Six wins have given Fenestraz
the Japanese F3 points leadFenestraz uses
sim for race prepSuper GT is an entirely new
challenge requiring diff erent skillsNI
SMO(^26) 1 AUGUST 2019
slicks he passed Toshiki Oyu around the
outside of Turn 1 to seal the victory.
But once he’s built a familiarity with
the corners, there are still plenty of other
skills he can practice, not least in Super
GT learning how to be lapped by the faster
GT500 cars without losing time. This he
rates as “the best thing of the sim by far”.
“That’s mainly the thing that I use
it for,” says Fen estraz. “It’s learning the
traffi c. I always try to take a slower car,
having faster cars coming from behind.
Even if it’s not the same track, sometimes
just thinking what to do helps you.”
The season-highlight 500-mile race at
Fuji this weekend will be comfortably the
longest he has ever contested and that,
combined with the GT’s weight, will be
a stern test of his tyre management skills.
“It’s something I did last year as well
before the GP3 rounds, trying to learn
the degradation,” Fenestraz explains. “It’s
very diffi cult to do a good tyre model [on
the sim], but you basically try to put how
fast you use the tyres and it makes you
understand how to approach the corners
to be less aggressive. It helps a lot on the
simulator to see what approach you need to
give to the corner to ask the least possible
of the tyres, while still being fast.”
Fenestraz acknowledges that his move to
Japan “was putting me a little bit out of the
way of my dream”, but is learning a vast
range of skills that will stand him in a good
stead if an opportunity comes knocking
with a manufacturer in sportscar racing.
“That’s my second goal after F1,” he
says. “Being a professional driver would
be a very good achievement.”
But he’s not losing hope of following
Norris to F1 just yet. “It’s not impossible,”
he insists. “Many drivers who have made
it to F1 came through Japan – not as much
as coming through Europe, but still a few.
Of course it’s a bit harder, but if you do
a good job it’s still possible to make it.”
As Albon’s career trajectory shows,
one setback doesn’t have to be the end
of the road. That steadfast refusal to
admit defeat can only be a good thing. Q
second faster than anybody in the wet –
and also sits third in the “completely new
world” of Super GT. Kondo is the best-
placed of the teams on Yokohama rubber
and Fenestraz narrowly missed out on a
fi rst win of the season in the last round at
Buriram, where co-driver Kazuki Hiramine
was overtaken on the fi nal lap.
“It has been a tough year of learning the
tracks and learning a new category like the
GTs, which is a lot harder than I thought,
and jumping from one car to another,”
Fenestraz says. “The biggest diff erence is
the weight. [The GT-R] is a bit of a boat in
a chicane when you change direction, also
you can’t see as much as in the F3 – at the
start you don’t really know where to put
the wheels, and it’s a lot wider too.
“So that’s also good with the sim, I was
training a lot at the beginning of the season
on the GT and then going to the F3 again
and again to see the diff erences. Suzuka
for example is a very diffi cult track in a
GT car compared to the F3, there are maybe
three or fi ve corners that start to be proper
corners – it was that kind of thing that I
worked really hard at on the sim.”
When he shared a fl at with Norris last
year, the two would often race each other
online to improve their understanding
of the slipstream eff ect, how the loss of
downforce from running behind another
car is manifested at diff erent corners and
where subsequent opportunities present
themselves. Fenestraz says this insight
is even more valuable this year.
“It helps a lot because I had no clue
about the tracks in Japan when I arrived,”
he says. “They are really tricky, narrow, old
school tracks with no room for mistakes,
and I need to learn them as fast as possible
because I’m battling for the championship.
“We’re not looking for lap time on the
sim, it’s more just to learn if it goes right
or left and then try diff erent lines, so
you start thinking about where you
can overtake at each track.”
That came to good eff ect in the fi nal leg
of the F3 triple-header at Autopolis, a race
Fenestraz describes as “one of the hardest
of my career”, where in damp conditions on
MAUGER
ISHIHARA