David Coulthard

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DAVID COULTHARD INTERVIEW

David Coulthard is hoping more than most at Red Bull Racing that Adrian Newey's RB3 car lives up to its sky-high expectations.

After a largely frustrating 2006 season, the 35-year-old Scot is ready to move back up the order and as he explained at RBR's launch in Barcelona, he is confident that both he and the team are ready to achieve that goal.

Q: You must be terribly frustrated with last year, with a car that wasn’t being developed and your career inevitably not going anywhere for six months of the year. What’s your mental approach to this year – is it win-or-bust?

David Coulthard: No, not at all because I don’t need to have that approach to my career.

Ultimately I’m here because I enjoy competing, I enjoy working with the team and I enjoy the challenge of Formula 1.

So the primary goal and focus is to enjoy what I’m doing, and of course if you’re getting success on the track that adds to that enjoyment.

I understand that racing can be frustrating at times, but it will only become extremely frustrating if you allow it to.

So I had a very realistic view when I joined Red Bull as to what we could expect.

Obviously I didn’t factor in year two being worse than year one – I expected year one to be the painful year and then to have a steady progression.

But it was the growing pains that I think are inevitable when you’re bringing new people into an organisation and it’s starting to change the way things are done.

So, yeah, it got difficult towards the end of the year and frustrating because sometimes people have got their head buried in the sand, and it takes some public expression of that frustration to get people to wake up.

Q: How close is Red Bull to the level of, say, McLaren?

DC: It’s still a long way away in terms of the facilities and the consistent investment in those facilities; it’s probably got about the same number of people.

But at the end of the day this isn’t about being close, this is about being in front – and that is a massive step.

The first step has to be to get out of the back division, which is where we’ve been for the last two years, and trying to get into the middle division, which means beating manufacturer teams which have been around for longer than the Red Bull organisation.

That has to be the goal. I believe it’s achievable. Only time will tell whether this car can deliver or not.

Q: Can it, from what you’ve seen, or have you not seen enough yet?

DC: We’re nudging ever closer to the lap times that the Honda is doing.

Inevitably there are some issues that mean we’re having to keep stopping the car and not leaving it out there on the track, because we have a completely new package.

The Renault engine is proven, but it’s not proven strapped to the back of a Red Bull, so we need to go through those growing pains of getting all the electronic boxes to talk to each other, cooling and all those sorts of things.

Q: Do you think that’s a job that will take longer than you’ve got in testing? Is it something that will impinge on the start of the season?

DC: No I don’t think so. This time last year we couldn’t run a lap without the thing overheating – so that was really critical.

This [the RB3] will be able to run a string of laps once we get on top of all the other little things.

The Honda’s rolled out and gone straight into testing because it’s an evolution of what they had last year.

We have a new partner so it’s inevitable there’s going to be a few little hiccups.

I don’t know how quick the car is [yet].

Q: Is it a case of being reliable and consistent this year, or aiming for outright performance?

DC: We’ve got to aim for performance, because reliable will clock up finishes but it won’t necessarily score you lots of points, so we need a quick package.

Q: You’ve driven Adrian’s cars before obviously. Do they have particular handling characteristics that make them comfortable to drive or give you confidence in them?

DC: Quick cars tend to be difficult to drive. I think a lot of people think that if you’ve got a quick car, it’s easy to drive and if you’ve got a slow car, it’s difficult.

It’s actually the opposite way round: the quicker it goes, the more it’s extracting from the tyres and of course it’s taking that tyre to the edge.

So what I want to feel is that this car is twitchy and responsive and has your attention the whole time.

And if we get that then I’ll feel pretty good.

Q: Both you and Mark are quite tall drivers, and Adrian has a reputation for liking to package his cars as tightly as possible – is the car comfortable to sit in and drive?

DC: It’s definitely a lot tighter and narrower around the hips than we experienced last year, so we’ve had a bit of difficulty – more so for Mark because he’s taller – getting the exact position in the car that we’d like.

But it won’t be a problem once we come to race it.

Q: You’ve generally got on well with your team-mates; how’s it going with Mark?

DC: Unlike Kimi, for instance, who I knew nothing about when he joined McLaren, Mark and I have worked together as fellow directors of the GPDA and all those sorts of things off-track, so I know him already and it’s just a continuation of that.

Obviously what we don’t know is how we both react to each other in a competitive environment, and we won’t know that until Melbourne.

But I don’t expect to have any issues with him because I’m not looking to have any issues.

I understand how the dynamic is with your team-mate and basically you have teams within teams – you can’t get away from that when you’ve got two cars out there racing on the track.

Q: I can remember a couple of instances where you and he had run-ins during races and there were a few harsh words afterwards. Are those behind you?

DC: Well that’s the thing, you’ve got the benefit of youth and your memory works! I don’t remember having a run-in with Mark.

I think he’s made some brave overtaking attempts that have ended up not coming off.

Usually when you attempt things like that you’ve got a 50-50 chance, which isn’t really good enough odds – when you want to get to the finish you’ve got to make sure you make a clean, decisive move.

Q: What’s your impression of the Bridgestone tyres on this car?

DC: I don’t have an impression because I did only six laps on Wednesday.

But looking at the tyres on Mark’s car it looks like there’s a bit of graining on the rear and very clean on the front, which is the same as what the Honda looks like as well, and it’s a consequence I think of the very cold track conditions.

The very unusual thing is that the tyres we have here are the tyres we will be racing during the season.

Under normal circumstances the manufacturers always bring the right tyre for the track conditions, so in the winter they bring a tyre that has a low operating temperature.

Here we’re stuck with a tyre that we’ll run on a track temperature of 40-50 degrees [and it’s] completely out of its window.

The consequence is that with all these regulation changes the teams end up spending a lot of money to go testing in Bahrain because you’ve got to go where the weather gives you the chance to work with these tyres.

So for every change which is there to help reduce costs, there’s a knock-on effect.

We’re restricted in how many tyres we have and how many test days we have, so let’s going and spend hundreds of thousands going to Bahrain because then you get your one chance of trying to get some good temperatures.

Q: How much difference does it make having an experienced driver alongside you rather than a rookie or near-rookie, and how important do you think that will be in helping to drive the team forwards?

DC: I fail to see how it can be anything other than a positive.

I honestly don’t feel a real difference so far, because we did a couple of tests together at the end of last year and interest level in the RB2 was not particularly high for either of us.

The interest for me was in getting used to the Bridgestone tyres – I wanted to get a feel for the grooves, the wets and the intermediates, which I was able to do, and that was as much as I wanted to achieve from that little winter testing situation, and for Mark likewise.

He’s obviously got experience of the Bridgestone tyres so for him the different characteristic of the tyre probably wasn’t such a shock.

It doesn’t have anyway near the front potential of a Michelin, so I now understand why the Bridgestone runners were always locking up, under-rotating the front tyre into the corners.

You very rarely saw that with the Michelin runners – it’s a different way of achieving the goal.

Q: Everyone is saying that the Holy Grail for Red Bull this year is the car, but do you think the team is operationally up to the job in terms of strategy and chasing time over the weekend?

DC: I think that those things are absolutely key to how a team operates.

We had a new team manager last year who has obviously had time to draw on his experience from Renault, put new working into place and get everyone to buy into it.

It takes time because a grand prix team is like a big old oil tanker – you don’t just spin it round on its nose, it takes time to put all the instructions in and get the reaction and get the thing going in another direction.

I’m not saying it was a bad team before, but it had a history of finishing seventh in the constructors’ championship, and that’s not good enough.

And if you just keep putting the same processes in, the same situation, the same people, you’ll get the same result – logically – so you need to change things and shake it up.

Q: So do you see Red Bull being up there in the second division this year, as opposed to nipping at the heels of the top three?

DC: Yeah, I think nipping at the heels of the top three is maybe a bit optimistic.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t be there in certain circumstances but to be in that second division battling with Toyota, Honda, whoever it happens to be [is the aim].

I’m just presuming the big three will remain McLaren, Ferrari and Renault because logically that’s what you’d expect, but none of us know.

Q: Do you think the levelling out of the tyres and the engines means that there is going to be a wider variety of teams with a chance of winning races this year?

DC: Logically you would think so, but when we’ve had one-make [tyre] formulas in the past you’ve still had a reasonable spread across the grid.

But at that time of course the engine formula was more open and cars were less reliable and all the rest of it.

I think that looking at how more cars finish grands prix than at any time in the history of the sport, if we’re all on one tyre then that takes out [another variable]…

Although we’ve got this silly rule that you have to run the other tyre at one point during the race.

Everyone will do the same thing on that. If you’re doing three stints you’ll run your two quickest sets of tyres and you’ll put your slowest set on for the end, because typically there’s no overtaking at the end of a grand prix.

So there’s not exactly going to be a great deal of suspense: you know, are they going to start the race with the slow tyres and give themselves two racey sets for the end? No they won’t.

Q: Do you not think that it might pay to run low fuel in qualifying to get a good grid position and then do a short first stint with the soft tyres, which presumably will have a higher wear rate?

DC: I don’t think tyre wear will be an issue. I’d love it if it was. If we had tyre wear issues that’s great because that means we’ve got a developed tyre, we’ve got something that’s really on the edge.

We know the six tyres that we have for the year and Bridgestone have just said ‘there you go, here’s your tyres, thank you very much’.

They don’t want to support too many separate tests because that means a lot of extra manpower and expense.

They’ve won the world championship, so they have no incentive at all to do anything other than supply tyres and market the fact that they’re the world champions, which they can start doing today.

Q: You were team-mates with Kimi for a number of years. What do you think of his move to Ferrari?

DC: I think it’s great for me, I think he’ll have success there.

Clearly he is just a quick racing driver. I don’t think he could ever have been criticised for lack of pace in terms of not having won more at McLaren – he was let down by reliability and various other issues.

I think he’ll do well there.

Q: You were perhaps too far away from the Renaults last year to be able to assess them, but where would you put the Renault among the top engines in terms of horsepower?

DC: I’d just be guessing, but I’m guessing that it’s in the top three.

It’s not just about pure horsepower though. We believe that we’ll have better fuel efficiency from this engine and better heat rejection, and that means we can run smaller radiators and use less fuel over the duration of the race. They’re both things that give you real performance.

So for the Americans it might not read very well in terms of horsepower and quarter-mile times or whatever, but we want an efficient package that allows us to take the most out of every situation and I think the Renault will give us that.

I’ve worked with Renault before and I know how they work when they supply the second team – when I was part of what was effectively the works team at that time in Williams – so it’s no surprise the way they’re approaching the supply of engines to Red Bull.

Q: You’re happy you will get equal treatment to the works team then?

DC: I believe it will be as equal as it ever can be given that we are the second team.

It’s quite clear their focus and goal is for a Renault 1-2 and then in an ideal situation they’d have Red Bull-Renault following them home.

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David & Karen

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The motorhome of David

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David & Mark

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