"I said, 'Mate, I got four heart attacks, one every lap!'"
Rene Rosin has just landed in America. He wasn't there to see his Prema Racing team's extraordinary Indianapolis 500 pole with Robert Shwartzman first-hand - Rosin was overseeing his team in Formula 2 and Formula 3 action at Imola - but it's immediately clear what it means to him.
"I still feel tears in my eyes, to be honest," says Rosin, the other side of an arduous journey to the US, speaking exclusively to The Race two days on from that incredible debut pole.
"Already before the weekend we say, 'Listen guys, let's try to get within the [top] 33', we tried to avoid bump day. We tried just to be solid mid-pack, that's already success.
"Then we arrived at Fast Friday. I was in Imola. In the evening, I was looking at all the sessions, I was getting messages from the people here in America. And it was fast. And I said, 'What is happening?'
"But then, of course, Fast Friday, you don't know how the others are running. You don't know the condition. It's still free practice. Inside myself, I got this feeling. I got somebody telling me, inside, listen...I don't know what happened, I can’t explain..."
A supernatural feeling would certainly go a long way to explaining this feat, that's for sure.
The Race begins its call by asking Rosin, the son of team founder Angelo, 'How did you do this?' The initial response was perhaps unsurprising.
"I don't know how we have done this, it's incredible!"
That achievement - the magnitude of it, the people behind the scenes who made the impossible happen - is of course delved into. But that reaction gives you a taste of the humble nature of the team in what it has accomplished.
On Saturday, for Shwartzman's initial qualifying run, Rosin was in a restaurant with Angelina Ertsou - Prema communications and team management, although that title doesn't begin to explain her importance to the team - and technical director Guillaume Capietto.
"OK, so we have arrived," was Rosin's takeaway from watching there, that day also producing the line about one heart attack per lap for Shwartzman's run.
For Sunday, Rosin was already at home as the journey back from Imola is not too far. So, like many fans, he was set up with three or four screens focusing on the action.
"Of course, for us, it is important just to be there within already the Fast 12, it was a dream," he says.
"When it was Robert's turn [in the Fast Six] I started shaking myself, literally shaking. I was not able to keep the computer at my end. I looked and I saw 233.1mph. I say, 'Holy ****!'
"As soon as I saw the first lap of Felix [Rosenqvist, the last driver who could beat Shwartzman], 232.5mph, I started crying. I started crying. And then I started messaging everybody in America saying, 'What the **** have we done?!'. And from that moment, the phone started ringing."
Of course, not being at the track to see his team take pole was not ideal, but there was one amusing, endearing charm to watching it at home.
"It was 1am or something in the morning, and I started hearing the horn of cars ringing in front of my house," Rosin adds.
"It was our Formula 2 engineers coming back from Imola, coming there and cheering for the pole position! They were looking on the computers. And then we opened a bottle of champagne altogether.
"Because really, all of Prema was looking at it. It was really incredible. Then I spoke with Robert. I said, 'What the **** have you done?!'"
How Prema pulled this off
Whenever a new team comes along and beats the establishment, there's a clamour to find a person responsible. The one, behind the scenes, 'secret' person who can explain all of how this incredible feat against the odds happened.
But I always think in doing that, you take away from the collective achievement. We're always told things like the Indy 500 is a 'sum of the parts' or 'down to the finest detail and all the details have to be perfect'. How can that be down to one person? It's the antithesis of that.
However, what we can do with Prema is chart its development because it's mostly happened behind closed doors and there has been significant reshuffling.
Ace IndyCar engineer Michael Cannon was brought in as technical director but he left during the pre-season, with some reporting it was because Cannon didn't feel Prema was ready and prepared to start its debut season.
How Prema solved Cannon's vacancy - especially in preparing for the Indy 500 - has been done behind closed doors. But we can edge that door ajar for you.
With Cannon gone, Rosin installed Mario Gargiulo, coincidently Shwartzman's engineer through most of his time at Prema including in F2 and F3, as new technical director. But he wasn't naive enough to think Gargiulo - as diverse as his experience is - could immediately know everything about ovals. He'd just come from the Lamborghini hypercar programme.
Instead, a committee of engineers have had to rely on each other. One of the biggest hires for Prema was Robert Gue, who joined from Arrow McLaren for this year as head of R&D. He's had a massive hand in how Prema's Indy 500 cars have turned out and was at McLaren for over 10 years in its Schmidt Peterson phase.
"Robert has already had tremendous input in the preparation for the Speedway car," says Rosin. "And honestly, all the jobs we have done has been discussing all together. Of course, we try to bring our way of working with methods and so on.
"It's be difficult in IndyCar because of the back to back events. You don't have time of preparation. European teams are preparing much more ahead. Here of course, you prepare year by year, but for us, it's difficult to prepare year by year because we were not here last year!"
But probably the most notable addition has been Eric Leichtle. Take a look at his LinkedIn, and you'll see he's a senior structures engineer at Space X. He's seemingly on loan for the month and is Shwartzman's engineer.
"He arrived for the open test, and he integrated well immediately within the team," says Rosin. "And to be honest, it gave us a bit of serenity, a bit of trust in ourselves."
Leichtle engineered Josef Newgarden to five IndyCar wins in 2022 at Team Penske, so he knows a thing or two about IndyCar race engineering. Installed alongside Callum Ilott's engineer Steve Barker, they've worked well.
But even Prema's overarching technical director Capietto and Gargiulo as well have been crucial in providing extra brains. Even if they don't know ovals, the engineering principals don't change and as a committee they've proven wise council in problem solving many areas.
Shwartzman's credentials
Still, after putting this car together, it needed a prodigious Indy 500 rookie, with a performance the like of which hasn't been seen since Juan Pablo Montoya, to drive the thing.
"Robert has been magnificent; the trace on the steering wheel, what he had done, really deserve big, big credit," says Rosin.
"Everybody now speaks about Robert, and honestly, I know the potential of Robert. I know what he is capable of doing.
"We must remember F2 in 2021, he was the only one fighting with [his then team-mate and eventual F2 champion] Oscar Piastri. Everybody's telling me now, Oscar Piastri, the new Formula 1 champion; I'm telling you, Oscar Piastri is Formula 1 world champion material.
"And the only drivers that was battling with him was Robert. So to be honest, that year has been amazing for us, because we got the two best drivers around."
There's no doubting the friendship of the drivers and the team, with Rosin also praising Ilott's run to 23rd - which would have been a fine achievement for Prema before the pole! - and acknowledging that "every small detail can make a difference and of course, sometimes not all the cars are the same".
'We've already done the extraordinary'
So, what about the race? Shwartzman's going to need to drive brilliantly and have great strategy and perfect pitstops. But perhaps understandably, Rosin's not quite ready to let the pole out of his mind.
"Honestly I want to let everybody get this week, to feel what they've done, to be proud of what they've done," he says.
"We will do our best to be prepared for the race. It's the biggest spectacle in racing, as the speedway guys say, and we need to enjoy it, every moment.
"I care about the [race] result, but already what we have done is extraordinary."
