Rob Smedley: “I cried for about an hour after Massa lost the 2008 title – it was so intense…”

This week, for the first time on Beyond The Grid, presented by Bose, we’re not speaking to a driver or a team boss, but to an engineer – and someone who’s been directly involved of some of the biggest moments in F1 in the past 20 years. Rob Smedley is probably best known to most fans as Felipe Massa’s long-standing Race Engineer, and in that role he experienced the full gamut of emotions, from the elation of race wins to the heartbreak of a narrow title loss, and the horror of seeing ‘his’ driver severely injured. We also talk to him about working for Ferrari, issuing controversial team orders, his impending departure from Williams, and why Michael Schumacher – a man he worked so closely with – was much more than a driver…