Video: Hot lapping Sonoma Raceway with Simon Pagenaud
R&T: You don't mess around coming out of the pits, huh? Just get right at it …
SP: Yeah! That's what you've got to do … When you're testing, you want to extract the best of the car and you want to have good feedback to the team. So if you don't go 100 percent, you don't feel what the car is going to feel like in qualifying. For me, I always go ten-tenths in testing because I want to know.
R&T: And once you ran into oversteer, you didn't back off.
SP: Obviously, that's too much oversteer. The car doesn't allow me to commit as much as I should be able to in some corners. The car snapped very quickly, which isn't the ideal balance. I remember feeling the car going really loose underneath me, really quickly … The feel [for snap oversteer] comes from your lower back, and your lower back is transmitting information to your brain, then your brain transfers information to your feet and hands. I think certain drivers like a car that's more stuck in the rear, some like a loose car. Me? I like a loose car. I don't like understeer. Some drivers would rather have understeer but, essentially, a loose car with new tires is going to be faster (than an understeer-prone car).
R&T: So why is the car getting so loose in this video?
SP: We were very aggressive with the setup, and it was too much. [Sonoma Raceway] is a track where you have a lot of elevation changes, so the suspension keeps changing on the compression. Every rise in compression, the downforce was going away too much.
R&T: Sure looks like a rough ride …
SP: Sonoma is one of the most physical tracks. You've got no time to breathe. It's left, right, left, elevation change, a crest, sliding rear end—you've got to be really precise with how you put the power down. You can see in the hairpin, where you're not flat until you go to second gear. It's one of those tracks where you have to be attacking all the time and commit. In terms of driving, it's one of the most challenging tracks you go to.
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R&T: How can you even keep your vision ahead to the next apex when the one you're at is tearing you to pieces?
SP: When you drive at this level, I think you kind of slow down the image. You anticipate what's going to happen. When you get very focused as an athlete—whether you're a driver or do strength and athletics—you get in a zone and everything has a tendency to slow down. In that first chicane [Turn 8] you're basically placing the car one corner in advance. It's a thought process.
R&T: What about that new twin-turbo setup? Is it nastier than last year's HPD motor set?
SP: Well Sonoma is the lowest-grip track we go to, so it's always difficult to get around the corners without a loss of traction. But, for sure, the Honda engine has more power available. It seems like it's faster; it seems like there's more loss of traction. Every year there's going to be more and more power—that's the advantage of an engine war, and that's what's great about the sport right now. Every year, the cars are faster and faster.