Simmons’ Silverstone eye-opener
“That was when everyone opened their eyes and went ‘wow’.” So says Chris Dittmann of what he reckons was Ayrton Simmons’ high point in British Formula 3 last season. And it wasn’t one of Simmons’ wins, rather it was his fourth place in Silverstone’s wet-but-drying reversed-grid race.
“It was very much a gamble on tyres, a gamble on set-up for that race, and there was a drying track that we knew he’d be the man to do the job,” Dittmann continues. “We went quite aggressive on a set-up and ultimately it paid off.”
The set-up’s flipside meant that Simmons, starting 12th, dropped even further down the order in the wetter early going. But then, Dittmann recalls, when the conditions came to him Simmons “just absolutely charged back through in the second half of the race, his fastest lap was two seconds faster than anybody else.
“Rather than getting frustrated or making silly mistakes he just dug deep. To drop down [to] 15th or 16th for one point and to end up finishing fourth, everyone’s got the same machinery here, there’s no massively different things, everyone’s on wet tyres, and to come away with that level of pace in front of everyone else it showed what he could do, and us as a team what we could do.
“We knew it was going to be a bold [set-up] choice but with any other driver it might not have paid off.
But we knew with him he was so aggressive getting the tyres warm and everything else. He knew his job, he trusted what we were going to do and he was fully in the zone of what he needed to do. That was the relationship we had towards the end of the year. Just the continuity, the chemistry was brilliant.”
Simmons was proud of the drive too. “I think if I had another lap I would have won the race,” he says. “The bad thing in that race was the whole field was so spread out which was so unfortunate because I think if everyone was together like it usually is we would have had a better result. But to just go from pack to pack and just go through the whole line of cars as easy as I did was amazing. All I had to do was hang for the first lap or two which was pretty scary at times.”