From wrestling a GT3 RS to sliding classics, watching the masters can be a driving masterclass
It’s fair to assume that if you’re reading this, you like driving. I love it.
And I’m not just talking about haring up and down a mountain road in a Porsche 911: I’ve enjoyed the occasional 5mph trudge around the M25, revelling in the one-two-three shifts and rev-matched downchanges. But I can also take great pleasure in not driving – more specifically in watching great drivers at work.
There was a period when it was a fixture on Porsche launches for rally legend Walter Röhrl to turn up and give passenger rides. That was sadly before my time, and I’m quite envious of anyone who got to sit next to him.
Thankfully, YouTube is a pretty good substitute, and Röhrl is hugely enjoyable to watch. He has this economy of motion to his driving style that makes it look as if he’s just fetching an apfelstrudel at the bakery on a Sunday morning. Yet the speedometer and the lap times confirm he’s not pootling.
Watch closely and there’s always something to learn about lines or steering and gearchange technique. I feel like I become a better driver simply by osmosis.
Following Autocar’s Jaguar Type 00 prototype passenger rides, there was some discussion about how much one can learn about a car by being a passenger. I’ll go one further and say that there’s a huge amount to be learned about a car by watching an on-board video of it being driven by a benchmark driver.
When the 992.1-generation 911 GT3 RS (the one with all the downforce) was launched a few years ago, some on-board footage surfaced of Le Mans winner and Porsche works driver Jörg Bergmeister taking it around Silverstone. In general his style seems to be more aggressive than Röhrl’s, but this was something else.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was an amateur, being very busy at the wheel and always understeering slightly, punctuated by spikes of oversteer. But we know that Bergmeister is quite the opposite. Clearly the effect of all that aero is a car that wants to be slightly over-driven; better to maximise the speed and ride out the understeer than lose speed and the associated downforce.
Meanwhile, when French motoring magazine L’Argus tests a performance car, its ace driver, Mathieu Sentis, heads to the Nürburgring. He does this on the open ‘tourist days’, so I dread to think of the insurance and risk assessment implications, but the resulting video is always fascinating and says more about the car than some reviews. (Not ours, obviously…)
Sentis is very much an adherent of the Röhrl academy of zen, so the cars in which his driving gets ragged really stand out. The way some let themselves be effortlessly teased into a graceful drift while others doggedly grip, the speed of the manual gearchanges and the apparent steering effort reveal so much about the cars.
Conversely, I think the joy of watching great drivers is why I’ve long tuned out of Formula 1. It has the best drivers in the world and the best cameras to capture them with crystal-clear imagery, so it should be the pinnacle of vicarious driving. But the cars have such quick steering and are so perfectly composed most of the time that there isn’t all that much to see or appreciate.
Historic racing is the exact opposite, and all the better for it. The cars are very much not the fastest things going, because their classic-style tyres mean that they’re sliding around all over the place and their recalcitrant old gearboxes require a bit of care. As a consequence, the drivers are kept very busy with fancy footwork and sawing away at the huge steering wheels. The result is magnetic to watch.
