Formula 1 Racing

How Raikkonen’s former race engineer became F1 TV’s latest pundit

Julien Simon-Chautemps

In 2021, Simon-Chautemps called time on a 14-year stint in F1. But, through his JSC7 consultancy, he’s still heavily involved in racing. He’s lending his services to French team Sainteloc on its switch to single-seaters, as well as German race data provider Paceteq. In addition, he is involved in motorsport engineering recruitment and in public-speaking gigs on leadership.

He has also been sharing his technical insight with F1 viewers, starting with French broadcaster Canal+ in 2022. And, after a test run in Brazil last year with F1 TV, he was recently confirmed for more appearances in 2024, including at last week’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

“I always wanted to create my own motorsport consultancy company,” Simon-Chautemps tells Motorsport.com about his career change.

“I worked nearly 15 years trackside in F1, and then Kimi decided to retire around September 2021. I don’t want to say that was a trigger, but that was a big part, and then on top of that, I had been living in Switzerland with Sauber for five years with COVID-19 in the middle.

Julien Simon-Chautemps

Photo by: Julien Simon-Chautemps

“I had a family back in the UK, so I was commuting back and forth to Switzerland. And then the team wanted to make some changes as well, so it happened and a new chapter started.”

In his role, JSC – as he is known in the paddock – is having to distill the processes that teams are going through over a grand prix weekend into clear and concise language for the viewers, which makes the task not that dissimilar to that of a race engineer.

“There are a lot of parallels between communicating with the driver and a team and expressing what you want to say on TV,” he adds.

“On TV, the challenge is to explain very technical matters in a way that casual viewers would understand it.

“F1 TV has a huge database of pictures and videos, and the team is fantastic, so I am really enjoying my time with them. There is a steep learning curve but the support I have had from Canal+ and F1 TV has been priceless and I am very grateful for the opportunity.”

Julien Simon-Chautemps

Julien Simon-Chautemps

Photo by: Alpine

Engineering, communication, resilience

In addition to Raikkonen, Simon-Chautemps served as a race engineer at Renault and Alfa Romeo for the likes of Marcus Ericsson, Romain Grosjean and Jolyon Palmer. He has identified three main pillars a good F1 race engineer needs to master.

“You don’t really need to be an expert in a particular field,…

Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Motorsport.com – Formula 1 – Stories…