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[h=2]INTERVIEW: Jack Hawksworth[/h] Mark Glendenning / Images by IMSA, IMS & LAT

One has to look pretty hard to find the silver lining to Jack Hawksworth's 2016 IndyCar season. Having signed on for a second year with AJ Foyt Racing - after the newly-expanded team conceded that it hadn't given him the equipment to shine in 2015 - his results actually went backwards. If a campaign in which you earn five top 10s is considered a failure, what do you make of one that ends with no finish higher than 11th, and last among the full-timers in the championship?


For many third-year drivers, those sorts of results might have proved career-ending. Instead, just a few weeks on from the end of the IndyCar season, Hawksworth is at Daytona, busily preparing for his new life as part of 3GT's factory-aligned Lexus RC F GT3 program in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

RACER: After a difficult couple of years, it must be especially nice to be sitting here before Thanksgiving and knowing what you''ll be doing next season?
JACK HAWKSWORTH: Yeah, it is It's been really refreshing, to be honest. It's good to get the deal sorted out early, and it's an awesome program with a lot of people involved with it – it's not just 3GT; there's Lexus, and Toyota's racing department in the USA ... it's a huge group of people. We had something like 40 people at the track just for one car [during testing at Daytona]. It's been a bit of an eye-opener for me to work with so many people. It's been a lot of fun.
RACER: You've worked with Paul Gentilozzi in the past ...
JH: Yes, I raced in LM PC with Paul Gentilozzi's team, RSR racing. I ran four races in 2014, and actually won the first race I did with those guys [on the IMS road course]. That's how this opportunity came about, because 3GT is formerly RSR, so I knew Paul and had a good relationship with him. We'd been speaking back and forth for a while over the last couple of years, and I was going to go and do some stuff with them in 2015 and 2016, but I wasn't allowed to do anything outside of my IndyCar contract. But we kept in touch, and when we got to the middle of this year I called him and said, 'have you got anything for next year', and it all spun off from that.
RACER: So you knew that early in the season that the relationship with Foyt was headed towards its end?
JH: I knew. To be honest ... I raced for them in 2015, and at the end of the year they had an option on me. And they took the option, and I committed to doing another year with them. But even then, I knew it was the wrong decision. There were certain things that needed to change there – especially on the 41 side of the garage – which I had asked for, and which everybody on the team was pushing for. Even when I signed at the end of last year, it was obvious that none of that stuff was happening. But I guess I signed the contract being a bit naïve; thinking 'I want to stay in IndyCar for another year'. I didn't sign for the right reasons, if that makes sense.
So I was worried pretty early on. And then it went from bad to worse. So by April, May, I was already committed to looking elsewhere. And I obviously knew that my stock had plummeted in IndyCar, so there weren't really any seats that I wanted that would have been available to me. So that's when I started looking outside of the series, and this was an opportunity that I thought was a good one.
RACER: Can you elaborate on what sort of things were missing? Was it an engineering thing?
JH: It wasn't on the engineering side. Everybody always looks at Foyt and says, 'oh, they're lacking in the engineering department'. [The problem] wasn't the engineering department when I was there. It's the fundamentals of the team that are poor. If you have reliability issues at every race, it doesn't matter how clever an engineer you are, or what set-up you put on the car. If stuff's breaking, or you ask to have this put on the car and instead something else is put on the car, it doesn't matter if you have the best engineer in the world.
And that was the stuff that scuppered us. We missed the basics. You can't have poor pitstop after poor pitstop after poor pitstop, or mechanical after mechanical after mechanical, and expect to make progress. There were many, many issues there, to be honest. I don't want to badmouth Foyt, but I knew it was the wrong decision immediately after I'd done it [re-signed].
RACER: It's presumably especially difficult when you're on the inside and you know what is going on, but everyone on the outside just sees the numbers.
JH: Yeah. And the numbers don't lie, and at the end of the day that's why you can't worry too much about these sorts of things, and just go out and get the job done. But it's much more complicated on the inside than it looks. It looks like you just get a good engineer and a good driver, and put them together, and that's it. But a race team is much, much more than that. The driver and engineer are 10 percent of it. The other 90 percent, the actual foundation of the team, is built from the ground up. If you've got a good engineer and a good driver, that's the cherry on top.

I have no problem with any of the engineering staff at Foyt – there are a lot of clever guys there, actually. The guy I worked with this past year [Daniele Cucchiaroni] was very good; he had a lot of good ideas. Even if you look at the way the cars rolled off the truck – regularly, we'd be in the top five in practice, we'd qualify quite well, but as the weekend went on, invariably the wheels would fall off. But it wasn't down to the engineers not knowing how to set the car up, or anything like that.

It was just down to everything being on the limit from an organizational point of view. It was not a good working environment, and that's why I'm happy with this new opportunity I've got. It has been great for me because I've just been able to concentrate on being a racing driver. The last couple of years were mainly spent trying to sort other stuff out and deal with problems, and now I'm in a situation again where I can just focus on my driving; focus on my performance. And I'm enjoying that.