 The overall is completely asymmetric. The four tires are completely different. We may think, but we have bad memories, that we met in 2003. Maybe. Maybe. Hey everyone, so today I'm going to talk about Driver's Engineer Relationship. So that's Olivier Boisson. Hello. Olivier Boisson, I guess, in English. In English. Oliver Drink. Oh, Tintin, Tintin, for the most friendly ones. Olivier has been my engineer in the car since I arrived. Did you come in racing last year and I'm ready also for this year? Yep. Yeah, make sure that if you like the videos, you subscribe, you like, you leave us a comment. As always, happy to talk about it, reply, answer, and film more. Okay, I guess everyone knows what an engineer is, by the set of the car. I want to go more into detail between a Formula 1 engineer and a race engineer, Indica engineer, and which type of engineer we have. Because you are my race engineer. Is that what we said in Indica? Yes, race engineer. What do you do for me? I make sure... I know, I know what Olivier does for me, but... I make sure the car is ready, make sure the setup, just developing the setup, try to make sure, you know, everything is organized between us, the crews, and talking with the crew chief, make sure all the setup is sent to those guys, and also, you know, making sure we adjust everything, and we tune in the car, do some simulation, and making sure it's all, you know, optimized. Next to you, there are more engineers, right? Two more. We've got, yeah, two more. The performance engineer. Okay, that's the same as Formula 1, so I'm not lost on that one. Yeah, and what we call the DAG, which is electronic engineering, right? The guy is in charge, the person in charge of... Yeah, because for us, it's Lizzie, it's a lady, and she's doing a good job. Yeah, so she's in charge of all the electronics on the car, make sure the data acquisition system is working, and, you know, we get all the data, and everything's calibrated right. And the button, I'm not doing what I suppose you don't see. All the steering wheel, all those things, yeah. And then on top of that, we've got Honda engineer. Yeah, for the engine. For the engine, and a strategist. Yeah, a strategist. For the strategy of the race. So that's on the pit stand. That's how much people we have. Obviously, for Formula 1, there's a lot more engineers behind the scene, but in the car, that's what we have. I guess, you know, the relationship between driving an engine is not easy, because I can tell you that's yellow, and you're gonna like, well, that's yellow or orange. And when I drive the car, it's the same thing. I can say, okay, the car is oversteering on entry, but what do I call entry at the corner? What do I call oversteer? What do I call a snap? And then understeer and so on. So that's why you have really to build the relationship, and for you to translate those words into mathematics, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, everybody have a feel different things in the car. Every driver have different way to describe how they feel things, and what they feel. So our job is to make sure we understand that by building that relationship, we try to be, you know, it gets easier as we go to understand what you mean, and what you want, and how you feel things. So we can try to adjust accordingly. We may think, but we have bad memories, that we met in 2003. Maybe. Maybe. You're from France, not from so ingenious Switzerland. Did you always want to become an engineer, or was it something? I like racing, just always like racing. As a kid, just, you know, working on cars, and motorcycle, bicycle, always wanted to do stuff engineering-wise and mechanic-wise. So, and racing is fun because, you know, it's fast-paced, it's pretty quick, you can make decisions, make things happen pretty fast, and, you know, get to travel, which is really fun too, so. So you started in Europe in France. Yep. And then very quickly you moved into USA. Yes, as soon as I was done with school here, 2004, just with a backpack. And then you went straight into Indica, which is quite rare, right? Yep. At the time it was called Chamco. They had the whole Indica Chamco split, and yep, and I got hired to build shock absorber dampers for an Indica team, Chamco team, yep. Yeah, so what you have to note, Indica is everyone's the same car. The only part we can develop is the dampers, and they actually do a lot. So Olivier, you started there where, last year at Delcon, you were doing most of the dampers. I was doing the design and some development, and now at Andrade, we have a bigger team and more people doing it, but still be involved in it and participating. So that's something we should have probably mentioned in terms of the engineers that we have. We also have engineers for the dampers. Yeah, we have a lot of people in the background doing dampers, design, development and simulations. We also have some people for aerodynamic, but compared to Formula 1, there's nothing, right? In Formula 1, you've got a 1,500, 200, engineer of aerodynamic. We are one. One, two. And they only look really at ovals. That's the only place where... Everything else is maxed on force. Yeah. Pretty much. And Indica is very easy in aerodynamic, but oval is really where you want the car to be set up nicely, and that's really why you fill the downforce, because, you know, it is driving at 200 plus miles an hour, and that's where the downforce is the job. Yep. What else do we have in the team? I guess maybe we can speak about the difference between ovals, streetcourses and roadcourses, because that's very particular to... To Indica. I mean, racing and all those types of tracks, the main thing is different tires. You know, like the streetcourses tire is a softer tire. Roadcourses tire a bit stiffer, but it's pretty, like from people from Europe, it's pretty normal. You know, you have like same tires at the front and same tires on the rear on both sides. The oval is completely asymmetric. The four tires are completely different, from compound to stiffness, structure, everything. Diameter, sizing, tires, difference. Yeah, because on the oval, the car doesn't have a differential. It's like a spool. So basically, the car turns because the right side tire has begun the left side, so naturally the car wants to turn. There is no differential in the car. It's like a solid rear axle, but the whole car is completely asymmetric from cambers, toes, springs, and the tires, everything is completely asymmetric, and the car naturally wants to turn without any input. So how did you, I mean, because that's, you know, that's quite crazy in terms of engineering, that the car doesn't want... And one of the first question I asked when I came to Indica, why don't you make the car straight and then turn in the corner on the oval, and you just storm it slower? Yeah, it is. The car has to turn on its own, which is very weird. So how do you learn how to set up a car on the oval? Because when you see the setup sheet, it's completely crazy, right? Yeah, it is. It is crazy, but in the engineering world, it's also in a way very simple, because it's a very long, steady-state corner. You don't really care about the straight line besides, you know, like, drag, and what we care about is how to make the car like carry more speed in the corner, not scrubbing speed, and that's why it likes... Every time you give an input to the car, you kind of slowing it down because you're binding the car. So that's why the car, when it turns naturally, it carries more speed. It's a very long, like at the speed where you have four corners, they're a very long, steady-state corner, which is a lot, in a way, from an engineering standpoint, a lot easier than a quick, you know, breaking really hard. The car's a bit on the edge, and, you know, very quick, bumpy, you know, like a street course where the corner don't last very long. On a speedway, it's a long time, and so it makes things a little bit easier to understand because each wheel does very something very specific in each part of the corner, in a way, on the engineering, once you understand the concept, it's pretty easy in a way. Okay, so that's a really good thing, yes, because the first time I cover no rules, you're like, we're gonna change one spring. That's something you never do on road course or street course or whatever. So tell me what the four wheels are doing, because they all have a different role in the corner. So let's start front left, what does front left do? Very little, front left is very lightly loaded, it does help a little bit on the mid exit of the corner to finish a corner, if you have a bit of understanding, but it's very lightly loaded, it does a very little job. So it's there because we need four wheels, but it doesn't do as much job at the other street. Okay, so then front right? The front right does a lot. I mean, that's the one, like it gives you confidence when you turn in, in entry, like how the car feels, getting into the corner to the apex. And that's the one, at the speedway, when the tire getting hot and stuff, you saturate that right front, and it gets really hot, and that's how you slide and you go up the track toward the wall, that big understeer, big wash. That's the one we can adjust with the weight jacker in the car, we can put plus or minus weight. Yeah, we have the weight jacker in the car, so you can adjust the weight. So if you have a car that's a bit loose, you put a bit more weight on that right front tire to secure the car, and if you have too much understeer, because maybe you saturate that right front tire, you can move a little bit a weight across way to the left side. Then let's go rear left, because the rear right is a very important one. Yeah, but the left rear is also pretty important because it does a lot for the security of the entry also, because mid corner, mid exit, it's more about the right rear, but the entry, the left rear, especially when you start playing with the left rear tow, you really can control the rotation and how the car feel when you're turning in the corner. So it's a very important time. Front left does no much. Front right does mid to exit understeer. Rear left does entry at the corner, and then rear right is the one. As a driver, it's the only one you want to be confident with because that's the one that gives you all the feeling. Yeah, it does a lot. It's what control, basically the feel of the driver are comfortable with the feel in the car, because we say you're almost driving on the right rear tire all the time. So if you feel like the car is moving a bit when you load, then that's the one you get the most vertical load in the corner. So if this one doesn't work very well, it doesn't give the driver confidence. It's not like a street course where you drive to the limit or over the limit of the tire. On the overall, you never really drive over the limit of the tire, especially on the right rear. Because if you do, you pretty much, it's a bad day. So you drive a bit under the limit of the tire. The only thing the driver gets is that feel of how close to the limit can they get. And that tire do a lot for the mid-exit of the corner, the middle, and also you can play with the right toe and that gives you a feel of rotation mid-corner. That's very powerful. It can be very disturbing if it's not good. Yeah, because as a driver, it's very strange to the car rotating itself without you putting an input. That is normally oversteer, not normal. But on overall, it's a different feel. So it's how much comfortable you can be with that thing doing the job for you without you putting a steering input. But how much is it that it's because of the car does that? How much is it because it's actually sliding and you are over the limit? Yes. You say it's easy. For me, it's very complicated set up an oval. And if it's windy, if it's hot, if it's cold, it's always going to be different. The car is very sensitive to the racetrack and all the condition change for sure. When you go into qualifying day, how do you decide how much you're going to trim the car, remove downforce, trying to make it fast in a straight line? It's mostly based on condition. We have a lot of historical data and that's why we have all those days where we practice where basically every day when we're going to trim to try to do a qualified attempt, we're going to look at the weather, find the conditions and try to step through the different level of downforce and find where we start to get not comfortable. And there's a diminishing return where you start taking a lot of downforce out but not so much drag. So at some point, based on the condition, if it's a windy day, you're going to put more downforce. If it's like a nice day and cool day, you're going to trim a lot. But we have a lot of historical data plus we have all those practices when you start to get to fast Friday here and we start to take steps through all the different level of downforce to know what we're good at and what we think is right. One of the very big difference between Indica and Formula One is the calendar, right? Yeah. And now we're on for a very long stretch of races with very different setups. So we did just Indy Grand Prix. Yeah. Indy qualifying, Indy 500, three weeks in a row. Yep. The week after we go to Detroit which is one of the most bumpy track in the world. Yep. Which is the very weirdest grip you can have. And then we go to Road America which is like a spa for caution of the US. Yep. Amazing but big. So we got five weekends in a row with no time off really. Yep. A good thing is that we stay within the US so we don't travel too far. Yep. But yeah, we had to prepare so much setup before we actually got into it because then it's not the same car on Speedo and Roadcourt. Yes. Two different cars that we have and then we have one week off and then another three races or so. Yep. And then we have some testing in between like Iowa. Very bumpy overall. Very bumpy overall, yeah. So yeah, it's a busy schedule. We finish early. September 11th, championship is over. We're going to reinvent the wheel during the winter I guess. Pretty much, yeah. It's too long of a time off. The time off, yeah. Trying to make, work on all the things you don't have time to work during the season. Take a lot of notes during the season of all the things you wish you would have time to do and you do them in the winter, basically. Well, I guess that's a good insight of what is our life like, what the relationship with the engineer, how to transfer someone's feeling that already have to put into words and those words are not to go to Olivier. Olivier has got to put those words into mathematics and then those mathematics have to go in the car and it's a cycle like this in any car because there's so much more mechanical change you can do compared to Formula One where it's all aero driven. I feel like the relationship with the engineer is even more important than it was in Formula One where, you know, if the past, the last two seasons was on the steering from the aerodynamic map and there was nothing we could do to get rid of that. It was just the way it was here between the road center and the geometry and the camber and the dampers and so on. We can actually make it to our liking and that's why I feel that the lap time of everyone is super tight. Yes. Everyone's got to a place where he likes the car. Yeah, and everybody's different. You know, even between our teammate, we don't, we have differences between the setup. So I guess if you want to be an engineer one day and you want to send your CV, send it. You know, I think it's a, it's a great place to learn. It's a great place to have racing fun and I hope you like the video. As always, please make sure you subscribe, you like, you comment and I'll see you very soon.