. By the time the chequered flag falls on Sunday in London, I want to know that we gave it our all.

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