A name not likely to have registered on your radar, Canadian engineer Ryan Dingle proved to be something of a trailblazer in Japan. .JamieKlein_ spoke to him about his career as he heads for pastures new. Feature:
If foreign drivers have become scarce in Super Formula and Super GT recently, non-Japanese engineers are an even rarer breed. Indeed, since the days of the late, great Ricardo Divila, foreign engineers working in the upper echelons of Japan’s two premier categories can almost be counted on a single hand.
This year, Dingle is moving on to pastures new after landing a plum race engineering job with Toyota’s World Endurance Championship squad. That makes this an ideal time to look back on the 36-year-old’s nine-year stint in Japan, which includes three seasons in All-Japan Formula 3 before his promotion to the big leagues in 2017.
With that year's final round at Suzuka called off due to a typhoon, which left Gasly half-a-point shy of Ishiura in the final reckoning, Sugo turned out to be the crucial race for the championship. These were the days where races were longer and featured refuelling stops, but Team LeMans and Rosenqvist came up with the idea of saving enough fuel to eliminate the pitstop entirely.
This involved starting on wet tyres on a bone dry track, which according to the Super Formula regulations negated the need to run both dry tyre compounds. This allowed Kobayashi to avoid the medium tyre, which was multiple seconds a lap slower than its soft counterpart, and the advantage of doing so was increased by the new pitstop window rule that meant anyone starting on the medium would have to use it for several laps before pitting.
Initially motivated by the prospect of working with Mugen’s Red Bull junior drivers in Super Formula, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic meant he would run Juri Vips for a single pre-season test at Fuji before spending the rest of the season with Ukyo Sasahara. The following year, he’d finally get his first race win with Hiroki Otsu in mixed conditions at Motegi, before engineering another rookie in the form of Ren Sato at the Servus-run Team Goh outfit in 2022.
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