Recognising when the time has come to hang up one’s helmet is a decision which every driver must face at some stage in their career and one which is notoriously difficult to get right. 1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill, infamously overstepped the mark, arguably retiring healthy machinery in his final season with Jordan in 1999. Michael Schumacher, it can also be argued, may have been pushed into retirement too soon, only to perform an ill-fated U-turn in 2010, (after the sport had fundamentally changed).
IndyCar veteran Oriol Servià admits that retirement is something he too has considered in recent times, but despite stepping out of his ride with Dragon Racing in Formula E, is still some way off. These days, the 41-year-old can be found in the Formula E paddock still in Dragon team-wear, but now with the very official-sounding title of Managing Director, a switch made at the behest of team owner Jay Penske himself.
“Funnily enough, it’s not that much different because throughout my career, I’ve always loved dealing with the engineers,” says the Spaniard inside the Battersea Park E-Motion Club. “I studied mechanical engineering for seven years and although I never worked as one, I’ve always liked it and always saw an advantage by being able to communicate well with them. Now, my job description is basically to make sure the team is working in the way I would like them to work.”
“I’m not saying my driving is done; I always said I would stop driving the day that either my team-mate was beating me regularly – even if it was just two tenths every weekend – or I just got tired of everything around driving, the off-seasons never having a ride and still pushing for it year after year. But that day hasn’t arrived yet and I still do a good job at the wheel, so I haven’t given up.”
Having been a part of numerous teams during his lengthy IndyCar career, from frontrunners Newman/Haas, with whom he took his only victory at Montreal in 2005, to Forsythe Racing, KV Racing, Rahal-Letterman, Dreyer & Reinbold and minnows Dale Coyne, Servià certainly knows the constituent parts of a successful race team, which gave him a useful head start in his new role.
“All my career I was never able to do two consecutive years in the same team, which I hated because as with anything else, not just racing, any sport, any company, continuity is key to success. I always felt like I did a good job, but it was because of lack of sponsorship or the team would close down, or whatever, I was never able to repeat. That gave me the opportunity to jump around a lot, be in extremely good teams and not good teams.
"It’s not like you take notes, but you suffer through the good and the bad times and just end up learning by experience what works and what doesn’t. It’s not only about how much money you can spend on a team – obviously that makes a big difference – but it’s about how the team works, how the engineers work, how you analyse and go after knowledge. Although I was unlucky in my career because I would have achieved more success by staying in one place, it was probably a good thing for whatever comes next in my life that I got to sample so many organisations.”