A KIWI LEGEND WORKS WITH… SCOTT DIXON
WSR returned to single-seaters in A1GP, when it ran Team New Zealand in the inaugural season of 2005-06. The team would go on to run the USA and Singapore entries too, but its best campaign was with the All-black car. Matt Halliday drove in the majority of races, and Jonny Reid in some, but the team also welcomed Scott Dixon – then a one-time Indycar champion – to the cockpit for practice at the Dubai round.
The Dubai Autodrome was the first venue designed by WSR’S Clive Bowen, Bennetts and Drew Macdonald, who all then worked on
Hampton Downs in New Zealand. Macdonald also created the revised Silverstone GP Circuit in 2010, alongside Populous Design.
“For Scott it was his first time in an A1GP car, so that was difficult,” points out Bennetts, “and to go to a brand new track you’ve never seen… Luckily we had every corner radius because we designed Dubai Autodrome. We could tell him every radius, every bit of camber of every corner. But it also highlighted we had an engine problem that weekend. Really interesting to listen to Scott’s feedback, but yeah, when we overlaid it we were down on power, so we complained to the engine supplier [Zytek] about it and they reckoned there was nothing wrong with it.
“We were quicker off the 180-degree corner onto the main straight, because Scott got the right line pretty quickly. And down the end of the straight we were down quite a bit. Unbeknown to the engine builder, I got an overlay [of data] from a friend of mine at another team running the same rear-wing set-up. It would have been good to have someone like Scott in the car for a season. Top man. I still follow his races.”