Eurointernational's three drivers (Carlos and Daniil in 2010 raced alongside USA's Michael Lewis) had one race engineer working with them – Nicola Sgotto from Italy. He was one of the driving forces behind the team's confident victory the year before, but now he had to work with two karting graduates, and he realised from the very beginning that Eurointernational would struggle to repeat its success.
Nicola Sgotto:
"You can't win a championship without experience. But the problem is, experience isn't something you can buy in a supermarket. Both of them were very quick, we wanted to give them as much time as possible in testing, but they would have to race against drivers who had already spent a couple of seasons in Formula BMW – while they didn't have a single race under their belts. Felipe Nasr, before the came to us, had decent experience from Brazil, while Daniel Juncadella achieved a truly strong result only in his second season. Carlos and Daniil came to us out of karting. Yes, they were very fast in testing, recorded great laptimes, but being fast over one lap in the winter is one thing and correctly structuring a race weekend with all of its complicated logistics is quite another.
"They needed to adapt to the environment, to the walls of the cockpit, the gearshift, the weight of the car, the maximum speed and entirely different overtaking tactics. After karting it's very important to learn to maintain distance. There almost every overtake includes contact, but in formula racing any contact is likely to lead to bent suspension and retirement. For a talented driver, producing a good laptime over a single lap is usually the easiest task.
"Daniil was not as ready as Carlos. He needed to have paid more attention to, for example, physical training. He did it but he wasn't doing it right – because he didn't know how. Carlos by his side always had his father, who understood, how important nuances like these were. He had experience, knowledge, and he always had an exhaustive answer to every question. Daniil had nobody who could help him. His father knew nothing of motorsport. Yes, he did all he could, but he was a person from an entirely different world.
"When we first ran Daniil at Varano, he didn't even know how to deal with the gearshift, while Carlos, when he came to us, already had dozens of testing days under his belt. It was completely normal that he had a slight advantage in the beginning."