Oliver Rowland has revealed that working with a sports psychologist has given him a significant boost ahead of, and during, the current FIA Formula E season, and says he relishes being the underdog of the championship.
The Nissan man currently sits third in the Drivers’ standings, only nine points off Pascal Wehrlein and Jake Dennis, having won the first of the double-header in Misano, before being cruelly denied victory on Sunday after a software glitch.
Speaking to the media this week, Rowland told Motorsport Week that he has moved-on from his difficult spell with Mahindra Racing, in which he left half-way through last season before being signed-up by Nissan to return to his old team for Season 10.
“It’s hard to remember back twelve months – it’s been a complete circle,” he said.
“The last couple of years have been very challenging, whether it’s from a professional or mental aspect to try and be able to deal with what I was having to deal with, especially in a critical phase of my career, where I felt I still had a bit of youth on my side, a bit of experience, and I knew deep down that this was the time to be successful.
“Obviously, I took a big leap of faith to break my contact last year to miss half of the season which wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do.
“I think we [Nissan] are still in a rebuilding phase within the team, and that was the target this season, to build the blocks to be ready for next season when we’ve got some decent upgrades coming, to really build the team.
“I had a new performance engineer this year that hadn’t done the role before, had a new race engineer who hadn’t done that role before, there’s also new people that have come in, so the target was to try and build throughout the season and understand our package and build the working relationship, so I don’t think I’ve ever expected to be in the position we are in at the moment, but it’s been a welcome surprise.
“It’s something I’m relishing and enjoying – I guess I’m enjoying the underdog fight we are bringing.
“Nobody really expected anybody other than the Porsche and the Jaguars to challenge for the championship or race wins, so for us to be in the mix and consistently performing is very positive.
“It makes-up for the difficulties last year and how I was feeling.
“Mentally, it was very tough. I’ve been working with a sports psychologist throughout the last six months, which I think has helped me massively in regaining my confidence and focus on the job in hand.”
Rowland also responded to the praise he and his team have received from other teams and drivers in recent weeks, with many praising the Nissan package over the Misano weekend, and firmly considering them title challengers, but says that he isn’t feeling pressure as a consequence.
“We don’t feel pressure because we have our own goals and targets set and they don’t change.
“I actually had a call with my sports psychologist before Misano and what we spoke about was coming to a completely different challenge and reaffirming what our goals and targets were.
“They asked me what are these targets still are and I reeled them off, and they had increased but not to the level we’re at at the moment, so I think for us, it’s about carrying on our day-to-day stuff, race-by-race.
“I’ve been quite pessimistic in terms of what I thought our chances were before we went to these high energy efficient races but after this weekend, I think I can no longer block that off completely, because we were so competitive, and now we have to accept we are going to be competing on a regular basis, and it’s just optimising and avoiding what happened on Sunday a little bit! But try and avoid those little mistakes, but I don’t feel any pressure on my side.
“I’m pretty relaxed and I come into every weekend trying to do my best and know that what we’re trying to achieve will be achieved anyway.”
Rowland also told us that after a double-header weekend, returning to Monaco, where the whole race schedule is comprised within one day, he is looking forward to condensing a whole weekend’s work into a smaller timeframe.
“Actually, I was thinking it would be a nice weekend, because we don’t have FP1 on a Friday, we can shift all the work into the Saturday, so whilst there’s more racing in one day, the workload before it is less, so Thursday is going to be relatively empty, and the Friday and Saturday are the work days.
“I’m not expecting too much more fatigue, interestingly, when I first joined Formula E everything was in one day, and as a rookie, I suffered from fatigue and I was knackered after the weekend because it’s pretty intense – you don’t have time to sit and think about it overnight.”
