You may not have heard of race coach Rob Wilson, but you’ve certainly seen his work. He is the person on the other end of the line when on-track careers are in jeopardy and is credited with breathing life into struggling F1 drivers like Daniel Ricciardo or Lance Stroll, putting Alex Albon at the forefront of Williams’ resurrection pushed and Liam Lawson was guided to an impressive rookie season after a surprise call-up. It corrects curves, cancels out understeer and saves people from endless DNFs – and it does it all, rather improbably, in a Ford Puma.
It is difficult for a layman to detect. It is not without reason that Wilson is called F1’s ‘secret weapon’. You won’t see him in the pit lane anymore, he hardly ever goes to races anymore. It doesn’t advertise and is barely Googleable. But with the help of a few insiders, I found myself spending the day under his wing, experiencing firsthand what might be described as a mix of hard physics, forceful personality, and a little touch of magic.
On the surface, Wilson is an avuncular, 72-year-old chain smoker. Unless his hands are holding the steering wheel, he probably has a cigarette in him, such is his deep relationship with nicotine. He approaches me with a worn black briefcase, Nokia 6210 and wispy red hair floating in the wind above a corduroy blazer. He cuts a ridiculous figure – a caricature compared to the sleek, chrome, corporate, brand-conscious figures of F1. But to judge this book by its cover would be a huge mistake. Make no mistake: the man is a kingmaker. The best competitive drivers in the world fly thousands of miles for a piece of Wilson’s wizardry.
His list of protégés reads like a who’s who of racing. In almost fifty years, the New Zealander has produced more than 75 F1 stars, including at least half of the current grid. But before becoming a coach, he had an impressive stint as a racer himself, taking victories in Formula Ford and Formula Three, passing Le Mans and beating some of history’s greats such as Gerhard Berger, Nelson Piquet and Michele Alboreto . He even came within a whisker of making it into Formula 1, winning a seat four times only to have it swept from under him at the last minute by someone with better sponsorship deals.
Others would be bitter, but Wilson isn’t worried about what could have happened. “It was all a rehearsal,” he says, “for this.”
I’ve figured out exactly what “this” is because his particular method of teaching has become the stuff of legend, and yet no one seems able to adequately articulate it. Maybe the man himself can do better.
“There are a few aspects to driving fast,” he explains from a boardroom behind the Donington Park circuit. “There’s all this ABC stuff.” For the uninitiated, these are acceleration, braking and car control. “Anyone can learn that,” he says dismissively. “Of course you can look for higher speed in the middle of the corner or brake later to avoid understeer, but the answer does not lie in squiggly lines on a screen – downloading data disguised as technology. Then you feel it in your bones.”
‘Translating messages from body to machine’
Wilson’s knowledge of automotive science is deep. He can tell you about the least economical places to look for speed: “Cars don’t really accelerate if they’re crooked,” uses helpful analogies with sloshing water glasses and gives me his ‘flat car’ principle of treating corners as if they were Pieces of 50 cents. But his real genius is esoteric. He speaks of cars as if they were conscious, asking drivers to “communicate” with delicate movements, “translating small messages through the body to the planes of the machine.”
It’s something you can’t really understand until you’ve put it into practice, and it’s the reason he uses an entry-level road car with a manual transmission, so that every clutch disc buzz, grind of poor shifting or squeal of tires run right through you. The amount of feedback in a Ford Puma makes it much clearer when you find what Wilson is asking you to look for. “You become one with the car, the car becomes one with the surface, you become one with the surface and you can almost transcend the car,” he says, making it sound simple.
The first few laps around the track are about as crunchy and squeaky as it gets. I’m new to heel-toe shifting, so it takes forever to master the pedals in the correct setup. While I’m trying to get to the good stuff I ask him ironically to treat me the same as Kimi Räikkönen and he tells me with a smile that when he had Räikkönen on the hot seat he also made him repeat the same round over and over again until it clicked. Finally, on what might have been my hundredth attempt, I emerge from a corner in a way that feels slightly different, a lilting sensation rather than a full-body lunge. He taps me hard on the leg and says, “There it is.”
“Now do it again,” he grins wryly. That is the core of his working method. It works with you relentlessly, slowing you down to examine every part of your driving, adjusting the smallest steering movements, taking all the tricky stuff out of your pedaling and asking you to do all the hard work so that the car barely can move. knows it’s on a racetrack, and once you master that, he’ll have you repeat it until it’s embedded in your DNA. His rare pearl in the hectic world of F1 is patience.
The other thing he has in spades is personality. As I enter my fifth hour in this man’s company, I am completely convinced that drivers come back to him half because of his anecdotes. He regales me with stories about his rock band (he’s been in several bands, including Edison Lighthouse, which had a No. 1 hit in 1970) partying until 3 a.m. the night before a race, taking the Stefan Johansson’s Marlboro sponsorship raided the local shop to swap them for Rothmans and sat in Nigel Mansell’s car discussing who was struggling financially when they entered Formula Three. His magnetism 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 like to show how fast they are and what incredible reflexes they have. And I have to get rid of all that.” He was empathetic in helping Stroll cope with his frustrations and was so good to 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 baffled. Lines on a graph look confusingly similar before and after coaching, even though one of the laps is seconds faster. His doctrine is something that telemetry can’t tell you: the key to driving fast isn’t about speed at all; the key to driving faster is driving 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.