The man behind Pagenaud’s IndyCar title challenge
Simon Pagenaud’s off-season leap from fast but flaky to fast and champion elect has been astonishing to many. But his race engineer Ben Bretzman is the man least surprised, as he tells David Malsher.
Polesitter Simon Pagenaud, Team Penske Chevrolet
GM Racing
DM: We always knew Simon had the talent and he was often fast last year. The big jump we’ve witnessed in 2016, I feel, is in his confidence. At Long Beach Simon appeared to be struggling through Friday practice compared with the other three Penskes, but when it mattered – qualifying – then boom, he was right up there. Speaking to Rick Mears about this he said, ‘Maybe Simon’s now at a stage where he doesn’t need to give 100 percent for a whole lap to know what he’s got, or he’s just piecing together certain bits of the course.’ So…. What’s the truth?
BB: Well, I have to say that ever since I worked with Simon back in 2010 [at the Highcroft Racing in the American Le Mans Series], our policy has been not to care about our laptimes until qualifying. We could be P-last all the time up to that point. We only worry about how the racecar is behaving. I trust what he says and he trusts what I do, and then we only lay it on the line in qualifying.
Some of this may go back to how [teammate] David Brabham was in sportscars… when he’d go out, he’d do two or three laps, and learn a section on each lap and by the fourth lap he’d put all the sections together and he’d be very fast.
And Simon is the same way in that he can learn in a short amount of time what the car’s doing in this instance and what we need to do to affect it. And he’s able to retain that and know what he needs. He’s mentally astute and all good drivers are like that.
Back when he was waiting in the wings of open-wheel racing after he lost his seat during the open-wheel merger, I asked him about whether being an endurance sportscar driver might take the edge off his one-lap pace because there’s obviously less importance put on qualifying (a) because it’s endurance and (b) because there were only 3 or 4 cars in his class in ALMS at that time. And he honestly admitted that yeah, he was worried that he may have lost a couple of tenths. I’m assuming that’s not really an issue for him any more.
He’s always had the skill and it’s way more of a driver confidence thing. With all the cars so similar in IndyCar, having a driver who has 100 percent confidence in what his racecar is doing will find you more time than having the perfect setup. So it’s my job to make sure the car’s good and that it’s maximizing its tires, but everything on that car is for Simon, and he can just relax. He doesn’t need to worry about setup – if he has confidence that the car will suit him and he also has utmost confidence in his ability, he’s going to find way more laptime.
And ever since Toronto last year, he’s had that confidence. We’ve been thinking, ‘How do we tailor the car for Simon?’ He got on the front row there and should really have been on pole but he messed up Turn 6 – twice! – but at least the car was as he liked it. And the confidence kept ratcheting up.
Then through this off-season we kept on working at it and got it to where his car is so easy to drive now, he doesn’t have to worry about it. It sounds really bad to say it but the road and street courses for him are really easy now because we know what he likes, we have a strong baseline and so now we just adjust it for the racetrack and he can just focus on his driving.
When we were at Schmidt, it was different; Simon just thought, “How do we beat Will [Power]? How do we beat [Scott] Dixon?” So coming here, it was, “Give me what he Power has and I’ll try and beat him with it.” Well… that’s not always the case, is it? Here at Penske, we have four cars and setup-wise, they can be quite a bit different now. Each engineer has to get his driver confident in what he has and you will find more laptime that way than giving a driver a car that is set up for someone else.
But if you and he went up a blind alley on setup one weekend and needed to rely on a setup from one of your teammates – all three of whom are obviously very good – could you still take one of the other drivers’ setups and have Simon adapt to it, if necessary?
Last year we did that a lot in the first half of the year because we were chasing our tail, wondering ‘Who do we follow within the team?’ But this year on road and street courses we’ve just kinda done our own deal… and luckily we haven’t disappeared up any blind avenues yet! On the ovals, we can’t ignore the fact we’ve got a three-time Indy winner and two-time Indy winner on our team, so we listen quite a lot to what Helio and Juan are doing. We rarely do a whole kitchen-sink transfer, but we obviously listen to what everyone has to say. Simon’s done oval racing quite a bit now, but he doesn’t have the miles those guys do. It’s a not a knock against Schmidt Peterson, but there we didn’t have a teammate the first year, and then the next two years we didn’t have teammates who could help us – they were rookies.
This was the second year that, despite the result, you’ve appeared to have the quickest Penske car in the Indy 500. Do you feel that you as an engineer are bringing more to the table?
On the ovals, I definitely feel we’re helping now because people have seen what Simon can do at Indy, and run a really aggressive line there. And yeah, I’d say it’s nice seeing some of the things we’re doing on road and street courses now also migrating onto the other cars. It means we’re doing OK.
For Indy, yeah, we’ve turned up there with two different configurations – last year with the new aero kits and then this year with the domed skids and raised ride heights – and we’ve been strong. And that excites us, because it means that whatever Chevrolet give us or the Series throws at us, we can still be good. That’s encouraging. Simon was very quick at the start of the race, and then after the pitroad penalty, he was passing two cars per lap trying to get back to the front. I don’t know why – although it is a good thing – that of all the ovals, Indy is the one he’s adapted to best.
Do you see the potential for him to develop into a top oval driver?
He’s an absolute professional racecar driver like Dario Franchitti was or David Brabham was – they take their profession very seriously. I’m not sure I’d put him in the world of Montoya, of just being a naturally gifted racing driver. But Simon works at it, he learns his craft and gets good at it, and that’s what he will always do, whether it’s a rally car, a sportscar, an open-wheel car – or learning things like ovals. He’ll figure it out. A true professional. His mentality is, “What do I need to do to be successful at it?”
And he doesn’t put wheels wrong; he doesn’t crash. He’s always going through a building knowledge process, learning what the racecar needs, and he’s so mentally adept at that. He’s like a human data recorder – his retention of what’s happening is so good.
Last year Penske lost a lot of places – especially on ovals – when you compared qualifying to raceday. When you consider Juan only lost the title on a tiebreak, that looks costly. Has there been a change in policy this season?
Last year I think at Texas, for instance, we probably got greedy and expected the race to be a bit more strung out. I think Simon bust out to an eight or ten second lead but then got reeled back in. And to be fair to Juan, he ran the same setup as Simon and Will and he finished fourth. I guarantee you that if there’d been one more yellow, he’d have won the race. It’s a gamble we took for three of our guys and one of them did a really good job.
I think last year was really tough in that we took a load of poles [13, 11 legitimately, two through weather] but the races were really messed up with yellows and so strategies shifted. This year we’ve been starting near the front and also finishing at or near the front because there haven’t been many strange yellows, there hasn’t been strange weather, and so Simon won three in a row. The races have been ‘normal’, if you know what I mean.
As a team I think we were faster relative to our competition than we have been this year, because Honda have caught up. We’ve gone from us four against Dixon to us four against some fast Hondas and Dixon, plus Newgarden has been consistent.
Speaking of speed advantages… At the GP of Indy, Simon’s in-lap and out-lap at the final stop were spectacular. Did he always have that pace in hand? Was he just playing with the others?
Yeah, we gained 4.5sec over Helio just in those two laps. We were fast! He’s great at that track, very good on the technical sections, doing it all with the brake. If you look at Graham Rahal, he looks out of control a lot of the time, but Simon makes only small inputs on the steering and does the rest on the brakes. I think it’s something he learned in sports cars, where you had this huge front splitter that needed to be on the ground and flat at all times, so he learned how to work the pedals and still get everything he needs from the car. It’s transferred to these cars, especially now we’ve got so much downforce in IndyCar.
What’s your policy now? To keep Helio and Dixie behind you at all costs from here on out?
We set goals each year and have the last six or seven years. And there are still a couple of tracks we want to win at this year. I think we’re still two wins from where we want to be. We always want to stay ahead of the #9 car [Dixon’s]. My brother Eric was engineer for Dixie for so long, I know how good he is, I know how good that team is, we know what they’re capable of, even coming from 80 points back.
So we’re still too far away to get into points racing. And that’s fine because I know we have a lot of road and street courses left that I know we’re really going to be fast at so we need to take advantage of those opportunities.
Be part of Motorsport community
Join the conversationShare Or Save This Story
Subscribe and access Motorsport.com with your ad-blocker.
From Formula 1 to MotoGP we report straight from the paddock because we love our sport, just like you. In order to keep delivering our expert journalism, our website uses advertising. Still, we want to give you the opportunity to enjoy an ad-free and tracker-free website and to continue using your adblocker.
Top Comments