eRacing Magazine Vol 2. Issue 4 | Page 66

How did you get involved with Formula E?

This was an invitation from the FIA. I've been driving safety cars for 7 years in high-level FIA world championships. They knew my work from the past years, and it was a good challenge for me to race on city circuits. Everything changes when you have electric cars behind you. So when the FIA put this challenge in front of me, I accepted it.

Tell me more about these challenges of being a safety car driver for electric race cars vs. petrol-fueled cars.

It's totally different from any open-wheel or closed-wheel cars. Here, the speed is not what matters. In the other categories, you need to maintain a good speed to keep the air flowing to cool down the engines, keep good tire temperature, and keep up the concentration of the drivers. Here, it's a bit different as the drivers don't need the safety car to go fast because it's a loss of energy. They want to save as much batter as possible, but we should always keep a good pace. We are not here to make their lives harder. We have some rules about being a maximum of 10 car-lengths from the safety car, so I always try to keep a good pace to keep the tires warm but not as fast as the other categories.

When Formula E cars are in the safety car formation, what is the optimal speed to maintain both tire pressure and not use too much power?

I would say it depends a lot on the incident on the track. If you have a huge incident, you don't want to have all the race behind the safety car. So you need to be sensible with that and give time to the marshals and teams to work on the problem. In normal conditions, around 80-100 kph (50-60mph) is good. It's not easy to drive that fast on city circuits. We need to be careful with the debris and oil - ah, wait no we don't have oil! But we do have to be careful of blind corners to keep the good lineup behind the safety car.

What's different about the Formula E Safety Car compared to the street version of this BMW i8?

We have a FIA-homologated roll cage, the lights (atop the car), cameras for TV, the light control system inside, and we took a lot of parts away to make the car lighter. This was the contract from BMW. They are trying to do their best to really get involved with the championship and they are doing a good job. Of course, it's the first year and there are some things we'll need to improve for next season.

And now a question for our young readers: How could someone become a BMW i8 safety car driver, as this is a dream job for a lot of little boys and girls? For me, too!

It's a dream job for me as well! I have a racing background. I've raced around the world. My suggestion is that racing experience is important, because you have to keep your nerves in place, you have to make sure you don't make a single mistake because our responsibility is much higher than any driver here in the paddock. We cannot make mistakes. We are representing the FIA. There's a lot of responsibility in this job.

The first step would be to have some racing experience, the second step is to be involved in some marshal association to understand how things work on the other side. Start doing it in your own country, then try to get involved in some international meetings to feel that pressure. You need to carry a good racing experience. It's not a game, our position is really serious. It's most important to have enough experience through the years.

Ideally, you are the most consistent driver of anyone here.

Yes, I'm always in the front of the cars!

All eyes on you - especially in this car!