Rob Smedley on Felipe Massa
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.
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.
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?!”
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!
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