Photos

2012 Petit Le Mans – Winners in P2 (and 2nd & 3rd overall) – left to right: Marino Franchitti, Christophe Bouchut, Scott Tucker, Luis Diaz, Dario Franchitti with team manager David Stone behind. Team work pays off.
(Photo James Penrose)

2012 Petit Le Mans testing – Marino’s big brother Dario testing the Honda ARX P2 ALMS car before the event. HANS® with JP airpads and highback in use.
(Photo James Penrose)

2012 Petit Le Mans race – Marino waits in the pit.
(Photo James Penrose)

2012 Petit Le Mans race – Marino up on the wall ready to jump over and into the car.
(Photo James Penrose)

Article

When I met Marino I’d been doing some driver safety consulting with Level 5 for a while. Marino joined the team with his brother Dario for Petit Le Mans event in 2012. This is the big event of the American Le Mans Series, end of season, final of the championship, everything rolled into one.

So for that event we had team owner Scott Tucker teamed in one car with Christophe Bouchut and Luis Diaz, both drivers I knew well and had worked with for some time. In the second car Scott also drove and was teamed with the Franchitti brothers.

New combinations of drivers for a 1000km / 10 hour race is always a challenge, drivers completely new to a team even more so. Dario’s reputation as an outstanding Indycar champion was well known and his relaxed nature and professionalism from so many years at the top was easy to work with.

Marino was a bit of an unknown quantity as I knew little of his career, character or skills. In the team we were used to drivers that were team players and also those that were not team players.

I don’t know if it is especially a Scottish habit to be picky but on my mother’s mother’s side of the family they are Scottish and definitely picky, I’d also had similar experiences with a number of other racers from the region! So I was wary and I discovered Marino is ‘super-picky’ about his racing safety gear.

For me that is actually fine as there is nothing worse than a driver who either cannot make his mind up about how he wants his gear prepared or wants advice but never heeds it. So it was down to preparation – fitting radios and drink tubes in helmets and seeing how he got on with my work.

Marino had clearly been having discomfort issues with his HANS® for some time and also in the Honda ARX P2 ALMS car he had some issues with head / helmet stability under acceleration and deceleration.

Marino had never tried airpadding for the HANS® (which I’d been producing primarily for F1 for many years) and this solved his discomfort issues immediately.

The head / helmet stability under acceleration and deceleration issues were immediately solved with a highback extension on the HANS® – not the cumbersome thing used in Indycars, but an extremely lightweight but also strong piece developed originally at Ferrari for Michael Schumacher.

So he tried this and the problems went away. Marino’s brother Dario had brought along his heavy Indycar HANS® highback and immediately saw the benefits of the one Marino was using. As a result he also ended up using this and the airpadding too.

It was a pleasure to work with both Marino and Dario at that and subsequent races.