He teased us, cryptically, with the Twitter post.
“Little blog to sign off last year. My 2019 calendar is filling up with a few exciting projects. I will be busy! Feeling good about everything that comes next. There are more chapters to write!”
How cool to get the news this week that Brendon Hartley’s involvement with Formula One will continue past 2018’s toxic Toro Rosso drive.
How interesting that his new role will without doubt bring him in contact with leading Prema driver and Ferrari Driver Academy member Marcus Armstrong.
Well done Ferrari for recognising one of the attributes that puts Brendon head and shoulders ahead of other drivers: his ability to both analyse in depth what his vehicle is doing and more importantly to describe its behaviour in detail to his engineers.
That, for many, was the difference between Brendon and another Kiwi star: Tauranga’s Richie Stanaway. Richie was blindingly fast, an instinctive racer and his single-seater career was on a fast track until it was derailed by that awful bone-cracking accident in 2012. Brendon, more reflective, more considered, drove tactically perfect races, never putting his car at risk and only occasionally having to weave through messes made by other racers. That’s how you become the World Endurance Champion.
There was a point where Brendon and Richie Stanaway were leading lights in the growing group of Toyota Racing Series graduates.
Brendon did more TRS races than Richie, and aged 15 was the first ever TRS race winner – which we should never tire of reminding ourselves about. And the big stuff is well known – WEC and Le Mans and then F1 when Porsche shut down its WEC squad. Less well remembered perhaps is Brendon’s first European championship title – Formula Renault 2.0 – with Epsilon in 2007, having made the jump to Europe the year before. He was against the likes of the late Jules Bianchi, Charles Pic, Oliver Turvey and his team-mate Jaime Alguersari.
Richie surged into the domestic Toyota series and almost as quickly was gone again, having wowed the crowds at the Hamilton V8 Supercar event in 2009 and lifted the stand-alone Hamilton 400 TRS trophy in the process. Those were different times. At Hamilton, he was up against a mainly Kiwi field with the exception of Australian driver Nathan Antunes. Sam MacNeill, Daniel Jilesen, Michael Burdett, Mitch Cunningham and others were all very much on the pace and the difference really did come down to Richie’s raw talent.
But back to Brendon and the new role – working the sims for Ferrari F1. This builds on a very successful time in Brendon’s career, when he rebounded from being dumped as support driver for the Red Bull and Toro Rosso F1 teams. Yep, them again.
He had a test for Toro Rosso (2008), then was support and test driver for both teams (2009), and in 2010 appeared to have set himself on a path to a pukka F1 drive when the dollar factor chimed in. Jaime Alguersari’s ambitions were the same as Brendon’s and where Bryan Hartley could have elevated Brendon to the role just on sheer passion and force of will, Jaime’s dad had very deep pockets and a loud voice.
So out went Brendon, in went Jaime, shortly afterward up went Jaime to an actual drive. Not long after that out went Jaime with no drive, but we shouldn’t mention that.
Everything happens for a reason though, and Hartley forged on with his career in Europe, continuing to drive in the well-regarded Formula Renault 3.5 series and picking up a handful of drives in GP2, the official feeder series to Formula One.
That persistence not only led to some testing for Mercedes in 2012, his last time on track with an F1 team, it also opened doors for a role away from the track working on sims and working with the massive data-dumps sent back from trackside by the team.
So now – as well as retaining his ties with the Porsche motorsport organisation as it transitions toward Formula E, Brendon will help make the Ferrari equipe faster in F1. Not bad for the kid from Palmerston North. It’s easy to imagine the ghost of a smile tweaking Brendon’s mouth every time the Italian stallions finish ahead of the energy empire.
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