How Warren Hughes is helping McLaren guide Alex Dunne

620

The value of a driver coach is widely accepted and when McLaren was looking to support its growing roster of junior drivers – such as Alex Dunne – it turned to Warren Hughes. He explains his role to Formula Scout

After initially joining the McLaren Driver Development Programme (MDDP) to look after F1 Academy racer Bianca Bustamente, Warren Hughes also began supporting Formula 3 driver Alex Dunne after McLaren signed the Irishman earlier this year.

Formula Scout caught up with Hughes and Dunne at Spa-Francorchamps, as the latter approached the end of his rookie F3 campaign, to find out what Hughes does and how being in Dunne’s corner helped his development through 2024.

A veteran racer with vast experience across motorsport from his own varied driving career, Hughes says his role as a driver coach is not a “defined” one, as it involves “filling in any gaps that I identify, really”.

“It’s just dipping in and out where I feel it can be of support to him [Dunne]. It might just be somebody for him to sound off to and be a sounding board. ‘What do you think about this? What sort of track position do I need to get a slipstream?,’ for example. Just general guidance.

“We’re talking about tracks, looking at onboard stuff and the tracks are evolving all the time, whether its resurfacing or the kerbs changing, so it keeps me very current on multiple tracks, how they’ve evolved in the last couple of years.”

And the buzz that Hughes gets from the role is obvious.

“I love it!” he enthuses. “It’s super enjoyable because once you get the trust of a driver by offering advice on kerbs or gears, they realise that you’re tuned in.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a replacement for driving. You know you don’t get the dopamine hit that you get from a super strong performance, but it’s the next best thing for sure.”

Having raced and won in everything from single-seaters and touring cars to Le Mans prototypes and GT sportcars in a driving career spanning over 30 years, Hughes has a wealth of experience to share. “You just pick up a lot of knowledge along the way,” he says modestly.

Hughes debuted in Formula Ford in 1989, and in 1991 was FFord Festival and Formula Vauxhall Lotus runner-up. He then stepped up to F3, and stayed in the category until 1999 as a perennial lack of funds meant that he didn’t progress up the ladder as quickly as his performances – which included coming fourth in the British F3 standings three times – merited.

As a result, he often found himself thrust into a developmental role, something that he revelled in. “Those technical challenges and testing new projects are things I’ve always massively enjoyed as a driver. Racing is one thing, but the testing and development stuff is something I’ve always really loved, getting under the skin of it all.”

Dallara’s asserting its dominance on the F3 chassis in the mid-1990s (a position it still basically holds today) owes much to Hughes’ early-season pace in the family-run Richard Arnold Developments team in 1993, when he stunned the established teams running the then-dominant Ralt or Reynard cars and prompting a mass switch to the Dallara F393 mid-season.

He was then hired by Mitsubishi to help with the development of its F3 engine, first in Japan and then back in Britain where he scored the company’s maiden victories in 1995.

That understanding of and interest in the technical aspects has, he believes, helped him “become the driver coach that I am”.

“You’ve got many aspects of understanding not just from a driver’s perspective, [but also] the team’s and engineers’ requirements and just how to get your point across, what the engineer needs to know, how the driver needs to be communicating with the engineer. That’s all built up just with my own experience.”

He initially got started as a coach “alongside my own racing in the early to mid-2000s” and has “been working in British Formula 4 with Argenti Motorsport for the last three or four years and Double R Racing before that, so the lower level of junior single seaters was quite current for me”. When Double R centrally ran the cars of the all-female W Series in 2021, Hughes teamed up with his former Le Mans 24 Hours team-mate Jonny Kane to act as driver coach there too.

His association with McLaren is lengthy, starting “as a driver coach on the Pure events programme that they do for [road car] customers who are doing track days”, with some of those customers progressing to GT racing.

“I was asked to do the Goodwood Festival of Speed last year and drive a couple of cars up the hill, [including] the 1977 James Hunt McLaren M26. Quite a lot of familiar faces turned up and I know Zak [Brown, McLaren CEO] from when he actually competed in F3 [in 1995], and our paths crossed quite briefly.”

After being given a glowing welcome by Brown at Goodwood, Hughes caught up with 1992 F3 rival and McLaren consultant Gil de Ferran “for the first time in quite a while since he became a big name in the US”.

Looking to offer the benefits of his W Series experience, he “touched base with Gil again to see what the situation was in F1 Academy, because I’d heard about [new all-female series F1 Academy] requiring Formula 1 teams to be affiliated with a driver.”

De Ferran replied that he didn’t know, “but he said ‘I know a man who does’, so he put me in touch with [then-MDDP director] Emanuele Pirro”.

“Emanuele and I spoke at length about how I would fit into the role, representing McLaren or supporting their affiliated drivers and we seemed to really connect on that sort of vision. He took the idea to Zak and Andrea [Stella, McLaren team principal]. Zak was very enthusiastic to have me on board so there was just a lot of really neat connections there and the timing was perfect,” Hughes recalls.

He began his MDDP involvement this February by supporting Bustamante in Formula Winter Series before she embarked on a second season in fellow F4 series F1 Academy. “We’ve done a lot of days together and gelled really well. We’re still mid-season with that and she’s had some good results recently.”

When Stephanie Carlin replaced Pirro in May, “she asked if I could support [new signing] Alex Dunne in F3, so I’ve been with Alex since the Imola race” that month.

“Obviously, it’s still in the fairly early stages of the [revamped] MDDP, but there certainly seems to be quite a commitment from McLaren to support drivers that they believe have got the talent and a future,” says Hughes, who in turn is enjoying the level of trust he has too from the team’s senior management.

“I’m enjoying it more than ever really, particularly on the McLaren side of it, because I do feel a real affinity with McLaren. There’s just a lot of good, historical connections which draw me to that team and to be able to do something that they value is really rewarding,” he explains.

“I feel very valued by the MDDP, by the hierarchy, by Zak and Andrea. I’ve really just enjoyed working with the young drivers. It’s super rewarding once you earn their trust and it keeps my brain very current as well. It’s just a very nice relationship in all aspects.”

When in F1’s support paddock, Hughes has focused solely on Bustamante or Dunne, with Formula 2 points leader Gabriel Bortoleto and Martinius Stenshorne – who came 18th in FIA F3, four places behind Dunne – not having his assistance.

Hughes explains the benefit of individual focus: “[You] sort of get under the skin of it. You live and breathe the thought processes throughout the weekend and then all of the meetings and debriefs. And I’m on the radio all the time when Alex is in the car. You’re properly embedded and you’ve understood the reason that they’ve come to certain decisions and if I can guide them in some way.”

So, what does a typical race weekend look like for a top coach like Hughes?

“It starts off with a track walk together with Alex’s race engineer. It’s important that the three of us do that track walk and the discussions that we have so that there’s no conflict of information.

“We talk about the track, we’ve always got an onboard video of a reference lap, and we just stop and talk about each corner. I use my experience of each track and what I feel. Just general overview stuff, not car-specific, more track-specific like which kerbs are to be used [or] track evolution over the course of a race weekend.

“Then Alex has just got a little bit more information to pick and choose from. Some of it will be relevant, some of it less so because it will be car-specific,” he adds. “There’s a lot of crossover with the engineers as well, obviously, we need to all be on the same page.”

On F3 weekends, Hughes would then join the pre-event briefing of the MP Motorsport team that Dunne drove for, and who he credits as having an “experienced set of engineers at this level”.

“Just to listen, to see what the run plan is going be. If I have an opinion on something, I’ll pipe up, but it tends to be just information gathering so that I’m aware of what the plan is for the weekend.”

Driver, engineers and coach go through the run plan again before Dunne hits the track for the first time for Friday practice.

“[I’m] on the radio, it’s a little bit tricky in terms of direct coaching in F3 because there’s no [onboard] video allowed on the cars, which is a massive tool when you’re trying to coach,” Hughes says of how his role transfers into when Dunne is driving.

“Occasionally I’ll go and watch on track, but trackside access normally is quite limited, especially when the crowds build up, so trying to get a good vantage point to watch a particular corner is sometimes quite difficult.”

Interestingly, he says that he doesn’t “have access to the pitlane during the qualifying sessions, but I do tend to be there for the races”. However, if he notices anything on the radio or from his observations, whether live or via the TV monitors, “I’ll get a message to either Alex’s father [former Formula Ford racer Noel] or to the race engineer just to say ‘double check on what he said there’ to make sure the communication is what it should be.”

In the debrief, he again tries to offer opinions where appropriate. “[I need to] ask the right questions. If I feel the information isn’t clear enough, I’ll just chip in and ask more questions,” Hughes says of trying to identify areas for performance improvements.

“We’ll do a little data review within the team [which is] obviously primarily led by the race engineer, but I’ll dip in and out as I see appropriate, but after that really it’s just a little bit coaching outside of the car, just for Alex’s own learning; to make sure he’s aware of [any] changes [to the car.]”

“If a change is made in the session and he feels a benefit from it, he needs to know what that change was so that he can store that away for future reference. Changes to the wings, the ride height or the roll-bars have a an effect, so he needs to be able to register what those effects are.”

Their relationship only began at the Imola round in May, where the Irishman was announced as a member of the MDDP, although naturally he’d already had his eye on him “in F4 a couple of years prior to that, so I was aware of how strong a talent he was at that level, but you’re never quite sure how that’s going to translate as you move up through the ranks.”

“I’ve been super impressed with his first year of F3. He’s a young guy, [I think] the potential is very high as do McLaren, so we’re really just trying to support that and just try and shortcut the learning process, both in and out of the car. I feel very quickly we’ve developed a very strong relationship.”

Due to the lateness of the MP deal, Dunne missed most of post-season testing at the end of 2023 and did none of it with the Dutch squad, meaning there was still some “bedding in” to do in the early rounds.

“I think there was a settling in period of the team trying to understand what Alex needed from the car set up and that bedding-in process sometimes takes a bit of time, but by Imola they’d had a test at Barcelona where they made a bit of a step with what they felt Alex needed from the car and he was much happier with the car balance.

“Imola started off really well. It was quite clear Alex had super pace from the word go. I thought it was a super impressive weekend, so my initial impression of him was already very strong from that moment onwards.”

As a result of a minor technical error by the team, Dunne had been disqualified from qualifying, leaving him at the back of the grid for both races, “so he wasn’t able to show the outside world what he could do. But when you’re watching closely enough, it’s quite clear, because I think he came back through the field and finished 14th [in race one and 16th in the feature race]. It was super clinical, the way he brushed the disappointment away from quali and just got on with the job.

“Really from that point forwards, Alex has been very clear and very strong in the message he gets across to the team, which I’ve tried to encourage as well, to make sure you’ve got enough rotation in the car, [and] you’ve got the car in the sweet spot where you want to drive it.

“That sounds straightforward, but it’s a moving goal post over the course of the race weekend because the track’s constantly changing with temperature, with rubber going down, especially on an F1 weekend, so there is that element of just learning and we’re still learning.

“F3 is such a difficult formula because you get so little track time, you get an extremely peaky tyre in qualifying [when] you might get one lap out of it if you’re lucky, so it doesn’t take much for that to be not quite where it needs to be either in terms of balance or a little bit of traffic. The slightest little thing can have a huge impact on your qualifying and that’s what we found in Hungaroring.

“It’s a difficult track to manage your runs traffic-free in qualifying. The first couple of runs were a little bit messy just with traffic. The third run looked like he was on for probably a P6 maybe, and the red flag came out for Luke Browning’s accident, so it’s quite clear that the ingredients on each weekend are there.

“There’s been a lot of missed opportunities throughout the year and that’s probably a little bit on both sides but the one that probably hurts the most is Silverstone.

“Alex had put it on the front row after the first run in the in the dry part of the session before the shower came and it was a little bit of a miscalculation probably team-wise that we didn’t go back out again because the track suddenly dried, so he got bumped down to 13th. That was a real golden opportunity. Because of Alex’s track knowledge we came into that weekend expecting to be quite strong, so not to be able to deliver on that was really quite a big blow.

“That frustration has been there at each event almost. Obviously Imola we’ve talked about, Monaco was the one after that where [it] was Alex’s first [visit]. Free practice had been wet so he had very little track knowledge, [going] straight into qualifying in the dry for the first time, so his first lap wasn’t perfect. His next lap he was on it, probably for P2 or P3 on the grid, again the red flag came out.

“There’s a lot of these flashes of raw potential there that, at the moment, we’ve not been able to show to the outside world. If you’re looking closely enough, you’ll see it. But we’ve just got to deliver and show the outside world what he’s capable of, because I think the potential is super high and his development in and out of the car is progressing all the time.

“Putting it together is hard for a first-year driver with a young team as well, so to get them meshed together to deliver week in week out sounds straightforward but with a lot of variables that affect that, so it’s really trying to cover off those variables as much as we can to prepare.

“In terms of development, I can see Alex has grown in stature within the team. He’s quite vocal in the team debriefs; he’s shown enough potential so far that when he speaks everybody’s very attentive internally within the team. I think his stature has grown hugely and you can see his confidence in how vocal he is. That’s grown as well. He’s sort of become a bit more empowered. I think he’s seen that with a clean run each week he can be right at the front.

Dunne says that “with such limited mileage [in F3], all the information I can get, the better,” so Hughes’ observations are “definitely a benefit.”

“There’s a lot of things that he gives input on, which for sure helps,” adds Dunne, underlining how Hughes’ observations complement the information available to the engineers on the pitwall.

“Warren will go to a couple of different corners during FP and say, ‘Oh, a couple of different guys are doing this. It might not necessarily be better, but you could give it a try,’ or ‘This definitely looks better, I think you should try it,’ and different things like that.

“Warren has a lot of knowledge, he’s been to a lot of the tracks that we’ve raced at and he understands the cars, the downforce and everything about the setup,” he says.

While Dunne is confident that he already understands “a good amount, if there’s anything I’m confused on or I have an idea, but I just don’t completely understand it, I can ask him. He’s always very good at explaining it and always helps make sure I understand what’s going on.”

Of course, Hughes’ presence trackside provides his bosses at McLaren “with a set of eyes and ears in the paddock,” to provide “an accurate feedback opportunity.” The team is investing heavily in its young drivers and having input from someone needs as much relevant input as possible to measure their progress.

Hughes feels that he can give an “independent overview of what’s going on within the team which I then filter back to McLaren. How was Alex’s performance? Where is he strong? Where does he need to work? I think that’s equally as important as the support that it gives Alex.”

Not so much a “fly on the wall” as a balanced viewpoint, going beyond what can be seen from the stopwatch and the points table.

Dunne admits that “we’ve had one of the more difficult seasons, [such that] somebody looking in from the outside might say sometimes I may be underperforming.”

Therefore, for him as well, having “someone like Warren who’s here, looking at the data, looking at everything on track, he’s able to, I guess you could say, back me up in the case that that’s not necessarily what’s happening.”

Having that “second opinion confirms that a lot of the things that have happened are not necessarily within my control. To have that [has] been very helpful,” he reckons.

Hughes has continued to work with Bustamente as she builds her career in F1 Academy, although the relative lack of experience compared to someone like Dunne given that most of her racing has been in F4 necessitates a “very different” approach.

“There’s way more guidance involved, both in the driving side and out of the car, so that I really feel I can influence her quite a lot.

“I’ve got a really good relationship with Bianca and her management as well, so if feel I need to say something or have an opinion on something, they’re very open and receptive to my opinion. She’s a great character, very bubbly and a lot of fun. It’s a little bit of a rollercoaster just because of the nature of F1 Academy, there’s probably bigger gaps between races, the drivers are less experienced, so there’s more room for variation.”

Having worked with W Series and now with Bustamente, he admits that “it is different working with a girl, there are other elements involved and the emotional side of it is definitely one of those things,” which has been “a learning process” for him too, “trying to navigate that and trying to use it in a positive way.”

“It probably would have helped if I’d had daughters, but I haven’t, I’ve got two boys,” he adds with a smile.

“I’m finding it a great challenge and it’s really rewarding when she gets a good result and she’s super appreciative of the input,” he says.

After around 20 years as a coach, Hughes has lost none of his enthusiasm for the role and the never-ending opportunity to learn something new, and never get stale.

“I’ve been at it a long time. You learn a huge set of skills, people skills and obviously it keeps you involved with car progression, with track progression, but you’re [always] learning, mixing with different characters all the time, not just drivers, but within the teams, different engineers, different nationalities,” he says.

“Every day is different, every personality is different and I think you’ve got to be emotionally switched on and emotionally intelligent to do a job that people value. But I’m still here so something must be going well!”