Photo: LAT Images
Joseph Loake was still buzzing a week after his maiden Formula 1 test, part of his prize for winning the 2023 Autosport BRDC Young Driver Award.
On August 21, Aston Martin (which sponsored last year’s award) ran the 19-year-old in its AMR22 car from 2022 at Silverstone, this year’s award sponsor.
“It’s very special to be able to drive an F1 car. Not many people can really say that they have,” raved Loake when he spoke to Formula Scout at Monza, where he was concluding his rookie FIA Formula 3 campaign.
“I’m still speechless now that I got to drive a car with that sort of pace. Even just watching it go around today, I’m kind of still going ‘I was driving one of them about a week ago’.”
He added: “Of course, one day I hope to be racing one of them.”
Loake was full of praise for the level of support from Aston Martin to help him get the most out of the experience, including “a day of really good running in the simulator”.
“There was nothing too crazy [on the day]. I did my installation, then a short run just to kind of learn what to do, all the controls and stuff like that.”
Afterwards he went on “a couple of performance runs on old tyres”, before finally getting his chance with “two new sets, a set of hards and a set of softs, which was really exciting because that’s when everything’s as close to the actual race car as possible”.
“I thought that was quite quick,” Loake remarked with some understatement. “Obviously I’m going to say that, but I think Aston were quite impressed.”
He acknowledges however that he does not know how much performance Aston Martin were letting him use. In total, 25 of his 36 laps at the wheel were timed.
“I still got a lot of running [and] by the end of the day, I was quite tired. I felt like I’d been given a proper test of an F1 car and that was more than I could ask for.”
Loake “managed to get an extra lap” before his test concluded.
“Robert Sattler [Aston Martin’s F1 Evolution programme director], who was running the day was kind of wanting to give me the extra lap anyway and [when] he suggested it, I was like: ‘Extra lap? Yes, please.’.
“The more laps you can get in an F1 car you’re not going to turn them down. I was just being a bit cheeky to see what I could get,” he jokes.
“It was all over too quickly. It was amazing, but a little bit of you never wants to stop. If anything, it gives you that extra bit of hunger to try and make it to F1 and to be in one of the cars full-time.
“The main thing was that I was there to enjoy the day and the first time driving an F1 car because you only get to experience that once.”
Photo: LAT Images