Grapevine: Ricardo does Monterey - Part 1

Hi there from Monterey, California.

A cool part of my job as third driver and tester for the Panasonic Toyota Racing F1 team is to perform demonstration runs like the ones we'll put on during the 33rd Rolex Monterey Historic Races at Laguna Seca.

For me, it's great to be in Monterey again, where I took the pole and won the race (and the title!) in the FIA GT championship back in 1998.

Events like the Monterey Historics are very important for Toyota, which is very proud of its sporting heritage, so we approach them very seriously, working hard to make sure the company is represented in the best possible way.

Also, this event is a great chance for me to drive an F1 car just for fun, away from the pressures of testing or racing, and get to know a beautiful part of the world a little better.

People asked me if I was going to do any surfing while in California (I used to surf all the time back at home, in Brazil), but I think I'll take a pass on this one: I've heard there are a few too many white sharks in the waters around here...

I've been really looking forward to running with the Toyota TF106 F1 car at Laguna Seca Raceway. On Thursday afternoon, I drove a handful of installation laps, just to shake down the car before our actual demo runs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was brief, but it was a lot of fun.

It's been a long time since I last drove at Laguna, so I decided to familiarize myself with the layout in a road car first.

After a quick chat with three-time F1 World Champion Sir Jack Brabham, who is one of the guys taking center stage this weekend, my engineer and I put in a couple of reconnaissance laps in a Lexus GS 430.

Since '98, the track has changed a bit, specially the surface, which has been completely repaved. There's also a little bit more runoff around the track, in fact it's now much closer to what's needed to safely run an F1 car.

Once I was strapped inside my TF106 (finally!), I did one lap on intermediate tyres just for system checks. I brought the car back in and the guys put on the pre-heated grooved Bridgestones and sent me out again for a half-dozen installation laps. Time to turn it up a little!

Even with "guesstimated" settings, it was very positive overall, but we still need to adapt the car a little bit to cope better with the bumps. The traction felt really on the edge because of that.

In fact, I anticipate we'll change the car quite a lot for the demonstration run, certainly soften the suspension a little bit.

As far as the track record goes (which I'm told is 1:07.722, set by Helio Castroneves in CART back in 2000), it's not something I'm concerned about.

In F1, we're running V8 engines this year, which have about 20 percent less power than the V10s that were used until last season.

My biggest focus really is to give the thousands of historic racing fans at Monterey a chance to see a modern F1 car in action. I'm sure they'll be impressed.

All in all, it was a good first day, and I'm looking forward to getting out there again.