The 72-year-old who fixes broken F1 drivers in his Ford Puma

You might not have heard of racing coach Rob Wilson, but you have definitely seen his work. He is the person on the other end of the phone when track careers are at risk and has been credited with breathing life into struggling F1 drivers like Daniel Ricciardo or Lance Stroll, pushing Alex Albon to the vanguard of Williams’ resurrection and mentoring Liam Lawson into an impressive rookie season after a surprise call-up. He corrects conked-out corners, overturns understeer and delivers people from endless DNFs – and he does it all, rather improbably, in a Ford Puma.

He is a hard man to track down, for a layperson anyway. Wilson has been labelled F1’s “secret weapon” for a reason. You will not see him in the pit lane, he hardly ever goes to races these days. He does not advertise and he is barely even Googlable. But with the help of a couple of insiders, I spent the day under his tutelage, experiencing first-hand what you might describe as a blend of hardline physics, potent personality and a little touch of magic.

On first impression, Wilson is an avuncular, 72-year-old chain-smoker. Unless his hands are on a steering wheel, he probably has a cigarette in them, such is his deep relationship with nicotine. He turns up to meet me with a tatty black briefcase, Nokia 6210 and wispy red hair that floats around in the breeze above a corduroy blazer. He cuts a risible figure – a caricature compared to the sleek, chrome, corporate, brand-conscious figures of F1. But judging this book by its cover would be an enormous error. Make no mistake, the man is a kingmaker. The best competitive drivers in the world fly thousands of miles for some of Wilson’s sorcery.

His list of protégés reads like a who’s who of racing. In almost 50 years, the New Zealander has looked after more than 75 F1 stars, including at least half the current grid. But before he was a coach, he had an impressive stint as a racer himself, chalking up wins in Formula Ford and Formula Three, enduring Le Mans and beating some of history’s greats, like Gerhard Berger, Nelson Piquet and Michele Alboreto. He even came within a hair’s breadth of competing in F1, landing himself a seat four times, only for it to be whipped out from under him at the last minute by someone with better sponsorship deals.

Others would be bitter, but Wilson is untroubled by what might have been. “The whole thing was a rehearsal,” he says, “for this.”

I have come to find out just what exactly “this” is, for his particular brand of teaching has become legend and yet nobody seems to be able to adequately articulate it. Perhaps the man himself can do a better job.

“There are a few aspects to driving fast,” he explains from a boardroom behind the circuit at Donington Park. “There’s all the ABC stuff.” For the uninitiated that is acceleration, braking and car control. “Anyone can teach that,” he says, dismissively. “Sure, you can look for a higher mid-corner speed or at coming off the brakes later to avoid understeer, but the answer isn’t in squiggly lines on a screen – data download masquerading as engineering. It’s when you feel it in your bones.”

‘Translating messages from body to machine’

Wilson’s knowledge of automotive science is deep. He can tell you about the least economical places to look for speed: “Cars don’t really accelerate when they are leaning”, uses helpful analogies involving sloshing water glasses and gives me his “flat car” principle of treating corners as if they are 50-pence pieces. But his real genius is esoteric. He speaks of cars as if they are sentient, asking drivers to “communicate” with delicacy of movement, “translating little messages through the body to the planes of the machine”.

It is something you really cannot fathom until you have put it into practice and is the reason he uses an entry-level, manual-transmission road car – so that every whirr of the clutch plate, crunch of a poor shift or squawk of tyre scrub runs right through you. The volume of feedback in a Ford Puma will make it that much clearer when you find what Wilson is asking you to look for. “You become one with the car, the car becomes one with the surface, you become one with the surface, and you can almost transcend the car,” he says, making it sound simple.

The first couple of laps around the track are about as crunchy and squawky as it gets. I am new to heel-toe shifting, so it takes forever just to get the hang of using the pedals in the right formation. Champing at the bit to get to the good stuff I ask him, tongue in cheek, to treat me just as he would Kimi Räikkönen and he tells me with a smile that when he did have Räikkönen in the hot seat, he also made him repeat the same lap over and over until it clicked. Eventually, on what might have been my hundredth go at it, I breeze out of a corner in a way that feels slightly different, a lilting sensation rather than a full-body swerve. He raps me hard on the leg and says: “There it is.”

“Now do it again,” he grins wryly. That is the crux of his method. He works with you unremittingly, slowing you right down to investigate all the constituent parts of your driving, tweaking the tiniest of steering-wheel movements, taking anything cumbrous out of your pedalwork, asking you to do all the heavy-lifting so that the car barely knows it is on a racecourse, and then once you have mastered that, he makes you repeat it until it is embedded in your DNA. His rare gem, in the frenetic world of F1, is patience.

The other thing he has in spades is personality. As I enter my fifth hour in this man’s company, I am quite convinced that half the reason drivers come back to him is for his anecdotes. He regales me with stories of his rock band (he has been in several bands, including Edison Lighthouse, who had a No1 hit in 1970) partying until 3am the night before a race, plundering Stefan Johansson’s Marlboro sponsorship to swap them for Rothmans in the local shop and sitting in Nigel Mansell’s car discussing who was struggling more financially when they were competing in Formula Three. His magnetism is what allows him to pour water on some of F1’s famous egos.

“When they arrive, they are the most important person in the world,” he says. “They’re anxious to show how fast they are, what incredible reflexes they have. And I have to get rid of all that.” He was empathic as he helped Stroll tackle his frustrations and was so good to Nico Rosberg that when the German won the world championship in 2016, Wilson was one of the first people he thanked.

Experts have studied Wilson’s methods and come away bamboozled. Lines on a graph look confusingly similar pre- and post-coaching, even though one of the laps is seconds quicker. His doctrine is something that telemetry cannot tell you: the key to driving fast is not about speed at all; the key to driving faster is driving better. Call it magic, magnanimity or intuition, but there does not seem to be anyone else in the world who can do what he does.