When a generation of drivers learned skills for life from an atypical academy scheme

What do Stoffel Vandoorne, Alexander Rossi, Alex Lynn, Michelle Gatting, Timmy Hansen and Macauley Jones have in common? There may be any number of links between that disparate bunch, but one common thread is that they were all part of a largely forgotten young driver programme that kicked off more than 10 years ago.

It wasn’t run by a Formula 1 team or a manufacturer, and neither did it involve putting the participants’ bums in racing cars. Yet those who took part view it as an important staging post in their careers. And its legacy stretches beyond the successes – a Formula E title, an Indianapolis 500 victory and a World Rallycross Championship crown included – that the up-and-comers on its books went on to achieve.

The scheme in question is the grandly titled FIA Institute Young Driver Excellence Academy. More than 60 drivers were involved over a series of intakes between 2011 and 2015. Others who took part include the much-missed Craig Breen and Anthoine Hubert, plus Michael Christensen, Andrea Caldarelli, Lucas Auer, Kelvin van der Linde, Pietro Fittipaldi and Jordan King.

It wasn’t devised specifically to propel drivers to F1 or the higher reaches of the sport, but rather to give them the grounding they needed to climb the ladder or to make careers out of their chosen discipline, while at the same time making them aware of their social responsibilities. The FIA Institute, founded in 2004 to promote sustainability and safety in motorsport, wanted its charges on the scheme to be advocates for road safety, too.

The academy was the brainchild of Richard Woods, the Institute’s director general and the FIA’s former communications and campaigns director. It came at a time when the Institute had access to some of the $100million that came into the FIA’s coffers as a result of the F1 spy scandal – that was the fine that was handed down to McLaren for its part in the controversy. (It lost its constructors’ points, too, from the 2007 season.)

Woods brought together Robert Reid, winner of the 2001 World Rally Championship as Richard Burns’s co-driver and today the FIA’s deputy president of sport, and ex-F1 driver and two-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner Alex Wurz to conceive the Institute’s excellence programme.

Current Porsche factory driver Christensen benefitted from the scheme as a way to learn from his peers, while having fun

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths

Reid, as performance director of the Motor Sport Association (Britain’s national sporting authority, now known as Motorsport UK) had been involved in devising its coaching programmes through his Elite Sports Performance company, while Wurz, who at the time of the launch of the academy was between stints as a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (he became chairman in 2014), ran Test & Training International. It is an organisation with a reach that includes road safety, driver coaching and management, and circuit design that he runs to this day with his father Franz, a three-time winner of the European Rallycross Championship in the 1970s and early 1980s.

“I didn’t know the amazing things Robert was doing and he didn’t know what I was doing,” recalls Wurz. “But Richard knew both of us and what we did. He brought us together, sat us around the table and said, ‘This is what we want to do’.”

The goal was not conventional by the standards of most young driver schemes.

"We weren’t coaching them specifically – we were asking them questions and getting them to think"
Robert Reid

“Our aim was to offer a different kind of coaching to a traditional young driver programme,” explains Wurz. “We wanted to give our academy members skills and values for life. Normal driver programmes don’t do that: they pick who they think is best from karting or Formula 4, and then one or two years later if you don’t perform, you’re out. That was not what the excellence academy was about.”

The Institute’s young driver programme was inaugurated in 2010 for the following season. Drivers had to apply to take part, and then a selection process whittled the applicants down to the final 12. In year one, Vandoorne, Hansen and Rossi were joined by, among others, Robin Frijns, Andreas Mikkelsen, Philipp Eng and Paul-Loup Chatin.

They were tutored through 2011 over the course of a series a multi-day workshops around Europe. There were trips to the Wurz family’s T&TI centre at Melk in Austria to learn about vehicle dynamics, tyre science and more, and to Edinburgh University to work on fitness, psychology and nutrition. Then there were training camps in mainland Europe. Chamonix was one venue chosen by the academy.

Wurz explains that “training by group dynamic” was one of the cornerstones of the programme.

On-track performance wasn't the only element that academy members learned from Wurz and Reid

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths

“If an instructor tells you a message, we know the uptake has a certain efficiency,” he explains. “If a group of peers finds the answer out – coaching themselves, if you like – the efficiency is much higher.”

Reid: “We weren’t coaching them specifically – we were asking them questions and getting them to think. The more you engage your brain, as Alex says, the more you retain the information and can transfer it into different situations. We were giving them the ability for self reflection.”

Reid and Wurz also wanted the drivers on the scheme to learn from each other: the range of backgrounds of the participants aided that process. It wasn’t just drivers from rallying and rallycross who joined the circuit racers; there were also representatives from truck racing and drifting. That holistic approach and the independence of the scheme was one of its strengths, reckons Reid.

“We had no allegiance to any manufacturer or focus on any motorsport discipline,” he says. “That allowed us to take drivers from all different disciplines.

“Kids doing 30 weekends a year in one car become very specialised. One of the big things when you put 10 or so drivers together is what they learned from each other. We were standing at Melk and one of the rally drivers, Kevin Abbring [a winner of the Ypres Rally who has also competed in the WRX], went out on the low-friction surface and the jaws of all the racing drivers dropped.”

Michael Christensen, today part of Porsche’s World Endurance Championship Hypercar squad, remembers the cross-fertilisation with drivers from other disciplines being invaluable.

“We got to learn from each other, while having some fun,” says Christensen, part of the year-two intake, who at the time was changing career direction with a move from GP3 to the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany. “When you are young and coming out of high-level karting and then [going into] single-seaters, you can be a little bit arrogant. Then you come up against someone you’ve never heard of and he beats your arse. It humbles you a little bit.”

Cadillac WEC driver Alex Lynn was part of the excellence academy in the same year, 2012, and has similar memories, not least because both came up against the late Breen in a competition aboard BMW M3s at Melk.

Lynn recalls being impressed by Breen when they went head-to-head

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths

“It was cold and wet, bordering on icy, and we were on semi-slicks,” recalls the Briton, who roomed with another rally man, current Toyota WRC driver Elfyn Evans. “There were a lot of highly charged young racing drivers wanting to prove something. I lost out in the semis to Craig. What a talent. You definitely learn something in that situation.”

The final was Breen versus Christensen. “He won, but only by a tenth!” laughs the Dane, who would become a Porsche junior driver over the course of his stint with the academy.

“I’m not sure it made me a better racing driver per se, but it opened the door to the things I had to do to make me a better driver,” continues Christensen. “It helped me understand what I needed to focus on; it told me that I was good enough, but that I just had to work on the right things. It gave me the tools, if you like.”

"It lifted the way to train and coach young drivers to a new level. I think both of us believe that we came up with something beautiful and gave something to motorsport"
Alex Wurz

Lynn describes the excellence academy as being “definitely important in my career”. It “broadened the horizons” of a driver who was then racing in British Formula 3.

“Specifically, it helped with the way I went about training,” he says. “I hadn’t long left school, so training meant a bit of cross-country during PE and maybe the odd trip to the gym. I didn’t know what I was doing. The academy was good at teaching young drivers about their fitness and nutrition. Overall, it definitely made me a more rounded driver.”

The Young Driver Excellence Academy came to an end after 2015 when the FIA Institute ceased to exist. Its educational programmes were taken in-house by the governing body, and its role in safety was taken over by the Global Institute for Motor Sport Safety. Yet Wurz and Reid believe the Institute’s academy has had a lasting legacy.

“Still today, Alex and I often get messages when someone wins a race or a championship,” says Reid.

Today Wurz and Reid are still in touch with graduates of the scheme

Photo by: DPPI

More importantly, thinks Wurz, it set a new tone for driver training that continues to this day, and not only in the programmes the FIA runs – the CIK Karting Academy Trophy, Rally Star and Girls on Track.

“It lifted the way to train and coach young drivers to a new level,” he says. “I think both of us believe that we came up with something beautiful and gave something to motorsport.”

Yet there are also some other, less tangible examples of its legacy, reckons the Austrian: “When we started, drivers weren’t warming up properly before a session or a race. That was one of the things we taught. When drivers like Stoffel started doing warm-up exercises for the body, the mind and the eyes, two or three years later you saw the entire Formula Renault or F3 paddock doing a proper warm-up routine. It had an effect.”

Speeding up by slowing down

A young driver cutting a swathe through junior single-seaters might ponder the value of going out on a slippery track in a relatively low-powered road car shod with semi-slicks. Yet Alex Wurz insists that it’s obvious for a simple reason: the laws of physics remain the same whether a car is doing 25km/h (15mph) or 250km/h.

“You can have very talented drivers who don’t understand the science behind driving,” he says. “If you have a not very decisive or clean steering input, you can’t process what is going on at high speed because it’s all happening so quickly. But if you are going much slower in a normal road car on a slippery track, it all happens much slower and you can figure it out.

“You can then go back to the classroom and [learn] about slip angles, friction circles and weight transfer before going out on track and trying again. This can make you a better driver and a smoother driver. It can also help you talk to your engineer because you really understand what the car is doing. So it makes the driver more popular in the paddock, too.”

Speed wasn't the essence of the FIA Institute's Young Driver Excellence Academy, but car control figured highly

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths