“I really love this track,” says Franck Montagny of the Jerez circuit in southern Spain. “I remember my chief engineer in Renault’s test team was always saying ‘if there was a championship of 15 races in Jerez, you are world champion every year’.”
The Frenchman never raced at the track he picks out as his favourite, but relished every time he got to drive it testing Formula 1 machinery between 2002 and 2007. That’s just as well, because he completed just shy of 5,000 laps of the circuit for Renault, Toyota and Force India, including 2,312 tours across 22 days in 2005 alone.
“It suits a lot the Renault car at this time,” says Montagny, who started seven grands prix for Super Aguri in 2006 when Yuji Ide’s superlicence was revoked. “It’s an old track, bumpy, there’s no big hotel on the side, so I understand that people don’t really love it. But I tell you, it was a magic track. I always had a lot of pleasure there.”
After hosting seven F1 grands prix between 1986 and 1997, Jerez had become a popular test venue during the era of unrestricted running in the early-to-mid 2000s. As Michelin tyre testing was typically the order of the day during Montagny’s spell at Renault, both in dry conditions and wet when the track was specially sprayed, he was mostly driving with new rubber and had “always full capacity of the car” on the track’s prevalence of medium and high-speed corners.
“It was really cool,” says Montagny wistfully. “Jerez is perfect for an F1 car – it’s dry, sunny, hot, you can work easily and there are all the corners you need to develop the car. It’s a perfect place and you get the good jamon!”
He singles out the “really exciting” double-left at Turns 7 and 8 that follow the Turn 6 hairpin where Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve famously came to blows in 1997 as his favourite point of the circuit. The first was taken flat, before dropping one gear on the “demanding” second left that leads into a sequence of right-handers interrupted by a chicane installed at the site of Martin Donnelly’s horrifying accident in 1990.
Montagny believes Jerez has every necessary feature for F1 car testing
Photo by: Edd Hartley
Montagny’s first visit to Jerez in December 2002 was memorable. It marked the occasion of the 2001 Formula Nissan champion’s first Renault test outing, and he concedes that “special feeling with Jerez maybe comes from…
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