AUTOSPORT's technical expert GARY ANDERSON takes you behind the scenes of an F1 team during the frantic weeks leading up to the first pre-season test
As devoted followers of Formula 1, you may be wondering why the teams take so much time off during the winter. After all, the last race of the season was on November 23.
But I can assure you that very little holiday is taken during this period. In fact, December and January are two of the highest-pressure months for anyone involved in an F1 team.
These are the two months of the year when all the bits and pieces that make up your new baby start to come together. And having been there myself, I learned from experience that no matter how late a drawing is signed off for manufacturing, there is always a new and better idea that pops into your mind about how you might have done things differently.
Even so, you have to be very disciplined and stick to the build schedule as it is very difficult to reduce manufacturing time. You can't just go to Halfords and get something better off the shelf, you have to design and make the parts yourself.
The parts that are currently in production are the ones that will be used for the first tests. Only after that will other ideas that you come up with be implemented into the development plan.
McLaren-Honda will hope for a smoother time at Jerez than in Abu Dhabi © LAT |
Every team will tell you their new car is more aerodynamically efficient, stiffer and lighter. And the engine manufacturers will explain that they have found that little bit more power and improved fuel efficiency.
But it is not until you get to the circuit for those first tests laps that you really know whether all the hard work translates into reduced lap time.
For me, this time of the year was always the most stressful of the season. You spend the whole winter believing you are overcoming the deficit of the previous season, and hoping that you have not engineered in any new gremlins.
So you desperately want to get the car together and on the ground ready to go. To be honest, the mechanics who build up the new cars are always a great pointer.
They are normally very experienced guys who have had enough of travelling and are now factory-based. Their comments during the build period are a great indication as to whether the birth has been an easy one or if it has been intensive labour lasting several days, or even weeks.
This feedback gives you a good indicator of what the season ahead is going to be like.
Along with that, there is also the pressure from the marketing department, which wants to get its hands on the car for press-release pictures. Or, worse still, they want it for a launch in some far-off part of the world.
Anything that interferes with an efficient car build just adds to the pressure and I am sure I used language during this period that I later regretted. Hopefully those who were on the wrong end of my tongue, including my wife, understood that!
Once the car hits the circuit, you can take a breath of fresh air. The problems are never over, but at this stage they are different.
The 1997 Jordan was one of those cars that was a clear improvement over its predecessor every time we went into the windtunnel, so we went into pre-season with high expectations.
Anderson remembers the debut of the Jordan 197 fondly © LAT |
Ralf Schumacher had joined us for his first season in F1, and being a Schumacher he was pushing us pretty hard. He was testing the 1996 car at Jerez to get mileage, and when the '97 car was ready we brought it along.
I had already told him that from figures, I believed the new car would be around 1.5-1.8s faster. On his first five-lap run, with the same fuel load, he was 1.6s faster. All of us, including Ralf, had a big smile!
But while sometimes things go well, as they did with the Jordan 197, very often things can prove to be much harder.
Just look at what happened last year, when the teams running the Renault engines realised that they were in deep trouble with no overnight fix. Or Mercedes when it suffered a front-wing failure when Lewis Hamilton was driving on the first day of the Jerez test and crashed at the first corner.
These things should not happen, but when they do the crucial thing is to understand the problem, the cause of the failure, and rectify it. Mercedes did, but for Renault it was a very different story.
At Jerez on Sunday, when the first four-day test starts there will be some teams that will be struggling from the start, while for others things will run smoothly. In my experience, you will have more difficult experiences than good ones during your career.
When the car first runs, you do get a good idea of whether it's going to be a good one or not. If the driver is happy with the way it feels even before leaning on it and setting a proper laptime, that's always encouraging.
What you really want is a car that is driveable, that gives the driver confidence and that responds to set-up changes when you start to make them. But with the current engines still relatively new, and big changes to the power unit packages over the winter, there is likely to be more work to do in terms of getting good driveability.
Everyone, even Mercedes, can get caught out in testing, says Anderson © LAT |
If things do go wrong, then time is very short. As I said, the designs for the upgrade parts planned for the early-season races will already be well-advanced. So if you do hit the track and have fundamental problems, it's not as easy as you might think to tackle them.
There are three stages to tackling such problems. First, you have to recognise it. That's the easy part. Then, you have to understand what is causing it. This can be a lot harder and sometimes the root cause of problems can be very difficult to get to the bottom of.
The third thing you have to do is know how to correct it. Going through those three stages can take a long time and it's very easy to send yourself down the wrong route trying to fix problems. With running so limited, that makes it doubly important to keep calm and make sure you work through the process in the right way.
As history shows, it is incredibly difficult to catch up. Some of the trends that defined the 2014 season were evident watching trackside during the early days of testing at Jerez last year, and it will be a similar story this year.
But as you read this, the feeling within the teams will be one of having to push desperately hard just to get the car ready. For some, it will be worth the effort, but, for others, there will be disappointments to come.
My advice to the people feeling the stress of getting their new car together is very simple: It's only a sport, so enjoy it.
AUTOSPORT's technical expert GARY ANDERSON takes you behind the scenes of an F1 team during the frantic weeks leading up to the first pre-season test
As devoted followers of Formula 1, you may be wondering why the teams take so much time off during the winter. After all, the last race of the season was on November 23.
But I can assure you that very little holiday is taken during this period. In fact, December and January are two of the highest-pressure months for anyone involved in an F1 team.
These are the two months of the year when all the bits and pieces that make up your new baby start to come together. And having been there myself, I learned from experience that no matter how late a drawing is signed off for manufacturing, there is always a new and better idea that pops into your mind about how you might have done things differently.
Even so, you have to be very disciplined and stick to the build schedule as it is very difficult to reduce manufacturing time. You can't just go to Halfords and get something better off the shelf, you have to design and make the parts yourself.
The parts that are currently in production are the ones that will be used for the first tests. Only after that will other ideas that you come up with be implemented into the development plan.
McLaren-Honda will hope for a smoother time at Jerez than in Abu Dhabi © LAT |
Every team will tell you their new car is more aerodynamically efficient, stiffer and lighter. And the engine manufacturers will explain that they have found that little bit more power and improved fuel efficiency.
But it is not until you get to the circuit for those first tests laps that you really know whether all the hard work translates into reduced lap time.
For me, this time of the year was always the most stressful of the season. You spend the whole winter believing you are overcoming the deficit of the previous season, and hoping that you have not engineered in any new gremlins.
So you desperately want to get the car together and on the ground ready to go. To be honest, the mechanics who build up the new cars are always a great pointer.
They are normally very experienced guys who have had enough of travelling and are now factory-based. Their comments during the build period are a great indication as to whether the birth has been an easy one or if it has been intensive labour lasting several days, or even weeks.
This feedback gives you a good indicator of what the season ahead is going to be like.
Along with that, there is also the pressure from the marketing department, which wants to get its hands on the car for press-release pictures. Or, worse still, they want it for a launch in some far-off part of the world.
Anything that interferes with an efficient car build just adds to the pressure and I am sure I used language during this period that I later regretted. Hopefully those who were on the wrong end of my tongue, including my wife, understood that!
Once the car hits the circuit, you can take a breath of fresh air. The problems are never over, but at this stage they are different.
The 1997 Jordan was one of those cars that was a clear improvement over its predecessor every time we went into the windtunnel, so we went into pre-season with high expectations.
Anderson remembers the debut of the Jordan 197 fondly © LAT |
Ralf Schumacher had joined us for his first season in F1, and being a Schumacher he was pushing us pretty hard. He was testing the 1996 car at Jerez to get mileage, and when the '97 car was ready we brought it along.
I had already told him that from figures, I believed the new car would be around 1.5-1.8s faster. On his first five-lap run, with the same fuel load, he was 1.6s faster. All of us, including Ralf, had a big smile!
But while sometimes things go well, as they did with the Jordan 197, very often things can prove to be much harder.
Just look at what happened last year, when the teams running the Renault engines realised that they were in deep trouble with no overnight fix. Or Mercedes when it suffered a front-wing failure when Lewis Hamilton was driving on the first day of the Jerez test and crashed at the first corner.
These things should not happen, but when they do the crucial thing is to understand the problem, the cause of the failure, and rectify it. Mercedes did, but for Renault it was a very different story.
At Jerez on Sunday, when the first four-day test starts there will be some teams that will be struggling from the start, while for others things will run smoothly. In my experience, you will have more difficult experiences than good ones during your career.
When the car first runs, you do get a good idea of whether it's going to be a good one or not. If the driver is happy with the way it feels even before leaning on it and setting a proper laptime, that's always encouraging.
What you really want is a car that is driveable, that gives the driver confidence and that responds to set-up changes when you start to make them. But with the current engines still relatively new, and big changes to the power unit packages over the winter, there is likely to be more work to do in terms of getting good driveability.
Everyone, even Mercedes, can get caught out in testing, says Anderson © LAT |
If things do go wrong, then time is very short. As I said, the designs for the upgrade parts planned for the early-season races will already be well-advanced. So if you do hit the track and have fundamental problems, it's not as easy as you might think to tackle them.
There are three stages to tackling such problems. First, you have to recognise it. That's the easy part. Then, you have to understand what is causing it. This can be a lot harder and sometimes the root cause of problems can be very difficult to get to the bottom of.
The third thing you have to do is know how to correct it. Going through those three stages can take a long time and it's very easy to send yourself down the wrong route trying to fix problems. With running so limited, that makes it doubly important to keep calm and make sure you work through the process in the right way.
As history shows, it is incredibly difficult to catch up. Some of the trends that defined the 2014 season were evident watching trackside during the early days of testing at Jerez last year, and it will be a similar story this year.
But as you read this, the feeling within the teams will be one of having to push desperately hard just to get the car ready. For some, it will be worth the effort, but, for others, there will be disappointments to come.
My advice to the people feeling the stress of getting their new car together is very simple: It's only a sport, so enjoy it.
