The World sportscar champion reflects on a decorated career
At the very start of my career, I had a relationship with Martin Donnelly; my dad had helped out some drivers before with sponsorship who had been driving for Martin like Jamie Spence. My dad was always into motorsport and so we ended up driving in Formula Ford, kind of Class B in my first year of 2001, the junior version, and I really didn’t like them when I first got into Formula Ford.
I went from a go-kart which was light, with super-sticky tyres and lots of power, and got into this heavy Formula Ford and I just didn’t gel with it at all. The first few tests I really wasn’t sure, I thought I’d made a mistake to get into cars. But then slowly I got used to the car and what it needed.
The first year was full of a lot of mistakes of thinking that I was still in a go-kart and diving up the inside and ripping the front corner off and thinking ‘oh f***!’ Sometimes the day was over after half a lap. But in your early days you learn a lot pretty quickly.
I managed to pick up the Van Diemen drive the year after, and I had some good team-mates along the way, people like Wesley Barber and Jan Heylen and some real top boys there. Again, I was on the pace a lot of weekends, had some good results but probably just didn’t have the consistency that I needed through the year.
Once I jumped into Formula Renault I really felt more at home. I needed a car with more grip. I loved having a car with downforce and had a good couple of years there building up to winning the 2004 championship. That went well and then Formula 3, again, it was a twoyear process of learning in the first year and then winning the championship.
I’ve just always found that with more grip I just really enjoyed it a lot more as well. I really enjoyed those days – they were hard but
I really enjoyed them and I think I was just developing as a driver as well. Then GP2 I found pretty tough, really. It was quite a big step from Formula 3 to GP2 and I had some good pace and good results, like winning at Monaco, but consistency again just wasn’t really good.
That was when the IndyCar stuff popped up in 2008 and I jumped at that and it was really fun. There were more ovals on the schedule then, it was sort of half ovals and half road courses and I really enjoyed the first year.
I made a lot of mistakes on the ovals, as rookies do, but I was really looking forward to the second year with that good progression that you normally make in the second year of anything.
I felt like the first year at Indy was really good, we led some laps there and had a really good strategy and in the second year again we were leading laps and nearly on for the win at the end and then had a massive shunt. That kind of put me out of any kind of racing at all that whole year but it was also a really good time to reset and really thinking about the future a bit more.
I had a couple of up-and-down years after that. I was more successful on the road courses and that’s why in the end I wanted to call it a day on the ovals. Luckily, more teams wanted to employ me and I ended up winning more races at that time than I did before the accident so I was happy with my motorsport at that time.
I guess at a young age you’re fully focused on Formula 1, so I was fully focused on that. And then I realized that it’s probably not going to happen but then some other opportunities came up with IndyCar and so I was fully focused on the IndyCar stuff.
Towards the end of that a sportscar deal came up and I’d always wondered about Le Mans, followed it a little bit, and jumped at the chance to do that and just fell in love with the cars, really.
I really liked the way that you had to drive them, working with team-mates and it was a real team effort, all the sportscar stuff, and so it was a great decision. In 2013 I ended up doing a dual programme and splitting my time between IndyCars and sportscars with G-Drive.
That was a really fun year, winning races in different categories and that’s when I really felt that I was back to enjoying racing and back to driving cars that I really loved. It was fun again.
I really started to enjoy motorsport a lot more once I went away from the IndyCar side and I’ve been loving it ever since. The technology and development, especially when I first joined Toyota in 2015, were what really attracted me. There was a lot of development going on and it was really cool to be part of that era. It was really, really fun.
Now it’s a little bit different, but I think sportscars in general are getting really healthy again and a lot more manufacturers are coming back next year and so as a driver it’s really a good time to be part of it.
It’s really nice to be able to say that I’m a double World champion. Once you win it once, I discovered that you really, really want to retain it – and that doing so is just as hard as winning the first one in many ways. I’m really proud of last year and getting that second title… I just have to try and get a third one now!