by You may not have heard of racing coach Rob Wilson, but you’ve certainly seen his work. He is the person on the other end of the phone when track careers are at risk and has been credited with breathing life into the struggle of F1 drivers such as Daniel Ricciardo or Lance Stroll, pushing Alex Albon ahead of Williams’ resurrection and mentoring Liam Lawson in. A great rookie season after an unexpected call-up. He fixes tapered corners, restores the tire and rescues people from endless DNFs – and does it all, in an unlikely place, in a Ford Puma.
He is a difficult man to track down, as a layman anyway. Wilson is labeled F1’s “secret weapon” for a reason. You won’t see him in pit lane, he hardly goes to races these days. It doesn’t advertise and is barely even Googlable. But with the help of a few insiders, I found myself spending the day under his tutelage, experiencing firsthand what you might describe as a combination of tough physics, a powerful personality and a little magical.
On first impression, Wilson is an avuncular 72-year-old chain wearer. If his hands aren’t on a steering wheel, he probably has a cigarette in them, such is his deep relationship with nicotine. He turns up to meet me with a tatty black briefcase, a Nokia 6210 and wispy red hair that floats around in the wind over a corduroy blazer. He cuts a risible figure – a caricature compared to the sleek, chrome, corporate, brand-conscious figures of F1. But it would be a huge mistake to judge this book by its cover. Make no mistake, the man is a king maker. The world’s best competitive drivers fly thousands of miles for a piece of Wilson’s magic.
His list of protégés is like a who’s who of racing. In almost 50 years, the New Zealander has looked after more than 75 F1 stars, including at least half of the current grid. But before he was a coach, he had a great time as a racer himself, chalking up wins in Formula Ford and Formula Three, winning Le Mans and beating some of the greats of history, such as Gerhard Berger, Nelson Piquet and Michele Alboreto . He even came within a hair’s breadth of competing in F1, landing himself a four-time seat, only to be knocked out from under him at the last minute by someone with better sponsorship deals.
Others would be bitter, but Wilson isn’t dwelling on what might have been. “The whole thing was practice,” he says, “for this.”
I have come to find out exactly what “this” means, because his teaching hallmark has become legendary and yet no one seems to be able to adequately articulate it. Maybe the man himself can do a better job.
“There are several aspects to driving fast,” he explains from a boardroom behind the circuit at Donington Park. “It’s got all the ABC stuff.” For the uninitiated that is acceleration, braking and car control. “Anyone can teach that,” he says, dismissively. “Sure, you can seek a higher mid-corner speed or coming off the brakes later to avoid understeer, but the answer is not in squiggly lines on a screen – downloading data masquerading as engineering. This is when you feel it in your bones.”
‘Transferring messages from body to machine’
Wilson has a deep knowledge of automotive science. He can tell you about the least economical places to look for speed: “Cars don’t really accelerate when they’re leaning”, he uses helpful analogies of swallowing glasses of water and calls his principle “a flat car ” me about treating corners. 50-pence pieces. But his true genius is esoteric. He speaks of cars as if they are sentient, asking drivers to “communicate” with the sensitivity of movement, to “transfer small messages through the body to the planes of the machine”.
It’s something you can’t really appreciate until you’ve driven it and that’s why it uses an entry-level manual transmission road car – so every whirr of the clutch plate, crunch on a weak shift or tire scrubbing squawk. runs through you. The amount of feedback in the Ford Puma will make it much clearer when you find what Wilson wants you to look for. “You become one with the car, the car becomes one with the surface, with you be one with the surface, and you can overcome the car almost,” he says, meaning it sounds simple.
The first few laps around the track are as crunchy and squawky as it gets. I’m new to heel shifting, so it takes forever just to get the hang of using the pedals in the correct formation. Looking for the good stuff I ask him, tongue in cheek, to treat me just like Kimi Räikkönen and he tells me with a smile that when Räikkönen was in the hot seat, he did it again. the same lap over and over until it clicked. Eventually, for the first time I might have it, I flow out of a corner in a way that feels a little different, a lilting sensation rather than a full-body flow. He hits me hard on the leg and says: “Yes.”
“Do it again,” he said grimly. That is the heart of his method. It works with you relentlessly, slowing you down to explore all the parts of your drive, tweaking the smallest movements of a steering wheel, taking anything out of your footing, asking you for the lift make heavy so that the car will hardly be. it knows it’s on a race course, and then once you’ve mastered that, it makes you repeat it until it’s embedded in your DNA. Patience is a rare gem, in the frenetic world of F1.
The other thing he has in spades is personality. As I enter my fifth time in this man’s company, I am convinced that half the reason drivers come back to him is his stories. He regales me with stories of his rock band partying until 3am the night before a race, raiding Stefan Johansson’s Marlboro sponsorship to swap them for Rothmans at the local shop and sitting in Nigel Mansell’s car discussing who was struggling more financially when they competed in Formula. Three. It is his magnetism that allows him to pour water on some of F1’s famous egos.
“When they arrive, they are the most important person in the world,” he says. “They want to show how fast they are, what incredible reflexes they have. And I have to get rid of all that.” He was sympathetic because he helped Stroll overcome his frustrations and he was so good with Nico Rosberg that when the German won the world championship in 2016, Wilson was one of the first people he thanked.
Experts have studied Wilson’s methods and come away bamboozled. Lines on a graph with pre-training and post-training look confusing, even though one of the second laps is faster. Telemetry can’t tell you what it teaches: the key to driving fast isn’t about speed at all; the key to driving faster is to drive better. Call it magic, magnanimity or intuition, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the world who can do what he does.
