Teams In Constant Race To Be Perfect On Sunday
The Age
Saturday March 17, 2007
Simon Hoyle watches the Renault crew ready its cars for the big day
IN 2006, formula one races lasted, in total, little more than 271/2 hours. And Renault's world champion driver, Fernando Alonso, spent slightly less than 15 minutes in total making pit stops.Pit stops are merely the most visible part of the team's contribution to a driver's performance. A slick stop helps, but a car must be quick to begin with, and the work the team does on Friday is as important as the work it does on Sunday."People talk about strategy and they often think of strategy as being how many times are we going to stop on Sunday, and when are we going to stop?" said Pat Symonds, Renault F1's executive director of engineering and strategy guru. "To me, strategy is much, much more than that. It embodies having sensible programs that find the information that you need to run your race on Sunday in the best possible way, and in the most scientific way you can. One needs to be very disciplined at how you approach your practice sessions."That discipline was put to the test yesterday, when both Renault cars stopped with mechanical gremlins. This interrupted the process of gathering information about the Albert Park track and how the cars got around it. The team needed to learn where its cars were quick, where they were not so quick, and to give rookie driver Heikki Kovalainen time to find his way around an unfamiliar circuit."Halfway through practice, you think you don't look very fast, but you have to have confidence in yourself," Symonds says. "Let's not panic. Let's get on, let's get our answers and let's do the business on Sunday."Yesterday's practice sessions were nevertheless important in setting the team's course for today's qualifying session and tomorrow's race. The team worked through a set program, with ranks of engineers monitoring more than 100 sensors on each car, in real time. And more than a dozen mechanics buzz around each car.At a command barked over the radio, the mechanics fly into a routine of organised mayhem: bodywork goes onto the car, the engine fires up, tyre covers come off, and the car is waved out into the pit lane.Throughout both sessions, adjustments are made to the cars. Some seem arcane: "Front wing on Fisi (Giancarlo Fisichella) to 171/2 please, left and right." Others seem pointless: "Half a millimetre down front ride height." Others are more familiar, involving tyre pressures and fuel loads.The heat the cars throw off is extraordinary - when they return to the garage the air temperature rises noticeably and even three metres away it brings out a sweat.Questions to the driver are brief: How does the car feel? What is it doing? How can it be better? The driver's comments are just as brief: "Last corner, too much TC (traction control)", "It's quite comfortable on brakes".All of this information is used to make the car as fast as possible for tomorrow afternoon. During the race, Symonds will sit on the pit wall and dictate the team's strategy as the race unfolds. It can be stressful but Symonds said it "absolutely gets easier with experience"."I describe it as if you've got a big 3-D map in your head, and you've got to find a path through that 3-D map, over some mountains and through a valley," he said."You have an idea before the race starts of what path you're going to take, but during the race those mountains and those valleys shift around a little bit. You've got to say, well, is that path that I was going to take still the best one? And if not, where am I going to go?"It's a bit of a crap analogy, but it's the best one I can use to explain the weird process that goes on in my mind."The stress is just trying not to make a mistake. If you get it right you don't get much praise; that's what you're paid to do. But if you get it wrong, people notice it."
© 2007 The Age
