British MotoGP rider switches to four wheels for day

Yamaha rider Toseland, who crashed out on the first corner of the first lap in last Sunday’s British MotoGP, visited the Williams factory last week, where he had a go in the team’s F1 simulator. How did he do? Read on…

Kazuki Nakajima posted a time of 1min 21secs, before showing James around the controls. Toseland span off on his first lap out of the pits, and his first flying lap was a full 10 seconds slower than Nakajima’s time. But over the next 30 laps, Toseland got within three seconds of his target time. Not bad for a first outing in an F1 car, even if it was only a simulator.

“I’ve never previously driven a single-seater, let alone an F1 car,” Toseland said after his F1 experience. “It’s quite a culture shock to lap 20 seconds faster than on the bike and while the cornering speeds of the car are very impressive, the most difficult thing for me to get used to is the brakes. You have to be very aggressive under braking and Xevi (Pujolar, Kazuki’s race engineer) kept telling me to apply more initial pressure. I’m told that Kazki and Nico apply about 85 kilos of pressure to the pedal, which seems incredible.”

BONUS Toseland vid: James entertains fellow sports stars with his piano skills