Formula 1 race engineers need to stop mincing their words according to Rob Smedley, who came to fame for his messages to Felipe Massa during their time at Ferrari.
In the days when F1 radio messages were still a novelty in race coverage, Smedley gained recognition for his instructions to Massa, memorably telling him: “Felipe, baby, stay cool,” during the Malaysian Grand Prix in 2009. The following year Smedley delivered the notorious coded instruction to Massa ordering him to let his team mate Fernando Alonso pass to win the German Grand Prix: “Fernando is faster than you.”
Today’s race engineers do not have to disguise such messages as Smedley did. However, he believes some are still too reluctant to give direct instructions to their driver.
“In general, I think in Formula 1 now, there’s too much pussyfooting around,” he said in an interview for The Red Flags. “Like, the way the radio messages go to the driver – I don’t watch every single race, but the races I watch, I’m like, fucking grow a pair, man. Just tell him what you need to tell him, right?”
“You give any narcissistic sociopath an inch and they’ll take a yard, right, so don’t give him that inch to start with,” Smedley explained. “Don’t give him this fact that I’ve got some kind of inferiority complex here and I’m going to tell you something and maybe you’ll do it… No, mate, we’re at work, right? I’m going to tell you something, you do it.
“When my boss tells me something, I do it. That’s the way the world works. And if we don’t do that, right, as long as we’re not working for narcissists and sociopaths and they’re telling us to do the wrong things, if we don’t do that in a high-pressure environment like this, the whole thing’s going to get spun out. It’s going to get spun off his axis.
“So let’s just kind of get down these ground rules for how we all engage. The rules of engagement, how we talk to each other.”
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Race engineers can’t be afraid of hurting their driver’s feelings by giving them an instruction they won’t like, he said. “There’s a lot of this stuff like: should I make a decision? Should I ask this driver to move over or that driver to move him? Will his feelings be hurt?
“Look, you’re only ever going to get one driver at the end of the race who’s happy, right? You can’t please all of the people all of the time. So just fucking grow a pair and get on and make the decisions that you need to make.
“I think that’s true in Formula 1 and it’s true in life. You’re kind of like walking on eggshells and you daren’t make a decision, you just end up in the worst possible place.”
Smedley singled out Max Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase as an example of someone who communicates well with their driver.
“Between Max and GP, they’ve definitely got that relationship right. GP tells him how it is and Max will fire back.
“One thing I really like about GP – and again that’s very similar to how I always felt as well – is sometimes the drivers can get slightly sociopathic with their views on the team. These are guys who are staying up until midnight a lot of the nights working for you and getting things right.
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“You’ve heard GP a couple of times, and I’ve definitely said it to my drivers, I think you need to go back in the garage and apologise to the guys because how you’ve been behaving is not very adult or you haven’t been a very nice person, put in polite terms, so get in there and apologise. GP’s done that with Max, I certainly did it in my time.”
During one especially tense race last year Lambiase told Verstappen he would not be drawn into “childish” exchanges over whether other drivers were complying with the rules.
“I think the way Gianpiero conducts himself on the radio is probably just a reflection of their real relationship,” said Smedley. “They’ve got this good relationship, you’ve got a relationship that works, they both rely on each other fully and they both trust each other fully.
“When you’ve got that, you can talk to each other how you want. You don’t have to have this like, ‘control’, ‘check’, ‘ten-four’, all of this nonsense, right? We are checking, fucking hurry up then because I’m driving a car at 200 miles an hour.”
Although Smedley says he still receives offers from F1 teams to return to the sport, he is now focused on setting up his junior racing series, FAT Karting League.
“I wanted to do something that gave back,” he explained. “I’m from a fairly humble background and I ended up in this dream position in Formula 1 and building, I guess, a dream life, if you like. So I know that I’ve been super fortunate. I know that I’ve been ‘right place, right time’. That’s where a lot of my breaks have come from.
“Therefore I looked inwardly at myself and I thought, well, what was the chance of a kid like me getting to Formula 1 and being successful in Formula 1? I don’t know, like 10 million [or] 100 million to one, one billion to one. So I start to think about like, how do we lower the odds? How do we make the odds better for kids from more normal backgrounds to get to Formula 1?”
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