WEC: Q+A with 2014 P1 co-champion Anthony Davidson

He's the best interview in sports cars, and one of the best, period. Toyota Racing driver Anthony Davison heads into this weekend’s season finale at Interlagos as the World Endurance Championship’s new LMP1 co-champion with teammate Sebastien Buemi.
 
The rapid Englishman spoke with RACER’s Marshall Pruett about the accomplishment and a variety of other topics in a long form Q+A below.
 
MARSHALL PRUETT: I was amazed to learn this was your first major championship, Ant. You’re one of those guys who’ve been so highly regarded and have been in a number of amazing programs—I assumed your P1 championship was one of many you’d earned on your way to the top. Does winning a championship prove anything to you, or to those who follow you, that was previously unknown?
 
ANTHONY DAVIDSON: I do not know really, but I think what it does is prove you’re up against serious competition in any part of racing these days.  A lot of it is about nearly everything; being in the right place at the right time, in the right car with the right team.  That is how it unfolded this year.
 
MP: How did the shakeup with the driver roster in the No. 8 Toyota affect your championship quest? Losing Nicolas Lapierre and dropping down to a two-driver rotation could have been disruptive, and it also could have simplified things—you and Buemi as a tight unit extracting the most from the car as a tandem.
 
AD: I think from a personal level it is obviously difficult to lose a member of your team.  We all know the reasons why.  It has been spoken about enough.  Yeah, just crack on a bit like Sebastien and I did.  It was essential.  I think from a strategic point of view in terms of how the actual races pan out, for 90 percent of the races, it is almost easier to have two drivers than three.  I found it was that way just working with Sebastien.  Basically you get much more time in the car in the practice sessions, to start.  It definitely speeds up setup work as well, having just two drivers.
 
But there are races where it becomes physically challenging just having, say, for instance, if we were just two drivers in Austin this year, I don’t think either of us would have gotten the best out of ourselves because of the conditions, it was just too humid, too hot.  We would’ve suffered, towards the end of the race.  We would’ve fatigued, and our performance would have suffered as a result.
 
For the majority of time though, it is almost an advantage just to have two drivers.  In the race what we saw happening was when the driver that started the race, which is normally Sebastien, by the time they got back in the car for the third stint, they would be up against normally the third driver getting in in other cars.  Seb would already be totally in the groove or I would have been totally the groove by the time you’re facing the third driver for the other team getting in their car for the first time.  That is where you gain a bit of time.  That’s what I found anyway.
 
I’d say for the first 10 laps or so of that third driver getting in the car, you’re learning the rhythm of the race, like where to overtake, track conditions, car balance, all these kinds of things.  The driver that basically started the race on our car was totally in the groove, knew exactly what to expect, how hard they could push the tires from new, where the marbles were on the track, all this kind of stuff is just second nature.  You were totally warmed up, ready for it.

MP: It wasn’t so long ago when big sports car programs held a cautious view of younger F1 drivers looking to drive factory P1 cars. There were concerns of over aggressive behavior, prima donna attitudes, and all the other stereotypes that go with Grand Prix racing. Older F1 drivers were embraced, but there was an age bias, more often than not.
 
But with the changes in technology and reliability, we’ve seen more F1 drivers like Buemi, young guns like Brendon Hartley, Lucas di Grassi, and a few others become fantastic fits for endurance racing. Is that a change in attitudes by the Audis and Toyotas and Porsches, alone? Or do you think it’s a natural progression because current P1 cars demand maximum attack, and we know that’s a driving style F1 drivers bring without hesitation?
 
AD: I suppose when I first came into sports cars properly with Peugeot, yeah, they were looking at the almost retired F1 driver or drivers that achieved like Formula 1--already quite mature and experienced.  I think you do need that type of driver in the sports cars.  It’s not always about the lap time.  It’s not always about putting the car right on the edge and taking risks.  There are certainly more elements involved in driving sports cars in an endurance race than driving a one-and-a-half-hour sprint race in an open-wheeled car.
 
I think, though, having these younger drivers pretty much straight from Formula 1 coming to sports cars now in LMP1 has sort of shifted focus almost.  I definitely saw this new wave of driver come in.  I think as Formula 1 has been hunting for younger drivers--just look at Max Verstappen as an example--we are now getting the retired Formula 1 driver or ex-Formula 1 drivers that are much younger. Buemi was a 24-year-old when he first jumped in a sports car.
 
You see the youth and the enthusiasm from the young guys coming in and it’s impressive.  But it also takes a driver like Seb to have a wise head on their shoulders as well.  It’s a category where you need to be a very rounded driver. I’m lucky that Sebastien has, A, got the speed, and also, B, he’s got maturity, which is quite a rarity for such a young guy to have.
 
MP: Do you think we’ll continue to see the influx of F1 drivers in their 20s finding a home in the WEC?
 
AD: If it keeps going that way then, yeah, and I think in sports cars it’s going to keep bringing on this younger talent and we’re going to see younger and younger guys arrive.  With that comes a bit more of a desperation in your driving.  You’re a bit more insecure as a younger guy or girl.  You want to prove yourself more.  I think we are seeing it turn slightly in sports cars, even since I arrived.  I’ve seen it change.  I don’t know if it’s because the cars have changed as well, but it definitely feels like you have to rag them more than ever before when you’re in there.  Le Mans, it really is a 24-hour sprint race now.  I pushed close to 100 percent every single lap I did this year at Le Mans.  I don’t think it was like that in the past.
 
The cars are incredibly complex now.  It takes a driver with a lot of capacity to be able to handle that.  That is a big part of where the speed comes from today.

MP: Looking at the driver situation from the opposite direction, do you think we’ll see factory teams like Audi and Porsche, in particular, continue to elevate their GT drivers up the ladder into P1 cars, or could we see them rely more on top-tier F1 talent that is unfazed by the speed and systems in the cars? We’ve seen some excellent GT drivers become excellent prototype drivers, but it rarely happens overnight. That’s not the case with drivers stepping into P1 cars which are slower than what they’ve just stepped out of.
 
AD: It’s funny, I never even looked at it like that before.  I just thought the GT car, the GT drivers are the specialist drivers.  I personally find driving GT cars really difficult.  I’m the first one to admit that.  I’m certainly not in my comfort zone when I drive one.  I’m too used to driving cars with downforce and they’re a little bit more edgy and digital to drive.  I get confused by the GT body roll and the softer sidewall to the tires than the P1 car.  I confuse that with snap oversteer.  I confuse body roll with snap oversteer, basically.
 
I would have trepidations putting a GT driver into a P1 car today.  I know it can work, of course, we can see that in Marc Lieb.  But I think it takes time to learn exactly how to drive a car with downforce and much different construction tires.  Going from Formula 1 over to LMP1, you’ve got the hybrid driving style in place as well.  They understand the technology.  Whereas, GT haven’t taken that step yet.  There’s a whole lot more to learn for a modern-day GT driver than there is for, I guess, a modern-day F1 driver to step across to LMP1.

MP: I spoke with a colleague recently who said your Toyota TS040 was the best sprint race car in P1, and I’m looking to make excuses, but I disagreed and would contend the TS040 is the car of the year in P1. Sweeping all but one round—the big one at Le Mans—shouldn’t invalidate the car’s quality, and looking at how much the Toyotas led Le Mans this year, it wasn’t as if speed or quality was lacking. But with that being said, is it right to proclaim a car like the TS040 that didn’t win the biggest race as the best of 2014, or should that automatically go to Audi for winning Le Mans?
 
AD: I think it goes back to the first question.  I think it was the best car, all in all.  I think it was… it’s because… I won the championship because I was driving the best car.  It hasn’t been a dominant car.  I wouldn’t say that.  I think there have been occasions where we genuinely really had to scratch for a victory, especially at the beginning of the year.  The Audi seemed much closer in the beginning of the year then where they are now.  That is a bit of a head scratcher.  I don’t know why.  Why were they pretty much exactly on our car pace if not a

sniff quicker in Silverstone in dry conditions.  The same again at Le Mans.  They were completely lost at Spa.  I don’t know what happened there.  We thought that was an anomaly at Spa, because then after it was Le Mans and they seemed right back on it again.  After Le Mans, they slipped back to almost where they were at Spa.  And that trend continued through to the rest of the year.
 
They’ve been a bit up and down.  I don’t think they quite understood the tires very well.  I don’t think they were matched very well for their car this year.  And that’s something we completely nailed and gave us quite a bit of an advantage, especially at Fuji; I think was the biggest one.  But a lot of the time, our dominance, if you want to call it that, came at the end of stints.  It wasn’t at the beginning.  I think at the beginning of stints we always seemed pretty comparable, especially at Porsche, at the end of the year.  It was only the end of the stint where we started to make progress compared to the rest of them.  I think it’s fair to say at Le Mans when the No. 7 Toyota broke down, they were leading the race by over a minute.  And, yeah, there was a sense of failure; the electrical fire wiped their chances out.  It was something we had ever seen before.  It was one of those real flukey things.  It was just never meant to be.
 
But we can’t forget that Audi had two turbo failures which, that after the sea of testing that they’ve done this year, it’s pretty much inexcusable.  You can’t say that they have the better non-sprint package because there was basically 100 percent attrition at Le Mans this year in P1. It was a case of every P1 car having a failure of some kind, including the winners. We were the only car to not have a technical failure.

MP: You head into the season finale at Brazil with the Drivers’ title sewn up, but there’s more to play for with the Manufacturers’ championship. What’s the mindset—go balls out and drive for fun, knowing that the Drivers’ race is over, or are you and Seb good lads and tow the party line?
 
AD: I always want to win it.  In Bahrain.  I wanted to win at Shanghai but that would’ve been asking too much and that would’ve been asking for luck to come your way by Audi not finishing.  I really feel we didn’t win it by luck this year; we won it by hard work and winning more races than anyone else.  I always said right from the start as soon as I realized we had pretty much the fastest car, that we didn’t need good luck to win the championship--we just didn’t need bad luck.  It was so true.  In Bahrain, I was fully focused on winning the race – winning the championship there.  But it didn’t stop us not going for the race victory.  You probably saw at the start of the race Sebastien flying through the traffic and flying through the cars and getting the lead and then me jumping into the car, it was all going the same way in Shanghai and Fuji.  Then we had the alternator problem.
 
The weight of the championship – winning from our view in Bahrain didn’t hold us back there.  So I don’t think – I hate to say we didn’t leave anything on the table – but it’s great to go to Brazil now to race just for the team.  You’ve got your personal prize out of the way and now you’re just doing it all for the team.  We have to win the Manufacturers’ championship there.  Chances are we will, it looks very good.  Two cars, just have to score 4 points between us, which I think would be fairly straightforward.  That is 3, if Audi don’t get pole, based on the last couple of races, I doubt they’ll be able to achieve, thanks to Porsche’s dominance there.  Yes, looking realistically at it we’ve got 3 points to score.  Yeah, that means we can, especially from car eight’s point of view, and just have fun.  Put our foot down and try and win one more race before the season is over.
 
MP: Maybe you should have your drink bottle topped up with Capirinhas and really enjoy the race…
 
AD: I think it’s been a fantastic year and hopefully it’ll be topped off by winning the Constructors in Brazil as well.  It was great to see car 7 take a victory in the last race in Bahrain.  It was a really nice atmosphere at the end of the race in Bahrain because car seven got a long overdue victory.  They should have won Le Mans this year, I know that.  I think everyone else really does deep down.  It was a great atmosphere in Bahrain because as a team, we’re all winners, so that was really nice.  And for Mike Conway as well to score his first win for the team in only his second race in LMP1, it’s a great achievement and I think he drove really well.  It’s been a really good atmosphere all around for the team this year.

 
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