Alex Wurz: The cheapest way to buy laptime in F1?

It's normal practice for even the greatest performers in football, tennis, golf and any other number of top-line sports to have coaches. Yet in Formula 1, the idea of a driver coach - or, as new Williams recruit Alex Wurz has been dubbed, a 'driver mentor' - is alien, even though it's now the norm in most junior categories. Unusually, the former Benetton, McLaren and Williams driver is now attached to Williams on what is best described as a consultancy basis, where his job will be to work with Pastor Maldonado, Bruno Senna and reserve pilot Valtteri Bottas.

So what does the role actually involve? Well, firstly it's abundantly clear that it's early days in this role, so Wurz's brief is very fluid. The 38-year-old Austrian, who since his final grand prix start in 2007 has won the Le Mans 24 Hours for Peugeot and now joined Toyota's sportscar team, is not there to teach his charges how to suck eggs.

"First of all, they are top-notch drivers," says Wurz. "They have won races in GP2, which is a very competitive series, and have some great skills as F1 drivers. But compare the situation to the greatest in all sports; it's normal for Tiger Woods or Roger Federer to have a mentor or trainer. I'm sure that Tiger's coach doesn't play as well as him, but he knows his personality; he knows how he thinks. It's just an extra set of eyes and an extra brain.

Wurz made F1 debut in Canada in '97, and took podium finish at Silverstone © LAT

"In this respect, F1 is maybe one of the last sports that has not got involved in this kind of performance optimisation, to use a Ron Dennis phrase. For Williams to take this innovative step is really cool. Exactly how it unfolds depends on the individual driver. Some of them may need nothing for an entire weekend or season because they are performing at their peak, but there may be cases where the hundreds of thousands of test miles that I have done and the experience I have could be of help.

"F1 is something of a macho world in which drivers are expected to be machines when they come in and be perfect. Perfection always needs a bit of help here and there."

Wurz himself knows how difficult it can be to seek the right help as an F1 driver. During his 69-grand prix career, the Austrian believes he could have benefited more from somebody in the driver-mentor role. But he didn't realise by just how much until he got back into sportscar racing in 2008.

"In F1, you are trapped into the way that things operate, inside the same box with no lateral thinking outside of it," he says. "I realised early on that it would be helpful, but there was never anything like what I am doing now.

"Then, when I came back into sportscars and shared a car with other F1 drivers, we started to coach each other. We all found it useful to have someone to talk to with the same way of thinking, who knows life on the limit not only in the car but over the whole weekend. We all became more efficient because of this."

While Wurz is attached to the team, his mentoring role is designed to operate in parallel with, rather than as part of, the engineering side. He attended last week's Barcelona test to advise Senna, Maldonado and Bottas and already found himself discussing all manner of things with the drivers. What's more, he already has a feel for how he will have to tailor the way he works to each one.

The Austrian is aiming for a third Le Mans win with Toyota this year © LAT

"The technical staff have their own operation and I only deal with the driver aspect," he says. "There are different stages for the drivers. Maybe our young Finnish driver, Valtteri, needs this kind of information more than Bruno, who's very educated already, but I can still pass it on. Whatever they need, whenever they're hungry, I will be happy to help."

At Barcelona, Wurz spent plenty of time watching trackside to understand what the drivers were doing, again proving the value of an extra pair of eyes being able to feed information towards the man in the cockpit.

But that doesn't mean he wants to force his feedback upon the drivers. Instead, he will focus on being armed with as much information as he can when they need him.

"If the driver is open to this as an extra piece of information, then I'm more than happy to go into these details," he says. "I don't want to invade their world. In fact, that's the worst mistake that I could make now, because they are the world's top drivers. It would be a suicidal move if I were to tell them how to drive the car. I'd be better off staying at home."

Of course, the racing world is full of examples of ex-drivers who have caused way more harm than good by trying to teach their pilots how to drive. And some of those examples come from drivers with far more illustrious CVs than Wurz who, as good as he is, has only a trio of top-three results to his name.

There's an old adage about the greatest exponents of a sport being the worst coaches. The hypothesis is that the greatest often learn their trade so rapidly that processes get worked down to a sub-conscious level before they even realise what they're doing. In that situation, a great driver may struggle to know what it is that they're trying to communicate.

At Williams he will mentor Maldonado, Senna and Bottas © LAT

This same principle would suggest that it's those who had to work harder at their craft who have a greater depth of understanding of how to teach, having themselves gone through a longer learning process. It's a view that Wurz has plenty of sympathy with, even if it inevitably casts him as a driver who wasn't quite on the pace of the greats during his time in F1.

"You may think that the best drivers and sportsmen aren't the best coaches," says Wurz. "In general, I would agree with you but there are occasions when it's not correct. Walter Rohrl, one of the greatest of all time, is an absolutely stunning coach.

"I've had conversations with grand prix winners and even world champions when working for TV in F1 and I've asked them why they're doing a certain thing, because sometimes I think I've seen something they have ignored. There was a good example with a recent world champion on the Friday at last year's Brazilian Grand Prix. I said something and it triggered a little thought that helped him to realise that he was causing a problem he was trying to solve with set-up changes. He adapted, and it was no longer a problem, so was faster.

"Of course, I'm not as quick as this guy but I had the time in free practice to watch him, while he and his engineers had a massive workload, and pick up this small thing. Even the best can make use of that."

Wurz has already pointed out that driver coaching has often been overlooked at the top level. And, if anything, it's becoming more essential. Since 2009, in-season testing has been banned (although a three-day Mugello test will be held in May this year), so track time is at a premium.

Every time a driver takes to the track, there is a programme to work to. There is little time to focus on their own performance except as a secondary consideration. Add in mixed track conditions to each driver's six pre-season test days, and that means very little meaningful running.

A regular post-session chat between driver and engineer. Now add mentor in © LAT

"Testing regulations are so limited," says Wurz. "It's not only the amount of days, but here at Barcelona you start with a track temperature of six degrees and you're limited with tyres. That one day is filtered down to maybe two hours of really clean running when the track has stabilised. The amount of clean laps you have is limited.

"The rest always becomes a bit of a grey area because the wind changes, the track changes, the car changes between runs. There are so many variables that there is much less learning time for drivers."

It remains to be seen how the bold Williams mentoring experience works. There can be little doubt that the idea is sound and that the man selected - an experienced, analytical and affable character such as Wurz - has exactly the skill set needed. Most likely, it will depend on how the drivers take to him. Based on the evidence so far, it's going to work.

And if that is the case, it's possible that Wurz could be the man who changes attitudes and makes driver coaching a formalised part of what a grand prix team does. What was once done on an ad hoc basis, or not at all, could become as natural a thing as a coach on the football training pitch.

What's more, if he can extract a little more performance out of his drivers, even if it's just teasing a fraction more consistency that adds up to a tiny fraction of a second, he will likely be cheaper than the same improvement being made to the car technically.

"When I was talking to Williams about this, I said that I was hoping to become the easiest and cheapest win in terms of laptime," says Wurz. "Maybe we won't find it in pure laptime - perhaps it's more about consistency. But whatever it is, it can improve the driver performance."

And that will be the deciding factor in whether this experiment succeeds. As Wurz says, the stopwatch doesn't lie and, should the Williams pilots up their game this year, it's likely that he will have had a hand in it.

And that could lead to mentoring becoming an industry standard, even for the top teams who are running the best drivers in the business.