Jock Silpheed's Interview With Extreme Racing

admin · Jock Silpheed's Interview With Extreme Racing

Greetings race fans, Jock Silpheed here for the Silpheed Times. In an unprecidented move, this article is previewing life outside of Minardi F1 and Div4.4 in what hopefully will be a series of interviews for various teams and their owners.
First up in this series is Roy Lee of Extreme Racing, his orange and grey cars are running close to the top of the pack in Div3.12, and after qualifying are looking pretty cosy on the grid in P3 and P5.

I caught up with Roy a while back, here's what was said during the brief time I had with him.

Congratulations roy, on another successful qualifying session for your drivers. You must be happy with the qualifying pace of your cars once more.
Thank you and yes indeed we are very pleased with our qualifiying session, the pace was good and both driver's pushed as hard as they could.

Can you turn one-lap pace into a decent result? So far this season, your race strategies have let you down a little.
You are right we have had a little problem with pace but because of running with own brand we have had to adjust our strategies to help reduce the wear rates of the parts as we don't want to suffer many retirements if we can help it.

But surely, if your cars can do well in testing and in qualifying, then Kosmonout and Ormus should be capable of extracting the most out of them? Or does their age count against them?
With RPM been reduced in all the races and both driver's been told to take it easy, to help improve the chances of both driver's finishing this has limited the overall pace, but both driver's are still faster than most of the other team's.

Okay, bad example in the case of Ormus so I apologise. But Kosmo's getting on a bit now surely?
No i don't think Kosmo's age is against him, he's only 27 and still has a few more seasons before his age might start to affect his reaction speeds etc.

Well I'll stop bothering you about your drivers now, and ask you about future plans. For example, we're approaching the mid-point in the season. Do you feel like you've achieved your targets that you set down thus far?
We set our goal was to finish 4th in the constructors championship, at this present moment we are 3rd, so yeah we are very pleased with the way things have been going thus far.

I see... so do you think you can keep this rate of progress up? Can you still finish where you aim to finish come season's end?
Thats a good question, of course we would love to still be fighting for 5th and 6th in the races but i personally think we will not be able to do that all through the season, lets not foreget we are on own rand which means fuel is heavier and we can't go as far into the races as we would like, tyre ear is heavier. So may things are against us but still we push on and we seem to some how walk away with good resaults.

And what of Evans Racing? You've been keeping ahead of them despite having Own Brand contracts?
Yes we are on own brand contracts but i think perhaps Evans Racing have had a bad season compared to what some team's was expecting, never the less they are still fast and can easily continue to push for points. Jack Evans has been doing well to try and sort things out there and as we saw in the last race, they have closed the gap down by quite a lot.

I suppose we could both agree that you have an excellent design team then? Or would you say it's an inferiority on Evans' side?
Perhaps but i don't think like that i would like to think that we extracted more out of our developement program and this is why our car is at this present moment so far ahead of them, but they are closing that gap down and in a few more weeks it could be us that are looking at the back wings of there car's.

Now let's leave that rivalry to the one side for now. I want to ask you about the rumours that are circulating the paddock...
What rumours are they then, you hear so much these day's, and half of them are just hear say.

...oh, only the rumours that you're going to run into debt at some point, despite being on Own Brand contracts? Is there any truth to these whispers?
Oh that rumour, yes unfortunatly we have ben running in debt for a while, although we are not i debt now we cold well run into the red at some point this season. We are working on way's to reduce this from happening but at the moment it seems to be ok.

So do you plan on buying in any contracts for next season, or are you keeping everything firmly in-house?
If we have a budget that allows this then yes we will try to sign at lkeast two contracts, our main area we are loosing out on this season is fuel and tyres, if we can get contracts with both of those then we will be able to fight for 3rd maybe even 2nd next season.

And yet you still have room to improve - going back to your driver line-up, you've signed your guys up on long term contracts. This would indicate that you see your current drivers as the future of Extreme Racing?
I think even the est team has room to improve, it just depends on how bad you need to improve. For us we need to improve on reliability and more speed would be nice too. We like to think that our current driver's are good enough and are continuing to impress us with there speeds.

So what if say a Superb driver was to come along? Would you remove either of your current squad to make room? Maybe the test driver?
Then we would bring in the superb driver and we would look at what is best at that time for the future of Extreme Racing, at the moment we are not in such a situation, but it could so easily happen.

Well I'm not seeing any way in which you could make drastic gains of up to a second. But for now, you'd agree that Ormos and Kosmo are doing the job they've been hired for?
Yes we are more than pleased with both driver's comitment, they have pushed our car's to the limits and continue to to do so. We are more than happy with them both.

That's fair enough. I'd like to thank you for your time Mr.Lee, and good luck for this weekend's race.
No thank you, it has been a plessure talkingwith you and we look forward to seeing our interview in your paper.

That's all from me for now, folks. Tune into another division another time for another edition of the Silpheed Times!

~J. Silpheed
Silpheed Times Editor