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The Motorsport Brief | Bathurst preview with Scott Sinclair · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:04
  Welcome to the Motorsport Brief, a Bathurst preview ahead of one of the best races of the season.
• 0:12
  Hi everybody, Rusty with you from the mountain and what a week we have in store for you here.
• 0:18
  It's the middle of a triple header off the back of the Singapore Grand Prix.
• 0:21
  If you haven't already, check out the Oscar Piastri podcast.
• 0:25
  Really candid discussion with him ahead of that race.
• 0:28
  I know there's been a lot of conversation with it or about it and what happened on the opening lap since then.
• 0:33
  And I've also on the way to the mountain recorded our next feature episode.
• 0:36
  with a voice of the sport from the ABC days in John Smiles.
• 0:41
  You may remember him with Will Hagen back in the day and a very, very young Neil Crompton.
• 0:44
  He's got some great memories of Formula One, some incredible bike races over time, and a whole lot more.
• 0:50
  And some funny yarns too, including a bit of elbowing with Kimi Räikkönen in the pit lane one day trying to get an interview.
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  For this edition, I thought we'd do a preview of the great race.
• 0:59
  And I'd like to point you in the direction of an exclusive story you can find on the Supercars website.
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  We won't take
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  everything from that because its author has done a great job providing you with some insights of what to expect from an engineering a strategic perspective and more i'm with scott sinclair hello mate it is nice to catch up with you hey rusty yeah thanks for having me on and uh pumped to be here as always people will know you in the kind of relatively recent past from a managerial position with kelly racing but your experience in this pit lane goes well beyond that just share for those that don't know a bit more about your cv
• 1:35
  Yeah, well, I started straight out of uni in 2006.
• 1:38
  I was my first Bathurst, actually, the year Lowndes Eve won it.
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  So that was really cool as a fan when I was a bit younger.
• 1:45
  So, yeah, race engineered for eight or nine years, and then I was team manager at Nissan for six years.
• 1:50
  So I got a fair bit of experience, a few Bathursts under my belt, but I haven't won one, unfortunately.
• 1:56
  Yeah, but you, as you say in the very first paragraph, you know about stuff when it does go wrong and how to, I guess, learn from that.
• 2:02
  As you and I record here, we've got a slight break in the weather, but there's cloud all around us.
• 2:07
  It's rained here this morning.
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  That's kind of factor number one.
• 2:10
  What are we looking at from a forecast perspective?
• 2:12
  Yeah.
• 2:12
  Yeah, well, I just checked the updated before it came in.
• 2:15
  And obviously a bit of rain today, which puts the brakes, so to speak, on everyone's plans in terms of their car setups and tuning for the weekend.
• 2:22
  So, look, if you roll out of the truck with a really nice car and it's wet, you're probably happy because everyone else doesn't get the chance to tune it on a dry track.
• 2:32
  But conversely, if it's the opposite and you've got a bit of a dog on your hands and you're missing out valuable practice time on the Thursday, that's bad news for the weekend.
• 2:41
  When you look at it, and I mean, in a perfect sense, do you work backwards and go, you know, these are the amount of stops that if it is dry, if it runs, and I mean, there's all sorts of variables to throw into that, but if it ran perfectly, what is it that you'd be basically looking for on Sunday?
• 2:59
  Yeah, so the guiding principles, I suppose, of the race are that you want to have your main driver in at the end and not just the last stint, the last two stints.
• 3:07
  So you've got the last two stints with the main driver.
• 3:10
  The other guiding principle is that you've got to have had your co-driver laps done by that point.
• 3:15
  So it works out to be around lap 82, 83 that you want to be able to put your main driver in.
• 3:21
  So your co-driver has to do 60 laps.
• 3:24
  So you've really got to punch them out early before that.
• 3:27
  There's been talk over the years and all sorts of debate about starting a co-driver first, starting your main driver first, and in a regulation sense, we've played with that as well.
• 3:36
  What about this year?
• 3:37
  Yeah, well, I mean, they have opened up the option this year, but, you know, if you stick by those guiding principles, you've really got to start your co-driver.
• 3:45
  You know, any safety car sort of that means that the co-driver gets stuck in the car against the main drivers later in the race really compromises you.
• 3:53
  So it's risky.
• 3:55
  You might see one or two who qualify out of position to start their main drivers to try and make up some track position, but it is a risk, and so the majority will start their co-drivers.
• 4:05
  On that basis, then, the value of a quality co-driver, someone that's perhaps recently come out of a full-time role, is worth a lot coming into this, isn't it?
• 4:14
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:14
  I mean, the old saying, like, race pace trumps strategy, right?
• 4:18
  So no matter how good your strategy is, if you've got the fastest car, you know,
• 4:22
  Nine times out of 10, you win.
• 4:23
  So the co-driver's a huge part of that at Bathurst.
• 4:26
  Really important that they not only maintain your track position, but can ideally gain a bit of track position during their stints to give it to the main driver, who therefore has to do a bit less.
• 4:36
  We saw that at the bend with Hazelwood and Kostecki.
• 4:39
  Hazelwood put Kostecki in a really good spot.
• 4:41
  Kostecki just had to get it home.
• 4:42
  Do you look at that over the weekend from practice and even as the race unfolds to sort of say, right, we've got a number that we want our co-driver to kind of get to that is very close to the main driver?
• 4:53
  Yeah, yeah, they do.
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  One of the challenges is that the programs are quite different.
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  You know, you're setting your main driver up for qualifying.
• 4:59
  Essentially, a lot of the practice sessions, you're setting your co-driver up for qualifying.
• 5:04
  the race stints so they're doing a lot of the longer running it's hard to get a really direct comparison in terms of lap time but ideally you know they're within 0.4 of a second a lap uh you know that you can get away with that driver comfort that obviously takes place well before we get to the mountain here sometimes you've got drivers of differing sizes you're much taller than me for example right um finding a compromise in that regard what things are you look i mean you don't want stuff that
• 5:30
  you know, makes your body feel sore or your leg feel... You need everything to be feeling nice, don't you?
• 5:37
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:38
  And I think it's about 54% of the field have like a seat insert.
• 5:42
  So to be fair...
• 5:44
  back 10 years ago, it was probably higher than that.
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  So a lot of the drivers these days are compromising a little bit in terms of their seating position just to minimise the risk at the driver change, having to get the big bulky insert out of the car and back in.
• 5:58
  So that plays a big part, especially when a safety car comes and it's a driver change and your driver change time is under the pump.
• 6:06
  You can see often it'll go wrong there and, you know, your track position that you've fought so hard to earn, you've lost four or five spots and, you know,
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  win.
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  What about tyres this year?
• 6:17
  We did something different in recent years.
• 6:19
  What about, you know, strategically what they'll do there?
• 6:22
  Yeah, so it is the first time we've been here on this new tyre.
• 6:24
  This new tyre for this year has proven itself at all the events.
• 6:28
  The degradation last year was really low.
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  It's better this year, so I don't think it's going to be a factor.
• 6:33
  We won't see drivers saving tyres.
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  And because of the tweaks in the regulations, we probably won't see much fuel saving either.
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  So I'd expect a really flat-out race.
• 6:43
  We did see that last year.
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  The pace was incredible.
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  But with this tyre with a bit less degradation, I think the pace will be even faster this year.
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  In a broad sense, what are you looking for from the car?
• 6:53
  I mean, we've seen people get hungry around some settings in terms of camber over the years and so on.
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  What are you trying to find more broadly for this car for 1,000 cars?
• 7:04
  Yeah, I mean, you need stability across the top of the mountain, right?
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  And that's especially important for the co-drivers.
• 7:09
  They're just not as comfortable in the car so that they don't crash, essentially.
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  You need stability across the top.
• 7:15
  To get that, you need a lot of aerodynamic force, I suppose, so you have high wing settings.
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  But that hurts you all the way down the bottom of the mountain.
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  So in terms of your car, you want to maximise your straight line speed, but you also want to provide the co-drivers especially stability across the top.
• 7:30
  Things like cambers and that can help in that sense.
• 7:33
  I don't think we'll see the issues that we have in the past with tyres delaminating just because of the way this tyre compound is.
• 7:39
  So the teams may well push those cambers a bit further than they have in the past.
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  We're going to grab a quick break here.
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  Will you stick around for the second half and a little bit more of our preview here on Rusty's Garage?
• 7:48
  No problems at all.
• 7:49
  Awesome.
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  I've got him cornered.
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  You're listening to the Motorsport Brief, coming to you from Mount Panorama, Bathurst, ahead of one of the best races of the year, the Bathurst 1000, with Scott Sinclair.
• 8:01
  Looking at it from an inner team perspective, probably worth sharing with people too, that you work very closely with the broadcast nowadays and bringing that to the coverage behind the scenes.
• 8:11
  Thank you.
• 8:12
  Yeah, so my role now, I sit in the commentary box, look at all the strategies as they play out and feed the information to the commentators.
• 8:19
  It's been a bit of a challenge for me, if I've got to say, going from focusing on two cars over the race to focusing on 24 and trying to sort of keep an eye on what everyone's doing.
• 8:31
  But I'm getting a bit more used to it now.
• 8:32
  But, yeah, that's essentially my role and point out things that are happening for the guys as they're focused on actually doing the commentating, feeding them some of the information about what's actually happening with the strategy and where someone might actually pop out where they might not otherwise be expected.
• 8:48
  They're the numbers that you'll be crunching along the way.
• 8:51
  When you've been in that team perspective, what about the psychology with the drivers?
• 8:55
  Maybe coaching them a little bit over the radio, knowing when to calm them down, to pump them up and so on?
• 9:00
  Yeah, it's one of the great strengths of a good race engineer.
• 9:03
  And to be fair, that's a big part or the majority part of their job, especially during the race, is to coach and understand sort of the, as you say, the psychology side of it, knowing when to tell the driver to go faster and when not to tell them to go faster.
• 9:18
  And we see it all the time now in F1.
• 9:22
  you know drivers firing straight back basically telling the engineer to shut up so it's it's it's about managing that uh it's good around here there's a lot of um straight line time where you can talk to the driver not in a corner some tracks you know that's a bit harder so here you can you can typically have a calm conversation down conrod or back up mountain straight uh and get your point across without the driver feeling like they're getting attacked you know in the ears as well as sort of through the through the hands and feet
• 9:48
  What about when stuff goes wrong?
• 9:50
  I mean, you talked about it being a flat-out race this year.
• 9:52
  I mean, we've seen, going back over the decades, Larry Perkins go from last to first, recovering from something when that happens.
• 9:59
  How difficult is that in the current climate?
• 10:02
  Yeah, well, it's one of those ones, you know, like after something happens, you know, both the driver and the team, I suppose, are in that sort of moment of, like, our day is done.
• 10:11
  And it's up to the engineer really to drag the pit crew out of that and drag the driver out of that and refocus.
• 10:16
  And like you say, we've seen crazy things happen over the years.
• 10:19
  You know, a well-timed safety car can get you back into the race.
• 10:22
  But it is, you know, I've had plenty of those races where early on you're out of it.
• 10:27
  And it's a real grind for the whole day.
• 10:29
  You brought up safety car.
• 10:30
  That's timely, right?
• 10:31
  Been a bit of discussion around that this year.
• 10:34
  What about here at the mountains?
• 10:35
  Yeah, well, I mean, statistically, it happens every year.
• 10:39
  So we do see it every year.
• 10:41
  If the weather plays into it, you know, that obviously increases the chances of it happening.
• 10:45
  But, you know, it's a great leveler, I suppose, during the race.
• 10:49
  It resets the race.
• 10:51
  It's great for the fans.
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  It's great for TV.
• 10:53
  So, you know, obviously we hope that we see it.
• 10:57
  From a team perspective, you know, there's times where you really want one.
• 11:00
  There's times where you really don't want one.
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  So, yeah, that's in the lap of the gods, so to speak.
• 11:04
  lap of the track, when you walk it earlier in the week.
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  Those that don't follow the sport might think, but you did that last year.
• 11:11
  How valuable is that?
• 11:12
  And just finding little nuances that may have changed year on year.
• 11:16
  Yeah, it's 12 months, you know, like, and you've been to so many other racetracks during the year and you focus on every bump and, you know, cracking the road at all the other tracks.
• 11:25
  Yeah.
• 11:26
  you just don't remember.
• 11:27
  So taking that time to walk it, so much more valuable than even just driving it slowly in a road car.
• 11:32
  So one of the best things and first things to do on the weekend is walk the track, and it's also valuable time with your driver.
• 11:40
  It's a bit over an hour here to walk it, and that's an hour you get with the driver where they're not running between media commitments or whatever.
• 11:47
  So that's a really valuable time to get both your heads in the game for the weekend.
• 11:52
  What about when it comes to critical moments of the race and just keeping that level of calm right across the team?
• 11:59
  We've talked about dealing with the drivers, but when you're in that team management role and you've got various people coming to you with information and keeping control of all that too, the factors that unfold in a pit stop, for example.
• 12:10
  Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 12:11
  There's been cases I've had in the past where corporate guests or whatever are yelling and screaming in the garage and it's a bit unnerving.
• 12:20
  So a really important part, and as I've touched on before, the race engineer's role, that's a really important part of the race engineer's role.
• 12:26
  That any time that they open the radio channel to the driver, that it's in complete control and not...
• 12:32
  you know, and calm and measured.
• 12:34
  And so the driver is only feeling, you know, that sense of calmness as opposed to hearing all the carry on that might be happening in the garage.
• 12:41
  Okay.
• 12:42
  Are there any other factors that you, you know, in the multitude of inputs that we've talked about in this preview, are there other things that are worth considering too?
• 12:50
  Ah, good question.
• 12:51
  Look, it's one of those days it goes for so long.
• 12:53
  We don't get practice.
• 12:55
  The bend is 500km.
• 12:56
  It's only half the distance.
• 12:57
  This track, there are some down times coming down the mountain, going back up, and then it's hold your breath.
• 13:02
  So, look, it's one of those things that just when you think that the race is sort of taking a rhythm, something will change.
• 13:10
  Or you'll see a car on the fence at the top, and you'll know that you're, you know, two corners before that.
• 13:15
  So you're scrambling to tell your driver, you know, watch out for a car ahead.
• 13:19
  In the wall.
• 13:19
  And so, you know, the moment that you think that you've got the race or you can picture what's going on or going to happen, yeah, you're quickly brought back to earth when something does happen.
• 13:31
  The work that goes into preparing the machines for this is immense and it starts months out.
• 13:35
  How much does it ask of the car and its components?
• 13:38
  Yeah, look, it does.
• 13:40
  But I will say that these new generation cars are incredibly reliable and we've seen that statistically the number of DNFs,
• 13:47
  Nowadays, it's so much less than we used to see.
• 13:51
  I think every car finished last year for one of the first times in a long time, or every car except one, I should say.
• 13:56
  But the cars and the guys prepping them are really experienced in that.
• 14:01
  It's not so much a factor anymore, the reliability, which is a little bit of a shame, but the teams would disagree with that.
• 14:07
  But it's important.
• 14:09
  It does take a serious amount of time.
• 14:11
  Like the brake changes alone, the practice to get the brake changes done,
• 14:15
  all the componentry sorted, you know, you can't afford to have a brake failure here.
• 14:20
  So the time that goes into that is just, you know, I reckon it's over 100 hours of prep just to do a brake change.
• 14:26
  And they might only do one over the weekend or, you know, in the race.
• 14:29
  So that alone is a huge load on the teams.
• 14:32
  Right, final one.
• 14:33
  Worst question in journalism, who wins in your mind come Sunday?
• 14:37
  Yeah, yeah.
• 14:38
  Look, I mean, the top six guys, Kostecki, Brown, Feeney, Payne, Waters and Mostert are really, yeah, it'll be one of them.
• 14:48
  I think it'll be Feeney and Winkab.
• 14:51
  I think they've got a bee in their bonnet from not only from the bend, but I think also the last few years.
• 14:56
  So I think they'll be the ones to beat.
• 14:58
  Okay.
• 14:59
  Been awesome to catch up with you.
• 15:00
  Thank you very much for doing that.
• 15:01
  I know they are, because they're pro racers, they're ultra competitive about this being a great coverage this weekend as well.
• 15:09
  Enjoy your time with Krompo, Scafie and all of the crew and hope it's a great race.
• 15:12
  Yeah, thanks, mate.
• 15:13
  I'm looking forward to it.
• 15:15
  All right, that is it for this edition of the Motorsport Brief.
• 15:17
  Don't forget, we'll be live with Triple M across the top 10 shootout and the race proper, and we'll have more updates over the weekend too.
• 15:24
  Bye for now.