SUNDAY: GRAND PRIX
12.30 Warm-up
“Every time we do a pitstop practice, we start with a warm-up. It’s changed a lot over the seasons I’ve run it. Originally I brought in what I knew from football, which is more of a dynamic exercise to get your heart rate up. But I’ve learnt that race team mechanics don’t need that! What we need here is to actually calm everything down. Normally they’re coming off their tools, there’s pressure because they’ve got to get the car ready for the race – so the warm-up has now become a time to put some space between being a mechanic and being a pit crew member.
“We used to do it in the pitlane. But they didn’t like it because they were in full view of the public and they felt a bit like puppets on show – so we’ve moved it back to the garage now. It’s calmer, it’s quieter.
“There’s a lot of stretching mixed in with a bit of breathing work, which some guys just don’t buy! But some do. At the end, when we do our final stretch, I’ll just say ‘take a few deep breaths’ – because again, I want them to focus and bring their energy down a bit so that when they go out, it’s not frantic, it’s calm. We can see in the data that they do better when things are calmer.”
12.55 Final pitstop practice
“On Sunday mornings we always do a fairly limited number of stops, no scenarios, just a few normal stops, so we can get into a flow. And that’s obviously always with the crew that is going to be performing pitstops in the race itself – and always finishing on a clean, safe and fast stop so that you end on a good note with confidence.”
15.00 Race
“As soon as the grid is open and the cars go out, we start setting up the garage for the race. This involves arranging the chairs according to where each member of the crew will sit. The aim of the seating arrangement is to make it easier when it’s time for a pitstop, so that the guys can come out of the garage as smoothly as possible. In the morning I print out a plan of what it looks like.
Then I make sure that on each seat there’s the helmet of the person who’s sitting in that seat and also their water bottle, again, so that when they come back from the grid they’ve got everything ready and they can be on standby in case of a very early pitstop.
“The pitstops during the race were safe and clean. That’s all we could have asked for from the crew this week. And that’s because we had several members of the team who were in different positions
– so the guys weren’t doing their fastest stops or they weren’t really anywhere near their full capacity – but basically what we needed from a strategic point of view were safe, clean stops. And they were within the time that the strategy engineer used to plan. As long as it’s not over that time, that’s our target.”
17.00 Packing up
“When the race is over, the job basically starts with packing up the garage – and everybody is involved in that process. My job in particular is to make sure that all the bottles and chairs are collected and all the kit is put away. So the guys get out of their race suits and put them in the laundry. And then I make sure all the helmet boxes have all the helmets in them before they’re locked away. The bottles get washed and everything gets packed away for wherever we’re going next.
“On this particular occasion in Spa I left early. We were catching the earliest flight out, so getting to the airport when you leave the track with all the traffic can be a bit of a nightmare – and in this case it was, but we managed to get a police escort out there! It was a bit stressful, but we managed to get there on time.”