Sergio Aguero will forever be remembered for his outrageous 93rd minute Premier League title winning goal for Manchester City in May 2012. Its almost still frozen in time.
Immortalised by Martin Tyler’s deranged “Agueroooooooo” commentary, it was perhaps right up there in the most dramatic sporting stories of all time. So, when Aguero agreed to be hooked up with reigning Formula E champion Pascal Wehrlein and TAG-Heuer Porsche Formula E Team for the Evo Sessions in Miami last week it was tempting to think he’d again left everything late.
Not a bit of it. Ex Pro Driver61 apart, the Argentinian was actually very well prepped through a combination of his own simulator passion and trips to Weissach to meet the team and get immersed in all things Formula E.
But perhaps the most determinant thing about Aguero was his natural competitive aptitude. It shone through for Pascal Wehrlein, as he told Formula E Notebook that “the mentality is a lot closer than probably I would have thought.
“He (Aguero) was coming into this event, you feel like he really wants to do well, he puts the effort in, but then also he’s obviously very competitive,” said Wehrlein.
“That’s exactly the mentality, which is great on one side, but also on the other side, you say ‘oh, please don’t crash my car.’ But he’s asking a lot of questions.
“There were a lot of those things, which he tried to push forward and make that happen and you can definitely feel that he’s a competitive character and probably that’s also typical for any sportsman.”
Wehrlein also gave an intriguing insight in to the mentality aspect that Aguero brought from his time as an elite athlete and how that translated into his experience at the Evo Sessions.
“Like a lot of things which feel natural to me we are doing autonomously already, I spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it.
“Like if I was new in that car, what are the basics? The feeling, the tyres, so I told him ‘driving the real car is very different than the simulator. You are in the simulator; you are having the same grip and very good grip every lap.
“Here in the car, actually, from your first lap until the best lap, just the car itself, there might be a couple of seconds here or there. So don’t expect the car to do great in the first lap, but it will get better and better.
“For example, that is automatic for us, and we know that. We look at our tyre temperature and it’s 20 degrees. We know we need a lot more than that to get the most out of the car. All the safety stuff too as well because this is an electric car and there are some things like the ‘safety jump’ (when car is red) and what to do in case we crash. We had to explain all this to him.”
Wehrlein worked closely with Aguero to the extent where they actually first met just after the Mexico City ePrix in January. A seat fitting in the workshop and e-sports simulator practice came first Charlie Collins the manufacturers works e-sports driver.
A half day at Hockenheimring, to the Porsche Experience Centre, where Aguero got taught by a professional instructor in some of the road cars followed before a further simulator visit at the end of February. Renowned for his professionalism in football, Aguero mirrored it in something that most would view as fun, but he looked at as an athletic and competitive challenge.
All that included meeting his ‘engineer’ for the event Fabrice Roussel who has worked with Wehrlein for the last three seasons, guiding him to the crown brilliantly last season.
Roussel reckons that from an engineering perspective “it’s a little bit, at least personally for me, like 20 years ago when you work with your own driver doing their first lap in a race car, it’s far, far from what we do every day, obviously.
“It’s somewhat refreshing actually because Sergio was also an athlete, so he was used to sports at a highly professional level and there was some experience and exchange in that regard.
“We could make some parallel between professional football and professional motorsport, which was interesting just for the normal approach in preparation and the psychology of the athletes.”
Roussel made it clear that Aguero has talent as a driver, honed by his hobby as a sim/gamer in his spare time at home, just a. few miles away from the Hard Rock Stadium in fact.
“Obviously the kind of simulator he is used to and the one he used in the e-sports team simulator with us is very different to the race car team simulator,” added Roussel.
“He’s been doing very well, and he is clearly showing the skills needed. He has some sense of racing, a hundred percent yes. He was doing great for like first time in the single seaters is actually quite impressive.”
Stamina was another Aguero attribute he was famous for in his footballing career. You don’t play almost 300 Premier League games and almost 200 in La Liga without being physically and mentally agile.
“He clearly could sustain doing 14 laps in a row in the race car, which is already some
proof that you have the physical nature to do it and just keeping improving performance, not dropping performance,” Roussel told FEN.
“That shows that he’s fit physically. In terms of reflexes, it is a bit more difficult to gauge because basically you can see he’s driving correctly, and he can do a good lap time. But at the moment there was some occasions where he had a bit of a moment or stuff like that. And there you can see that he’s reacting well.
The mental aspect of driving a Formula E car largely comes through a combination of intra-race battles with competitors and relaying information and interacting with your engineer. Roussel gave an interesting perspective on the latter, the all-important communication.
“When you start to do a project like this one, it’s more a matter of first of all safety for Sergio,” he says.
“It’s actually not that different because part of motorsport is to have a constant flow of information for the driver. Even the basic things that the car just keeps evolving, like from one event to another, it’s never the same car.
“We are always developing on the software side, and we used to provide a lot of information to the driver to be able to extract the performance. So, in that regard, it wasn’t different.
“It’s just like the amount of information we are not focused to the last bit of details and more to the basics. I say it’s like going back to taking a racer from karts into a single seater for the first time.”
Aguero loved his experience in the Evo Sessions and even suggested that a very well-known countryman might even fancy a go in the future.
“Obviously I would like to compete with Leo. (Messi). Leo is an example of competitiveness, of wanting to always win, but this is different, so I would like to see how he is in that sense,” said Aguero.
Additional reporting and interviews by Georgia Williams
