Understeer. Turn into a corner, the front wheels slide and next thing you know the driver’s looking at the apex through the window netting of his V8 Supercar.

In 2002 'The Enforcer' was getting used to the idea of jumping ship to SBR for the following year.

Simple concept, right? Not really, when you’re an engineer dealing with a new driver you hardly know and have to try and decide exactly what sort of understeer he’s complaining about.

Are those wheels refusing to grip under power or when the tap’s turned off? Is it drive related or more to do with lateral grip? C’mon, you’ve got to come up with a fix now because your man’s 12th and there’s only six minutes left in qualifying.

Tick, tick, tick. Time’s up.

There, in those few frantic moments is the very essence of the problem that will, at least initially, hinder almost every driver who has swapped seats in the very silly ’04-05 off-season.

In 2002 Richo was still coming to grips with his move across from Ford Tickford Racing.

Each of them will have to go through a learning process to understand the new people and machinery around them.

Meanwhile, the team will have to learn about its new driver (or drivers in a couple of cases), his personality, strengths and weaknesses at the same time.

And while you’re learning you’re playing catch-up at best, not getting ahead.

How well and how quickly the various elements deal with that process will determine their fate in the championship, and possibly where that rather odd-looking championship trophy ends up at the end of the season.

Steven Richards and Russell Ingall were teammates at Castrol Perkins Racing in 2002.

Some will acclimatise quickly, be fast all year and energise themselves and the team in the process. Other combinations will simply never gel. The driver will quickly move on when his time’s done to seek a more comfortable and competitive fit, while the team will go wooing new flesh and blood.

"Any change that takes place is always initially going to put you on the back foot because there are so many teams that haven’t changed," explains Steven Richards.

The Castrol Commodore ace certainly knows all about the challenges of adjusting to a new team. While he’s now comfortably ensconced in Larry Perkins’ operation and putting in some of the best performances of his career, there was a period where he must have felt he would never get off the merry-go-round.

He started with Garry Rogers in V8s in 1996, was at Gibson Motorsport in 1999 when that team was taken over by Gary Dumbrell (Paul’s dad) and when he sold out, Richo made a brief jump across the great divide to drive for Glenn Seton’s fading FTR operation. Somewhere in there (1998 actually) he co-drove Jason Bright to victory at Bathurst as well as having a stint with Nissan in UK Super Tourers.

But this year Richo’s been nothing more than an interested spectator as more of his rivals than ever have swapped, vacated and grabbed seats. Of the 34 rides on offer, 15 have new occupants for 2005. Nine are veterans moving on, six are rookies moving in. Another five have departed the championship while 19 stayed put.

It’s interesting to note the two-car teams where the driving line-up has stayed intact include SBR, HRT, TPR, LMS and BJR, while there have been double changes at FPR and Triple 8. Draw your own conclusions.

It’s a point not lost on Richards.

"Guys like the Stone brothers have a good recipe for success," says Richards. "They retain their key staff year in year out, they have the same driver line-up and, in doing so, that enables the relationship and communication between one another to be easier. You work and understand.

"When you go to a new team one of the big problems is working with a new engineer ... it’s the initial problem of interpreting what the driver has to say. So until you get your relationship to where you are talking the same language, that’s a tough one."

There are ways around that, of course. Jason Bright has headed for the big bucks at FPR but will stay united with Phil Keed, with whom he struck an excellent relationship when they worked together at PWR.

"It will help us because we know we understand each other from the word go," Bright explains.

"Forming a relationship with an engineer takes some time, but with Phil we can look at each other sideways and know what each other is thinking straight away."

It’s not a panacea, of course. Bright still has another 40 team members to get to know, a car to learn and a bunch of internal processes to adjust to.

There are a thousand small things that add up to one big puzzle. How does the team pre-brief, debrief and pitstop? What about the car? Is it ergonomically comfortable, and where are all the switches? And then there’s the make-or-break relationships with the people. Not everyone gets on, personalities clash, but is there enough common ground to get the job done?

"It is just like getting married again," says Russell Ingall. "You don’t know the new person you’re with, you don’t know what they are like. And I am talking about everyone, down to the guy who polishes the wheels."

Left: When Jason Bright moved to FPR his engineer Phil Keed decided to follow, making Jason's year a little more comfortable. Above: To ease the transition from one team to another, FPR allowed Seton to test with DJR before the end of 2004.

As you might have read elsewhere in this issue, Ingall is looking on 2005 as being a big chance for him to finally grab the championship silverware, and at least part of that confidence comes from the amount of movement he’s observed over the summer.

It can take a full season before a driver and a team gel, allowing them to extract their full potential from each other.

While he’s only raced for Larry Perkins and SBR in Aussie V8s, Ingall has been through the grind internationally, campaigning for a variety of junior formulae teams in the UK, Germany and Japan as he chased the F1 dream in the early 1990s. He predicts relationships between drivers and teams will be forged and broken in the times of immense stress.

"It’s funny how people react and in the heat of the moment, a lot of drivers are pretty fiery," says Ingall. "If they have a moment in practice, qualifying or the race and they have the big lose, a lot of team members don’t know how to deal with that, and go ‘what’s the story with this idiot?’.

"They stand back and ‘bang’; all of a sudden you have everyone offside straight out of the gate.

"Everyone lives out of each other’s suitcase for 11 months of the year and there is always a process there. It can be six months before you get to know everyone, what they like and dislike and know how to approach it.

"The people are the important bit," continues Ingall. "It’s all part of the same deal. You need everything happening for you to win the championship. The smallest of things. It’s such a psychological game now."