HOW TO BE AN ACE ENGINEER
DAMS technical director Remi Decorzent shares his tips for a successful career
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s a powerful tool for engineers. And for DAMS Formula 2 technical director Remi Decorzent, it’s been the driving principle of a career that led him to spend a decade in Formula 1 with Sauber and Toyota, bookended by spells in the junior formulas. Central to the stalwart French team’s six titles in the GP2/F2 era, he’s also sampled life on the Indycar beat, worked on sportscars, and designed a downhill world championship-winning mountain bike.
After studying mechanical engineering, Decorzent discovered the ins and outs of car engineering by reading books in English. “I learned motorsport by myself,” he says. “It’s important to be curious, to go to the end of things. We often meet young engineers that don’t know basic stuff – they haven’t been curious enough.”
His first job was for French Formula 3 team Daniel Gache Racing in 1989, working as a mechanic for rookie Laurent Aiello. But at Gache’s insistence, Decorzent left after six months to engineer his son Philippe at the Apomatox Formula 3000 team. A maiden podium came in Birmingham with Didier Artzet in 1990, but funds were limited. “It was difficult to compete,” he says, “so I decided to go to Danielson.”
There came one of the best learning experiences of Decorzent’s career, running Peugeot Spiders and F3000 cars alongside Jacky Eeckelaert – “He taught me a lot, like a stepbrother” – and being afforded considerable freedom by company boss Joseph Lebris to indulge in side projects.
These included creating his own lap time simulation software, aero-mapping, and the “very high-level” mountain bike that Nicolas Vouilloz rode with great success. “[Lebris] never stopped anyone in their will to do better,” says Decorzent. “It was for me a very good school.”
But the team hit the skids in 1996 when backer Shannon failed to pay its invoices, leading Decorzent to join Lola as an Indycar support engineer. It didn’t last: “Everybody shouted at me, I was the representative of a car that wasn’t working…”
On his return to F3000 with Mclaren’s new junior team, he ran Nick Heidfeld to second in 1998, and welcomed its processdriven methodology. “It’s this philosophy of why you are fast that I try to put in place in DAMS,” he says. “In my life, without the English teams, I will never be what I am.”
His F1 break came with Sauber, initially as a performance engineer in 1999. But by the end of the year, he’d been promoted to race engineer Pedro Diniz, scoring his first points with Mika Salo in 2000 and then being reunited with Heidfeld in 2001. Decorzent struggled for confidence during this time, and frequently threw up after qualifying to dispel his nervous energy. “I always found I am really stressed, but I wanted to face the hardest challenge.”
Toyota came calling for 2004. He ran Cristiano da Matta before being switched to Olivier Panis’s car and then onto the test team for 2005, a move made to appease new signing Ralf Schumacher.
When Toyota left F1 in 2009, Decorzent landed at DAMS, overseeing its run of titles with Romain Grosjean (2011), Davide Valsecchi (2012) and Jolyon Palmer (2014), plus three teams’ crowns in 2012, 2014 and 2019. For the foreseeable future, he’s happy in F2, which “is giving a good balance”.
“I try to form young drivers and young engineers – and I try to keep them,” he says. “To build a team that is not an empty box, you need to have the same people or to build a reserve of people coming from school to a level in engineering. That’s why I stay in DAMS.” ■