After moving through the ranks of Formula Ford and Formula 3 I'm taking a big step up this year, to the World Series by Renault. What's that? Well, let me explain.
World Series by Renault is a long title so I'll call it 'WSR' from now on. It is a single-seater racing category that is a feeder series for Formula One; in fact the last few WSR Champions have all found their way into F1. Robert Kubica is now racing for the BMW F1 team, Heikki Kovalainen got the coveted Renault seat, recently vacated by Fernando Alonso, the double F1 World Champion who himself won the World Series title just a few years ago.
The whole aim of WSR is to prepare drivers for Formula One. The cars have lots of F1-style features such as paddle-shift gears mounted on the steering wheel, carbon brakes and some serious aerodynamics. I'll show you around the car:
The cockpit itself is pretty complicated. The steering wheel contains all the information I need whilst driving; it has a computer read out that tells me such things as lap times, engine temperatures, revs and what gear I'm in at any particular moment. On the wheel itself are an array of buttons including the pit-lane speed limiter which, when pressed, stops the car going over 60kph. If you go faster than this in the pit-lane you're in a lot of trouble and the fines are a lot heavier than the ones the police give out! The all-important radio button is also on the steering wheel. When this is pressed I can talk to the team in the pits and we can have conversations about strategy and set-up whilst I'm driving. This saves a lot of time during the practice sessions as we can decide what to do to the car next while I'm still on my way back to the garage.
The tyres we use are 'slicks' which means they don't have any tread pattern; the whole outer part of the tyre is in contact with the track which gives an unbelievable amount of grip. One of the first things they did to F1 cars to slow them down a few years ago was to give them grooved tyres. As you can imagine though you have to be sure to get enough heat into the tyres so they stick to the track and you don't want to be out there on slicks when it rains! The hardest part of the weekend physically is the qualifying session when we run on brand new tyres and low fuel. With new rubber and the massive downforce that the cars create, we can pull up to 5G side-to-side in some of the corners and up to 4G under braking front-to-rear.
The Renault engine produces 425 bhp which increases to 475 bhp when the 'push-to-pass' button is pressed. Push-to-pass is new for this year and it's a great idea. We have a button that we can press to give us an extra boost; the idea is to make overtaking a bit easier to spice up the races. The downside is that the button provides six 10-second periods of boost and once you've used it all there's no more. Even without that boost the cars can do 0-100kph in just two seconds.
All that power needs to be controlled somehow so the cars have carbon brakes, just like Formula One cars. It's hard to explain quite how phenomenal the brakes are. I can remember hearing an F1 driver say once that if you brake hard in an F1 car it can literally pull the tears out of your eyes and I can understand that now! I'll try to explain... We will reach our highest top speed at Monza in Italy where we'll get up to around 290kph at the end of the straight. The first corner has a minimum speed of around 55kph and you'll only start to think about braking about 80 metres before the corner. To get the car to lose 235kph in just 80 metres requires some serious physics! The brakes can heat up to around 900 degrees as they struggle to slow the car whilst I have to apply about the equivalent of 125kg of pressure through my left foot onto the brake pedal. The force you'll apply in a road car is about 20kgs!
The first race is in mid-April at Monza in Italy; after that we travel all over Europe before returning to the UK for our 'home' race at Donington Park, which usually attracts a 100,000-strong crowd of spectators. The season ends in Barcelona at the end of October after 17 races.
A typical race weekend contains two practice sessions on the Friday to get the car dialled into the circuit and prepare us for the all-important qualifying session that takes place on Saturday. That session determines the starting order for the first race that takes place that afternoon. The grid for the race two on Sunday is determined by the finishing order of race one, but with the top 10 positions reversed. This keeps the racing exciting and gets us all thinking about race strategy which, as we all know, is very important in F1.
We have one weekend which is not at all typical and that takes place at the end of May. WSR is a support event for the Monaco Grand Prix! We actually get to race around the narrow, Armco-lined streets of the Principality, in front of all the F1 teams. I can't wait!
Did I tell you the best part? The winner of the Championship gets to test drive a Renault Formula One car! Now that's what I call an incentive.