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What better way to learn more about Romain Grosjean’s maiden IndyCar test than with his Dale Coyne Racing engineer, Olivier Boisson?
Grosjean and Boisson immediately hit it off when they linked up for this season. Boisson is French-born and has worked with ex-F1 drivers like Sebastien Bourdais before, so on paper, his link-up with Grosjean was the perfect match.
“It doesn’t happen all the time with every driver but, very lucky, from the first day we met we got along very well and it’s been a very smooth and very good relationship,” Boisson (pictured below at Mid-Ohio, in sunglasses) tells The Race shortly after Tuesday’s Gateway test.
“He trusts me and I trust him, I trust his feedback and he is very professional. He’s very good at what he does, obviously, and he brings it to the next level where it needs to be.
“So it’s been very good and very enjoyable to work with him for sure.”
You may wonder why a feature taking a look at the test as a whole starts with the wider relationship between driver and engineer. But when it comes to oval racing, it’s the tiniest of changes and details that make the difference.
When you’re totally alien to the discipline, you don’t understand how a small spring change or altering the centre of pressure is going to affect the car’s handling, so the driver feeding back, and trusting the engineer to make the changes the driver might have been able to suggest on a road course but doesn’t have the understanding to do so on an oval, is absolutely vital.
“We talked about a lot of things before [the test] about how you should feel, how the car wants to drive itself in the corner,” Boisson says.
“It’s really hard sometimes for people coming from Europe to understand how finicky and very…fine tuning those ovals are.
“They might think ‘I’m going to be flat’ or whatever. On a shorter oval there’s a lot of driving.
“The car is very asymmetric so when you adjust the car, we almost adjust one tyre at a time, one corner at a time, not the whole axle on the whole car.
“So there’s a lot of little adjustments, and those adjustments do a lot more than maybe you feel on the road course because you spend a lot of time in steady state cornering.
“So for him it was a great experience, he learned a lot about it, like when the car is good mid-corner the car just wants to drive in a circle by itself, you don’t have to push it in, it just wants to go, and he liked that feeling.
“I think he enjoyed himself quite a lot, he was pretty taken with it.”
Before the test, Boisson had avoided utilising the Honda simulator to do too much running prior to the test for fear of the sim being less representative for drivers coming to ovals for the first time, who don’t necessarily understand where those differences are and how to compensate for them to make the sim as useful as possible.
Raring to go, Grosjean was halted three hours by soaring temperatures that didn’t provide representative conditions on the track, and then a short while longer as the team wanted Grosjean’s team-mate Ed Jones to do an install run in his car with the same set-up to check things were good for Romain and that Firestone’s new tyres worked well with that set-up.
Boisson adds to The Race at this point that claims made elsewhere that Jones drove Grosjean’s car are incorrect.
It was Grosjean who headed out, and soon after he did, he was hit with what Boisson calls a “typical” problem for oval debutantes. He got dizzy!
“When we went out it, was pretty much by ourselves so we did a baseline run, we did like 20-30 laps, and he got on really quick with it,” he adds.
“Every lap, he got a bit faster, he got pretty comfortable with the car.
“Then he got out of the car and got a bit dizzy at first. The first time on the ovals, it’s pretty typical for those guys just to get a bit dizzy and then for the brain get used to it and then it’s fine.
“But after the first one he was a bit dizzy.”
Grosjean also encountered some more quirks of oval racing for the first time, the kind of creature comforts that become second nature to drivers very quickly but initially they can appear alien.
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They included having lots of padding on the right-hand side of the seat to allow Grosjean’s head to rest through the longer runs, and also to have an off-centre steering wheel.
Every driver has an oval steering wheel preference that can even change oval to oval, but many have the steering wheel pointing slightly right while the wheels are straight, which can make long stints turning left easier because it’s easier that way to add steering lock repeatedly.
“That’s kind of what we told him, the way we wanted him to drive it,” says Boisson.
“It’s more a comfort thing.
“So basically you’re in a straight line, the wheel is pointing to the right, but a place like Gateway, where especially in Turns 1 and 2, you put in a fair amount of steering input.
“If you have a lot of lock in the steering wheel it gets very tiring after a while, so it’s a compromise to be made.
“In the past, when we had an experienced driver like [Sebastien] Bourdais driving the car, that’s the way they preferred it for that reason, so we told him right away ‘this is the way we want it because trust us, down the road, that’s going to be good’ and you can understand why, and he did.
“It was interesting with the padding on his helmet because on the right-hand side, we put a lot of padding so his head can rest in the corners from all the G’s all the time and at first he didn’t really like the padding.
“He’s like, ‘I can’t move my head, it’s not comfortable, I don’t like it, in a straight line my head kind of pushed to the left, it’s a feeling – I don’t like that’.
“So he’s like ‘can you remove some padding’, so I was like, alright, let’s see how long you last…
“We removed some padding. The first run he was okay, his second run he’s like, ‘alright, put the padding back, I understand, my neck started to hurt’.
“It’s just going through all the motions of the things that are weird, but then you realise there’s a reason why we’re doing it so it was all interesting.”
With comfort and understanding came pace, and 166 laps were completed at the venue over the course of the day. Grosjean’s qualifying sim came earlier on while others went out and improved in the cooler conditions as nightfall arrived, bumping Grosjean’s time down the order.
Still, he was within half a second of Colton Herta’s best time according to reports, and you get the sense Boisson is quietly confident ahead of next month’s debut oval race outing for the #51 team even if he may be tentative in building any expectations.
“We just got on really quick with it because we did a few runs in the heat of the day, tried to find a few key things for me to understand about his driving, about his feel on the steering wheel,” Boisson adds.
“And then we had the break for dinner and then after that we just got on really quick with just qualify simulations and things like that.
“Just for him to experience what is it to be on low fuel, high pressure on the tyre, versus the race pace. His feedback got really quick, really good.
“He was not comfortable at first with the rear of the car, we tried a few things that he didn’t like.
“We kept making changes and by the end of the night we got him pretty comfortable, I would say. He was pretty quick.
“The first time on the oval, you can’t fully set a goal to finish like top five, top 10, whatever. On the oval it’s like, first you have to finish, because the more laps you have under your belt, the more you understand, and the better you’re going to get so that’s going to be the goal.
“But given how comfortable he got in the car, and in the end we found some things on the set-up that really helped him feeling comfortable, and looking at the steering trace and the data how at the end he was able to adjust the car through the tyre degradation, adjust the car within traffic.
“I think he learned a lot and the car in race trim felt fairly comfortable so, I think we have a decent race car for him to at least have something comfortable he can just do all the laps and learn from there.
“Generally, if you do all the laps on the oval, you end up fairly well.”
It’s almost a win-win scenario for Grosjean in the sense that he’s not under the pressure other drivers may be to score championship points, as Grosjean has already missed the previous ovals at Texas (double-header) and the double-points Indianapolis 500.
Perhaps it’s a mark of how good his maiden season has been in that he is 26-points clear of team-mate Jones, who has done those races.
His part-season means he can approach this Gateway race as a learning exercise ahead of his anticipated full-season in the series next year.
One of the key elements of him not doing ovals this year was based on his Bahrain Formula 1 crash and the ordeal it put his family through.
It felt fitting then that Grosjean’s children and wife were in attendance at the test on Tuesday, his children reportedly watching Grosjean on-track live for the first time.
“It wasn’t planned that they would be here for the test, but then when the schedule paved the way, they’re here and I think it is important that they’re here,” Grosjean told IndyCar.com, as the test came mid-way through a Grosjean family road trip in their RV nicknamed Raoul.
“It makes me happy that they’re here, and I think for them it makes them feel better that they are around today for me.
“I think it actually turned out to be really good that they are here.”
Fans, onlookers, teams and sponsors will be hoping the Grosjean family has given their blessing to allow Grosjean to race on all the ovals next year, and to grace the series with his talents on all of the tracks.
It’s hard to imagine Grosjean being a bigger hit in the States – all of the fire department t-shirts fans give him have shown that – but an entry into the nation’s biggest race, the Indy 500, could really make Grosjean one of the series’ most popular drivers. If he isn’t already.
