Otmar Szafnauer

Well, look, if you're listening to this conversation with myself and Damien and you don't know what High Performance Racing is, it launches today and it's not me on my own.

It's me alongside a guy called Rob Smedley and a man called Omar Safna.

Now, the reason why we've chosen these two, Damien, I guess there's a couple of reasons.

The first one is they've been there and done it, right?

Rob Smedley was the guy who was the race engineer for Felipe Massa when he was challenging Lewis Hamilton for the world title.

And when I was doing the Formula One, Rob became our go-to guy actually for interviews about what was happening in the sport from a technical perspective because he's from Middlesbrough.

He's got a very sort of grounded and simple way of describing a very complex and challenging sport.

So Mark Wilkin, who was my producer on the BBC F1 coverage, no matter what the story was, if it involved technical regulation conversations, we were like...

Let's get Rob Smedley on.

Actually to the point, right, Damien, where Ferrari were getting a bit annoyed because Rob Smedley was getting more airtime on the BBC than like the Ferrari team principal or the Ferrari chairperson.

And sometimes they were like, well, do you want to speak to other members of our team?

And partly Rob Smedley's a Brit and it was a British broadcaster, but no, I've never met anyone that can explain the complexities of F1 in such a simple way.

So Rob Smedley is our kind of technical expert.

And then there are very few people who've ever been team principals in Formula One.

You know, there's probably as few team principals as there are drivers.

Not many people have done the job to actually run a Formula One team, which is operating across various countries with hundreds of people.

It's a real big challenge.

And while I was working in Formula One, if you wanted a warm welcome, and not everywhere gave you a warm welcome, if you wanted a warm welcome...

you went to Force India.

And the man who was the Force India team boss was a guy called Otmar Safnauer, who again has been a guest on High Performance.