Determined Danzey revved up as he prepares to take the next step with car racing debut
Having ably proven himself as a front-runner on the British karting scene in recent years, highly-rated young Russ Danzey is now preparing to take his burgeoning motorsport career up through the gears – as he graduates to cars in the inaugural Autosport Young Guns Championship.
Russ turned heads last season by finishing a superb third in the country in Formula Kart Stars – the same series as had first set a certain Lewis Hamilton, no less, on the fast track towards future superstardom, and one that boasts the prestigious official seal of both the youngest-ever F1 World Champion and the sport’s influential ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone – and now his talent has been recognised by Autosport Young Guns founder Martin Phaff and Falcon Motorsport, for whom the recently-turned 16-year-old will compete in the John Surtees Scholarship car.
Better yet, he will be financially backed along the way by new sponsor Domino Commercial Interiors, whose managing director Michael Peckett is a self-confessed petrol-head and as such is delighted to be supporting a budding young local talent – and who will be in attendance to witness the Dore-based hotshot’s single-seater debut at Castle Combe in Wiltshire this weekend.
“That will be loads of help, because of course it means we’ve got some money coming in, and if other potential sponsors look and see that somebody is already backing me, it might encourage them to do so as well,” Russ acknowledged. “As long as Michael is happy with what I’m doing and what he’s getting out of it, he might talk to people about me.
“He loves motorsport; he came to watch me karting before and has followed my progress for quite some time, and he is coming down to camp at Castle Combe with his two daughters to see my first Young Guns race too! His support is definitely a confidence boost for me; I’ve always believed in my own ability, but to see somebody else outside of the team that also believes in my ability enough to give me money to realise my dreams is just fantastic.”
The Westbourne School pupil has already been out testing in his new car at Pembrey in South Wales under the watchful and instructive eye of Falcon’s driver tutor, Superleague Formula championship leader Craig Dolby – and as he got himself increasingly comfortable inside the cockpit, Russ was soon looking every inch the seasoned pro and wasted little time at all in getting down to setting some seriously quick laps.
“The championship is growing all the time, and the whole atmosphere is much more relaxed than in karting,” he mused of his Autosport Young Guns initiation. “All the guys in the team have been really good over the past couple of days – they’ve been teaching me a lot, and if ever there’s a problem they deal with it quickly. They’re just a pleasure to work with, and they made it an easy and enjoyable couple of days. Testing was good right from the word ‘go’ – the first day was great, and the second was even better! Craig has so much experience and is a fantastic driver coach; he really helped me to get confident in the car and I was able to learn a lot from him.
“The car felt brilliant to drive, leaps and bounds better than a kart – and my race suit doesn’t get dirty in it either, which is a plus! It was all just about settling down into a rhythm, really. The brakes are fantastic – I could really push them as hard as I wanted and they slowed the car down really well. The main difference from karting is the fact that I now have to deal with downforce; the hardest thing for me was building up the confidence to be able to go faster-and-faster, because the faster you go the more downforce you generate and the more grip you get.
“I got so much quicker over the two days – I just kept going round-and-round and knocking my lap time down. Craig said a good lap in the car at Pembrey is a 56.5s, and we did a 56.6s on old tyres – and the pole time there last month was a 56 seconds flat, so we weren’t far off that at all. The team manager Nick Streatfield reckoned that new tyres can gain you as much as a second and there’s more grip down on a race weekend too, so the circuit probably wasn’t quite as fast as that when we were out. I think we would have been very close to the outright pace on new rubber, which was very encouraging.”
As he looks ahead now to his car racing bow in the fourth meeting out of six in the 2010 Autosport Young Guns campaign, Russ knows he will have a couple of strong team-mates to serve as benchmarks for him, and is maturely not setting himself any targets or putting himself under any unnecessary pressure at the start of this exciting new episode in his increasingly promising career.
“The main problem going to Castle Combe is that there won’t actually be any practice time,” revealed the South Yorkshire speed demon, quipping that there’s nothing quite like being thrown in at the deep end. “On Friday, a couple of instructors will take us round in two-seaters so that we can get a feel for the lines, but the first time we’ll be out round there in Young Guns will be qualifying. In a way that might work to my advantage, though, because nobody in the championship has seen the circuit before so in a sense it will be new to everyone.
“I can’t wait to get back out in the car again! All the other drivers have been in the car since the beginning of the season, but I’ve got two good team-mates who hopefully will pull me round a little bit in qualifying. I’m not sure how quick everybody is going to be, but I’m feeling fairly confident because of how fast we were at Pembrey. I think we should be on the same playing field as the others, and hopefully I can pick up the track quite easily and be around the mid-pack – that’s a realistic goal. Of course I would like to be higher than that, but there’s time yet...”
