INDUSTRY PEOPLE Interview: James Gornall FIA Formula Two championship coordinator
QUESTION Formula 2 is into its third season now, how’s it been doing? ANSWER Very good. Obviously this is a very difficult time to be running any championship. With it being a new championship [in 2009] we came in with a bang, but other championships have also come in with a bang since, and so we got the limelight for a short time, but we have continued to improve. We’ve got good grid numbers, and you can see all across the world that grid numbers are struggling, so we’re doing well.
Q Where exactly is F2 in relation to other championships? A We don’t have a car that’s as quick as a GP2, but we also don’t charge a million and half euros for a season [F2 is £225,000]. World Series by Renault is a good championship, but that’s also three times as expensive as F2, even if you can go a couple of seconds quicker – though we’ve proven to be as quick on certain circuits as that car. As for GP3, that’s a junior formula. We are
offering something quicker, and we would like to go quicker still, we’re always developing the car. It came out so quickly in 2009 that the car wasn’t developed to its full potential straight away. We improved it a lot for the 2010 season and we’re still improving it, but the whole idea of the championship is to keep it cost effective. Now, we could make it quicker by throwing lots of money at it, but then we would have to put the price up which is not what the drivers want. So we’re looking for a nice balance.
QMany championships are now going down the turbocharger route; do you think F2 was a bit ahead of the game in this respect? A I think so. Everything seems to be going turbocharged. It’s all about efficiency, isn’t it? Running a small capacity engine and boosting it with a turbocharger is going in the right direction, they’re talking about it in Formula 1 and it’s in World Touring Car and British Touring Car, so it’s all coming towards where we are, because they’re looking at being a little greener and they’re looking to reduce costs. We went in with that aim all along.
Q The VAG 1.8T is quite an old engine now though, isn’t it? A Well, it’s one that’s tried and tested. We used it in the Formula Palmer Audi
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Championship in previous years, so we knew exactly what it could do. But then again this engine’s completely different, it might look the same on the outside, the same block, but the internals and the turbocharger are completely different. We work with Mountune and we have got a lot out of it. They don’t need rebuilding during a season – they do an entire season comfortably – so that saves a lot of money.
1995-2002: karting 2003: BARC Formula Renault Champion 2003-2006: Oxford Brookes University studying business management; also involved in Formula Student, driving the car and working on marketing 2006: joined Motor Sport Vision as race driving instructor, eventually becoming ‘Super Senior’ instructor 2008: British GT champion 2009: took position as F2 championship coordinator at end of season
Q The championship is run centrally without teams, so how do you allocate race engineers? A It’s not an engineer for each driver. We pool the resources, and this brings the cost down. There are three drivers to every one engineer, with ample time for each driver to do what he needs to do. We do actually, in the interests of fairness and equality, rotate the engineers, but all of our engineers are extremely
QThere’s talk of ‘ghost engineers’ in F2, too, what exactly is a ghost engineer? A Well, we don’t stop anyone bringing a friend along and if your friend happens to be Paddy Shovlin, then that’s fine! Ultimately the driver has the final say on the set-up and he can bring an engineer with him and we will let them get involved.
QHow do you ensure parity between the cars? A One of the key points of Formula 2 is that we share data, so every single time the cars go out on the track the data of the fastest lap – as well as the video because we have onboard cameras with data overlay – can be seen by every single driver on the grid. You can see everything, including the boost pressure that the engine is creating. It’s all very transparent, and there’s no argument. Sometimes people think they might not have the same amount of power, but they look at the data and they can see that actually it’s creating the same boost, there’s no problem, and they go out the next session and try a different line and Bob’s your uncle, they’re just as fast.
QWhat’s the future for F2? A We obviously want to see some Formula 1 drivers come out of Formula 2, and we will be taking steps into making the car faster, but everything we do will have the cost in mind.
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