Mark Webber, on preparing to compete against Justin in the same team

“I think the announcement was like on the Monday or Tuesday after the British Grand Prix that he’s coming for the next race. And I’m like, ‘Just through sheer respect for Justin, I’ve seen this guy race, he can be dangerous in terms of his speed. And he’s quite strong mentally, as well, and I need to be ready for him.’ So I remember I went for a hundred-mile bike ride on the Wednesday before that race. Just to get my head right, and trick myself that I’m more than ready than this new guy coming in.

“And I was so dialed in with that car, and I was so settled, and I was so at one with it, that it was a really hard task for someone to jump in mid-season like Justin, because that car was very, very challenging to drive. So I think that from an engineering perspective, and also from a speed and performance perspective, it was a handful of a scenario for Justin to come in and be comfortable physically, and also from a stopwatch perspective, in a car that wasn’t built with him in mind.

“But the way we connected, I think that absolutely he was everything you’d want as a teammate, and this is not lip service. If you wanted someone that you could work with and have a great relationship with professionally, and take the team forward together, someone like Justin is who you would love to do that with.”

Webber already had a high opinion of Wilson from their battles in F3000, but that respect went up even further as the Australian watched how his new teammate adapted to difficult circumstances at Jaguar. Motorsport Images

Graham Rahal, on being befriended and mentored by Justin as a Champ Car rookie

“I remember Portland, my rookie year – 2007 Portland. I hadn’t really spent a lot of time with Justin. Obviously we had competed, said hello at all the autograph sessions, he’d always been extremely nice to me, that was always a given, but we were on different teams then. So at Portland, I sat next to him for something, and I think what he did said a lot about his personality and who he was as a man. He started talking to me, even though we didn’t know each other, and asking me, ‘Hey, what are your future goals? What do you want to do? Where do you want to be when you’re my age that I am now? What are the things that you want to accomplish?’ Those aren’t typically things a guy you go up against asks you.

“And I told him, ‘Well, I always thought that Formula 1 was the thing I wanted to do. And here I am, obviously it’s a little bit different, and I’m super excited to be where I’m at in Champ Car, but it was clearly a different path than I had thought I’d be on right now.’ And he said to me, ‘If I can give you one piece of advice, Formula 1’s not made for people like you and me.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘It’s not made for nice people. He said, ‘When I went to Formula 1, they chewed me up. They spit me out.’ He said, ‘I want to have friends. I want to be able to talk to other drivers and be friendly and have that comradery and then go fight it out on track.’

“He said, ‘You’re not going to like that. If you like being here, focus on being here, being the best that you can be here, because you’re not the type of guy who’s not going to want to have friends or not the type of guy who’s not going to want to be personable. Over there, they don’t embrace guys like us.’

“It was a powerful thing for me, because at that time in my career, I was still thinking, ‘Well, maybe that’s where I’d like to go.’ I was not 18 years old. And literally at that moment, speaking to him, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s not for me, being the driver who just shows up and you’re a robot and you just don’t talk and go out and drive and just try to beat your teammate and nothing else.’ That’s no kind of life. It was a really powerful lesson for me at a young age, in my life and in my career, of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.”

Barry Waddell, on coaching an F1 driver

“I had done many years of driver coaching, was with the Skip Barber school for a long time, got to instruct some amazing guys; Jeff Gordon, Juan Pablo Montoya come to mind first, and raced a lot myself. I got connected with the RuSport team that went from Atlantics with AJ Allmendinger to Champ Car, and that’s where I first worked with Justin. And so from right away, I had AJ and Justin going into that whole Champ Car thing, and Justin comes with F1 pedigree. You expect the ‘quiet stoics’ from an F1 drivers, doesn’t want to hear anything from a driver coach, so I thought, ‘this will be interesting…’ And it was fascinating. He was everything I didn’t expect.

“He was absolutely a sponge. Working with him absolutely became this high to me. A high-end communication on the driver’s side. I’d tell him ‘You got to give me feedback what you’re sensing. And the flip side of that is I can stand here on the outside, at the corners, and I can tell you what I’m seeing. And then we can go from there.’ And it was so much fun with him. And then there’s AJ, who fits in here in this space differently.

“At the end of a test day, you’d look at the speed overlays between AJ and Justin, you go, ‘Are you guys even on the same track?’ I mean, for crying out loud. But they’d lap within the same tenth of a second. It was a great education for me. And it was a great education where I’m blending these two guys in so many ways, they complemented each other.”