Richard ‘Spike’ Goddard is competing in his second FIA European Formula 3 Championship season with the ThreeBond with T-Sport team in 2014, having debuted with them last year.
As a rookie in 2013, the Australian failed to score a point all year, and had a best finish of 15th that he took on four occasions throughout the year. He made a big step up from the national category of British Formula 3 to compete in the European Formula 3 Championship, and admitted it was a big learning curve, but saw that 2013 team-mate Alexander Sims got a lot out of the c.
”2013 was my first season in an international Formula 3 series,” said Goddard. “In the previous year, I contested the national category of the British Formula 3. I definitely want to achieve more than in the 2013 season, this year. And it goes without saying that I want to do so in the FIA Formula 3 European Championship, the planet’s most competitive young-gun series, as I see it.
”I realised that the cars of my team, ThreeBond with T-Sport, are extremely reliable and virtually never encounter technical problems. Furthermore, Alexander Sims demonstrated last year that the car is very fast. I think that I still lacked the experience for racing on such a high level, last year, but I basically know that you also can make it to the very top as ThreeBond with T-Sport driver. Therefore, I opted for staying with the team.”
In 2014, Goddard has already broken into the top ten, finishing ninth in Pau after scoring his maiden point with tenth at Hockenheim. He was happy to get that monkey off his back, but admits he still needs to work on his qualifying to assist him in getting more opportunities to score points.
“I’m very happy with my achievements to date. In the second race of the Pau weekend I held ninth position for quite a while and also displayed a good pace. And even before, in the season kick-off at Hockenheim, we could see that the pace of our car is really good and that it has got what it takes to make it to the top 10.
“I just have to improve my qualifying performance. I must learn to sooner take the car to its limit instead of needing as much time as I currently do. With my current approach, using the peak of a fresh set of tyres is virtually impossible for me.”
So what is Goddard’s 2014 ambition? Well that’s an easy question to answer: to become a regular points scorer in the European Formula 3 Championship.
“I want to score points – as many as possible. And I’m on a rather good path, in this respect, as I already made it to the points in two of the first nine races of the season. “