• Moving to Force India also made me realise how stressed I had become at McLaren without knowing it. I was much happier at Force India, where everyone worked on the same page and just cracked on to get the job done. It was a bit less political. There was none of this: ‘Oh, that’s not my job.’ At Force India, the attitude was: ‘Right, what needs to be done next? Okay, let’s do that. Do you need help with this or are you okay?’ It was a very different environment; it had to be because of such a huge difference in size.

  • There is this strange paradox of each half of the garage focussed completely on one car for ‘their’ driver and yet, when it comes to a pit stop, the crew unites 100 per cent to have whichever driver under way in the fastest possible time. Similarly, in the event of an accident and one car needing repairs in a hurry, both sides of the garage will pull together. Everyone then has the same goal. But that dynamic changes once the car is back on track!

  • When you are a lower team, it is tempting to gamble on, say, a perfectly timed safety car in the hope of achieving a lucky result. However, that is not going to work nine times out of ten. It is better to be in the singular best finishing position.

  • The number of technical personnel in each race team is limited to 58 at the track.

  • The really busy period starts in September, with the design for the next year’s car, followed by the manufacturing department being full-on through December and into January, often working through weekends with only a brief shutdown for Christmas. It is the one period of the year when everyone on the team is under one roof for more than a few days at a time.

  • They may have a broad knowledge, but good managers will quietly accept that they do not know the fine detail driving the various departments beneath them. In my experience, the best managers are those who accept that the specialist groups making up an F1 team are expert in their own specific areas, and their decisions and opinions can be trusted.

  • It is said that Adrian Newey is very effective at Red Bull because he pushes the mechanical side to prioritise the aero setup. Everything is about give and take: what is the biggest priority? What is going to make the most difference? Underscoring all this, everyone will want their piece to be perfect. Mechanical design will call for the biggest range of cooling possible. Aero will want the engine cooling to be as small as it realistically can be. This is where you need a chief designer with a good knowledge of what can or cannot be done to level everything out.

  • In the early design stages, the specification of the car will not be an attempt to cover every possible race with, say, the maximum temperature ever seen.

  • The chief designer, by the way, might alternate from year to year, allowing one designer to focus on the current car while the other chief designer is looking a year ahead – but both working in parallel.

  • It is always useful, however, to read driver quotes on press releases issued by rival teams; there is always something to learn. Through experience, you become familiar with the thinking of various drivers. With some, if they say they are going to do a two-stop, you can be certain the opposite will happen!

  • Pirelli run a WhatsApp group, giving tyre information and listing the various sets drivers have left to play with.

  • The McLaren tunnel was built for a scale model, but an increase in the size of cars and their wings brought interference from the walls and the roof of the wind tunnel, rendering it unusable. Many of the teams then found they had little option but to travel to Germany to use the Toyota facility with its full-size tunnel.

  • The model in the tunnel can be turned 30 degrees relative to the prevailing wind, which mimics a through-the-corner situation.

  • The time taken to position the model is critical when it comes to measuring wind-tunnel operation. The FIA measures ‘wind-on’ rather than ‘tunnel-on’.

  • Downforce can be measured through load sensors placed on the suspension,

  • The car needs to be predictable. An unpredictable car leads to that extra bit of margin because the driver is concerned the brakes might lock or the tyres will lose grip and cause the back of the car to break away in a sudden snap of oversteer. All of which means time lost.

  • Under acceleration, you are going to be limited by either engine power or the tyres (rather than, say, a poor gearshift). When braking, it is about how hard the driver can hit the pedal without locking the tyres. In the corner itself, what matters is the driver feeling confident enough to go as fast as possible without taking an extra margin of comfort. Any additional margin increases lap time. The car needs to be predictable. An unpredictable car leads to that extra bit of margin because the driver is concerned the brakes might lock or the tyres will lose grip and cause the back of the car to break away in a sudden snap of oversteer. All of which means time lost.

  • The simulator is really useful over a race weekend. The guys and girls running the simulator start their day at around the time the on-track team is preparing for Free Practice 2 (FP2). Using a test driver, they will mirror what we do at the track, the object being to achieve a similar lap time, reaction and feedback by correlating whatever is happening on track. At the end of FP2, when the race drivers indicate what they would like to improve for the next day’s running, the simulator team will work on finding a solution overnight, the aim being to provide the on-track team with a list of suggestions to try in Free Practice 3 (FP3) the following day. It might be softer front suspension, higher rear ride height, rear and front-wing adjustments, suggestions on tyres – a whole host of things.

  • At McLaren we always treated the simulator results as a direction rather than the ultimate setup. Adding downforce, for example, would be a good direction – but the simulator model might not necessarily tell you how far to go.

  • Mutual trust was essential to make this work. If, for example during a race, someone said to me, ‘We need to stop this lap because we’re going to be undercut,’ I might not have enough time to check all the necessary information.

  • A common approach is to have one person in mission control looking after each car. At Aston Martin in 2022, one person took responsibility for Sebastian Vettel while another was the link to Lance Stroll. Information relevant to Vettel would be fed direct to his race engineer; it would be a similar story for Stroll.

  • Mission control is also very useful for volunteer support, which is made up of people with factory-based roles who want to experience some form of interaction with the track. They could be in the design office or working in aero. By volunteering for mission control, they can help with anything from monitoring the onboards of rival teams, listening to competitor radio or giving the pit wall feedback if other drivers have an incident or accident.

  • The pit wall has become reliant on the extensive background team. As a strategist, you are looking after two cars, determining run times and where your drivers are on the track. Are we impeding anyone? Are conditions at the absolute best right now? It is complicated on a dry track, never mind one that is wet but starting to dry. Are we going to make it through? Do we need another tyre set at this stage? It’s hectic.

  • I’ve never heard anyone compliment the IT team and say, ‘Well done, guys. The pit wall is working.’ But there is plenty to be said if the system goes down. When I worked on gearboxes with McLaren, we used to joke that nobody ever said a gearbox won a race or made the car fast. But you would hear reference to ‘the gearbox cost us points’ if the car retired due to an issue or failure. It is all rather like the strategist, in some respects. Do your job efficiently and correctly and not much is said by those outside the team. But get it wrong and social media is full of comments about the part played by the strategist in losing a race that should have been won.

  • The chief mechanic is exactly that, and is in charge of the mechanics, who are split evenly between the two cars, each with a number one mechanic, the rest carrying out roles that are mirrored on each car. There will be mechanics concentrating on the front end, with others working mainly on the rear of the car. There will be people focusing on tyres, fuel and electrics. Others will be responsible for looking after the trucks (at the European races) and the environment everyone works in, regardless of where we are in the world. It is important to say at this stage that each of the jobs outlined above is the mechanic’s primary role. Their secondary job is pit stops. F1 teams do not recruit someone just because they have, say, the build or fitness to handle a front-wheel gun, or deal with taking the wheel on or off. The pit-stop role – vitally important though it may be – is over and above what mechanics normally do. It may not be the job they are employed for, but mechanics love pit stops.

  • In some cases, a race engineer is focused on the physical setup, while the performance engineer deals more with what we call ‘the car tools’ – things such as brake balance, fuel and maps. These two engineers work very closely to get the best out of the race car and driver.

  • There will be a senior strategy engineer, or the head of race strategy, on the pit wall. Like many of the functions in each team, strategy on the pit wall works with mission control in providing a lot of analysis. It is very structured. As a race strategist on the pit wall, I worked with a senior strategy engineer in the factory. There would also be two junior strategy engineers in the factory, each having very specific roles, depending on whether it was a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

  • The other factor is that bank holidays (apart from Christmas and the New Year) have no real meaning in F1.

  • The off-season also presents a perfect opportunity to build the confidence of junior team members by dealing with live timing information or carrying out role plays with race engineers. We would use the intercom to run through various scenarios in a race or practice as a means of increasing their understanding of what will happen during a busy race weekend.

  • There was not enough information emerging from the first test to warrant a strategist’s presence.

  • Teams approach testing in different ways. Some do lots of low-fuel runs while others prefer not to carry less than 30 or 40 kilograms of fuel. On one occasion, Mercedes chose not to run the softer tyre compounds at any stage, which meant it was very difficult to get a read on their potential. Added to which, the track condition varies massively from one day to the next, with lap times also being affected by the way in which the track rubbers in and gets faster throughout the session. There is the continuous conundrum of the track improving in one way and yet becoming slower as the temperature increases. There was a year when Red Bull stopped rivals from estimating their straight-line speed by continually turning off the DRS before the braking area. The strategist is faced with interpreting all these facts when someone asks, ‘How are we compared to everyone else?’

  • Engines might be running at particular levels of power; there is no requirement to run at the legal weight during a test; the amount of ERS (battery deployment) in use can vary, as can the way the driver may or may not be pushing on the straight. Is the car running with or without DRS (drag reduction system)? There was a year when Red Bull stopped rivals from estimating their straight-line speed by continually turning off the DRS before the braking area. The strategist is faced with interpreting all these facts when someone asks, ‘How are we compared to everyone else?’

  • Take trying a different front wing. In an ideal world, you would run both wings with tyres of a similar age and in near-identical track conditions, while keeping the same fuel level and not changing any settings. Because track time is too valuable for that, something else will need changing on the car, in which case every effort is made to ensure these changes will have minimal effect. While that may be reasonably within your control, there is nothing that can be done about a variation in track condition or temperature, or the amount of traffic on track. It is very, very difficult to get pure back-to-back tests, which means there is always a necessary element of management.

  • The problem is that the various departments are understandably focused on their own interests. Aero will want to test the wings and the ride heights; they will not care about the car oversteering or understeering. The driver will need to check the balance of the car and find out if it is easy to drive. Then he will want to run low fuel and the softest tyres to find out what he needs to go faster. The race engineer is looking for the ideal setup, and the tyre guy wants to have a straight comparison between compounds. Overarching all of this is the number one goal, which is achieving reliability during testing. Going back to the front-wing example: it is an important test, but the power-unit people might say that the engine will not be able to cope with running that hot again. This is where the communications can become difficult. You may have a very good and valid point. If that outweighs other sound and rational points it becomes a question of knowing when it is important to speak up. There is simply not enough time to debate everything before each run.

  • In broad terms, there can be a launch package, a test package and then a Race 1 update.

  • There will be a friendly fight to see who gets behind the wheel on the last day of the test when, in theory, the car should be in its most competitive state thus far. All the aero tests will have been completed and, hopefully, early niggles sorted out. In addition, many of the sensors will have been removed, which could reduce the car’s weight by as much as 12 kilograms. This would include taking out extra thermocouples to assess the temperatures of the engine or the gearbox; additional sensors for all sorts of things such as monitoring fluid pick up when cornering or double-checking fluid levels that, under normal circumstances, would be assumed to be okay.

  • The crew will take time out to practise turning the car around quickly in the garage during qualifying, the target being 45 seconds to have the car come to a halt, refuel and get going again.

  • It is common to see photographers staying in one spot at the end of the pit lane and taking images of each car from exactly the same angle. A comparison between these and your own car allows engineers to use a mapping process to gauge the ride height or wheelbase being run by rivals.

  • The worst-case snooping scenario would occur during a grand prix in the period following a red flag, with the cars queuing in the pit lane, in race order. It could be, for instance, that a Ferrari had stopped beside your position on the pit wall. You would be busy on screen working out the shakeup to strategy caused by the stoppage, while being aware of a bunch of Ferrari mechanics standing directly behind you, looking at your screen – and there’d be nothing you could do about it.

  • More than half of the teams use ‘RaceWatch’, which is a piece of software created by SBG, a company started by James Vowles, formerly the strategist with Mercedes F1 and now team principal at Williams.

  • The question of whether the car will be lapped by the leader is important because it means your driver will be doing one lap less in the overall race distance – thus presenting the opportunity to carry less fuel. That could mean carrying, say, 2 kilograms of fuel that is never going to be used. As a rule of thumb, if 10 kilograms of fuel is worth three-tenths of a second, then, on average, this could save 0.06 seconds a lap. Across a race of 60 laps, that is 3.6 seconds.

  • Each driver is allowed 13 sets in total (eight soft, three medium and two hard). Because it is necessary to give back two sets at the end of FP1 and, again, at the end of FP2, teams usually run two types of tyre in each of these one-hour sessions.

  • You might ask the driver about the balance of the car: always a tell-tale sign that you’re considering a pit stop. Or you might have told your driver about opening a safety car window – another giveaway that a pit stop could be close.

  • Rather than aim for the best bit of track, it makes more sense to find the second clearest section because everyone else is going for the obvious bit, which is why it becomes crowded.

  • Low fuel means somewhere between 40 and 50 kilograms of fuel, perhaps dropping to 30. It is not a qualifying level, but neither is it high fuel. For the high-fuel long runs, the load ranges between 80 and 100 kilograms.

  • I can’t recall ever pulling data from a long run in FP3 that was of any use. It was always rubbish because the driver didn’t want to know about a long run at this stage. His priority would be to get this out of the way and move on to thinking about qualifying. You would never get a good read on tyre degradation because the driver was always pushing too hard. Someone might get useful readings on fuel consumption or temperatures but, from the strategist’s point of view, a long run in FP3 is a largely pointless exercise.

  • We usually set out three plans which could be designated A, B and C. It wasn’t always a case of choosing letters in alphabetical order; some people might prefer S to align with a safety car plan, for example.

  • If, for example, the optimum stop lap was lap 18, I would make the planned stop for Plan A, lap 20 because 20 is easier to remember. We would then work in Plan A, target minus two. Using round numbers can be helpful to the driver, who has a lot going on.

  • As part of the pre-race planning, we would have chosen what is known as a ‘bail-out tyre’. This would be automatically fitted in the event of a driver coming into the pits following an incident on the first lap. The bail-out would always be ready, the theory being that, even if nothing is said by the strategist, that tyre will be fitted by the pit crew who would also make a matching adjustment to the front-wing angle to allow for the different tyre compound if necessary.

  • Drivers start each race with multiple transparent tear-offs on their helmet visors, allowing the tear-offs to be removed at intervals to keep vision clear. The tear-offs are released into the air stream over the driver’s shoulder and can cause overheating on a following car if caught in the radiator or brake ducts.

  • I didn’t restrict myself to reviewing our race-team communications. I would always find time, post-race, to listen to discussions between the pit wall and the other 18 drivers. This flow of information is public and I found it to be one of the most interesting parts of my job. It’s not as onerous as you might think because, when the blanks are removed, each conversation collapses to about 15 minutes. It was easy to do this on long-haul flights home: you could make a few notes around each team, and no data was necessary. You learn a massive amount about whether a team planned a one-stop and converted to a two, why they stopped when they did, which rival they seemed particularly interested in, how they reacted, and how happy – or otherwise – their driver was in the car. I would always listen to Kimi Räikkönen first because his clipped, direct comments cheered me up at the start of the day!