r/F1Technical Jan 04 '21

Industry Insights Realising the teenage dream: My experience working as an F1 strategist

2.5k Upvotes

As part of a series of posts from people working in F1, I've been asked by the mods to write something about my time as a strategist in F1. Hope you enjoy, and I'll do my best to answer any questions :)

At the age of 14, I decided I wanted to work in F1. I spent the next 7 years working towards that with a lot of focus. This is the story of how I got there, what I found when I did, and why two years later, I left.

What I did

I was part of the Race Strategy team at Mercedes F1 between 2014-2016. The strategy team was (is, I guess) responsible for:

  1. “Running” the race. When to make pit stops, what tyres to fit, what lap times to target, how to approach qualifying, and the plan for unexpected circumstances (safety car, VSC, red flag, puncture, etc)
  2. Doing the preparation work before each race to select the amount of tyres of each compound the team brings to a given race, and to understand what the likely race strategies are going to be, what the remaining question marks are and hence what needs testing on Friday to get answers.
  3. Orienting the rest of the race team and the drivers on a given race based on the results of the simulations and historical races at that track.What is likely to happen? What are the key characteristics of this race going to be? Are safety cars going to be key? Is the undercut something we have to worry about? Is there a warm up curve on the tires that means in fact we have to worry about overcut? What will be the competing strategies?
  4. Doing the post-race analysis of all strategy decisions taken by the team and by all other teams and understanding which decisions were correct and which weren’t.
  5. Competitor analysis. The strategy team is the only “outward looking” department of a Formula One team. Everyone else is trying to make the car quicker. While I’m sure the aerodynamics department spend a lot of time looking at the competition visually, the strategy team were the ones mapping relative performance, setting the team development targets based on this and advising when to switch resources to developing the following year’s car, for example. One of my initial projects was trying to understand the amount of electrical energy various teams were able to recover by studying their GPS traces.
  6. Developing tools to make the job easier. Almost all the work above was much more manual than you’d imagine. When we weren’t preparing for a race or wrapping up from one, we would be writing bits of code to make those biweekly tasks easier. There was very little time for this.
  7. Rule changes. When anything changed (VSCs were introduced during my time for example, or the knock-out quali format at the start of 2016), the strategy team had to figure out the impact and how we should deal with it. We would also be the ones to liaise with the creators of the strategy software to adjust the tools so they could do the job.
  8. Random stuff. From creating a system that allowed us to automatically take pictures of the competition, to writing tools to analyse and compare GPS traces, to counting pixels on pictures to understand competitor ride heights, there was a lot of random stuff that was thrown to us. I even got pulled into a project to assess the effect of different types of success ballast for the Mercedes DTM team.

At the time, the strategy team was based in the UK, with only the chief strategist travelling to all races. The rest of us would rotate around on travelling. In the end I travelled to 2 races (Austria 2015 and China 2016) and quite a few tests (few in Barcelona, one in Austria I think). All of the other event support was done from the “Race Support Room” in Brackley. While you of course have live pictures and intercom to everyone at the track, it obviously isn’t the same being back in the UK. Especially during the races that aren’t on European time, you’d spend a week living on completely the wrong time zone, waking up at midnight and going to bed at 2pm for each race. Race weekend activities took up Wednesday - Monday of the race weekend, and that is excluding all the pre-event and post-event stuff discussed earlier. We would get one extra day off on the non-race weekend following a race weekend to compensate for the previous race weekend. With a race every other weekend at best, you can see how there is very little time for anything other than just keeping up. We’ll get to that later.

How I got the job

I studied Aerospace Engineering at one of the top UK universities, thinking that would be the obvious way into F1. During my final year I worked on a project with Mercedes, which I got because of Professor’s connections. While I was good at it and enjoyed aerodynamics, during my degree I realised that I didn’t want to be somewhere tucked away thinking about a front wing element and still having to go home and watch the race on TV. I wanted to be in the action, as close as I could get to driving the car. So when I was about to graduate, I was on the lookout for something a bit bigger picture than aerodynamics. I applied to Red Bull for a vehicle dynamics position and then saw a position come up at Mercedes in the strategy team. I got offered both, but strategy sounded like exactly what I was looking for, so I went for Mercedes. Halfway through my interview (which was in one of those glass meeting rooms), they started doing a photoshoot with Lewis in the adjacent room. I still wonder whether they scheduled the interview in that particular room knowing that was going to happen as some sort of power move. Of course I acted as if it didn’t faze me at all.

I’m sure I’ll get many questions on advice on getting into F1, etc. Generally I would say the UK probably does help a lot. But a lot of people seem to talk about the “motorsports engineering” degrees you can get in places like Oxford Brookes. I would be very careful with things like that. I would try and get into the absolute best university you can and do as well as you can. Then try to get a year out/summer internship with a racing team or performance car company of some sort. To give you an idea, when I was there Mercedes were only hiring graduates out of Imperial, Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge and Bath/Bristol if I remember correctly. At F1 levels, especially for the top teams, they want to know you are smart, and that you have a dedication to racing. You can catch up on the knowledge on the job. So go to the best university you can, do it in the UK if you can, and do something else that demonstrates your passion. I did an internship at an endurance racing team in GT3 and then a summer internship at McLaren Automotive. That said, I know teams like Racing Point have dedicated places for people that come out of Motorsport Engineering programs so it is a legitimate route in. But as a general piece of career advice, keep your options open. I was obsessed with F1, probably more than any of you on here (quite a statement I know). When I joined Mercedes, I knew more specifics about races in the last 10 years than anyone I ran into. I still decided to quit after 2 years. Had I done a Motorsports Engineering degree from a very average university (good universities don’t do them), I would probably still have gotten into F1 but my career afterwards would have been seriously compromised.

Some memories

I’m guessing a lot of you will want to know about interactions with the drivers specifically. They came into the factory every couple of weeks and being part of the race team meant that they would hang out around our area as those are the people they know best. The rest of the team really has very little interaction with the drivers other than team-wide speeches after race wins. I was very lucky to be right in the action. As many of you will remember, the 2014-2016 years were quite spicy between Nico and Lewis. While they were quite careful to keep the serious politics and drama behind closed doors with the inner circle of Paddy/Toto/Niki, if you were part of the race team you definitely felt it in an indirect way. Even after some of the most controversial incidents, driver debriefs were always very civil and were more of a checklist of things to go through rather than addressing any elephants in the room.

They (and probably most F1 drivers) are a very special, curious breed of people. They’ve grown up with teams of people around them doing everything to help them win and get to the top. If that starts from the age of 8 you’re going to turn into a pretty strange person, and you definitely sense that around them. They are single-minded, focused, are extremely quick to form a judgement on people, and have a very short attention span for absorbing information. Nico and Lewis didn’t seem to like the fact there even was another driver in the team so they avoided coming to the factory on the same day if at all possible. They would even avoid mentioning each other and would talk about “the other car” or “the other guy” if they had to. When they were in the same room, the interactions were just quite childish. Like one of them being overly disgusted if the other sneezed or smirking if the other complained about something in the car they have no issue with.

Lewis

While I saw more of Nico in the factory and he felt more like a “normal” member of the team than Lewis, I actually thought Lewis was the “nicer” guy. He always had attention for people while Nico was happy to look past you if he didn’t know who you were or you weren’t “useful” to him. On my second day at the team, I was reviewing some old races, mesmerised by now being able to hear all the radio comms of these races I had seen as a fan, when someone grabbed me from behind, scaring the shit out of me. It was Lewis, big smile on his face, welcoming me to the team and asking what I do. Seemed very genuine. Later on in the year he took the whole race team paintballing after he won the championship, where I had a few chats with him that were equally down to earth and just chilled out. He described the start of the 2014 Abu Dhabi race to me and how indescribable the pressure was to have to make the perfect start but also not jump the start. How with a twitch of his thumb he could have thrown it all away. Was really cool to see that human side.

Later that day someone shot him in the balls during the paintball which was also pretty funny (he had arrived late and had missed the part where we shoved some cardboard down our trousers to avoid this issue).

Nico

I probably had more interactions with Nico than Lewis over the two years I was there. He would come in more often for simulator work. While at the time he was more involved and probing on the engineering side of everything than Lewis was, he’s still not an engineer of course. Information would have to be presented very succinctly, with confidence, and by a person who he trusted. He came across a bit like a super focused robot if I’m honest. He was extremely driven, very determined and didn’t have time for any distraction. His humour was really difficult to place because he would give you shit with a really serious face as a joke. But then he would quite often also just give people shit with a serious face not as a joke. From an engineer’s point of view he was interesting to work with though because nothing would get past him and he was more able to talk “your language” than Lewis. Doesn’t mean he’s not an F1 driver though! I remember during the Austria test of 2015 I was in the garage and had left the wikipedia page of the F1 season open after compiling some numbers. He came over to me and started looking at the table race results and championship standings. He just stood there for a while and then said something like “it makes no sense does it? I don’t understand how he is ahead”. I didn’t quite know how to reply because we were looking at a table of race results that pretty clearly demonstrated why Lewis was ahead. The way he said it really made me understand how these guys have such a belief in their own ability that they just can’t really compute how someone else can beat them.

Monaco 2015 and 2016

Two of the most memorable races for me are Monaco 2015 and 2016. In case you don’t recall, in 2015 we (the strategy team) threw away a Lewis win by pitting him under a late safety car that dropped him from the lead to P3. In 2016 we won the race by transitioning Lewis from full wet tyres to slicks, skipping over intermediates (with a little help from a messed up RIC pitstop).

Only the chief strategist was at the track for both of these races, while the rest of the strategy team was back at the factory. In both races, the strategic decision came down to a few seconds where we’d have to call into question a pretty direct decision from the pitwall. This is incredibly difficult to do. Despite the direct link to the circuit, there were many conversations on the pitwall we didn’t have visibility of, and so it feels extremely risky to jump into the main radio channel from the UK questioning a decision we’d barely have time to reverse. This is why, in 2015, when Lewis was called in for a pit stop in the last few laps leading under safety car, we all pretty much thought there must be a strong reason we hadn’t heard about for this call to have been made. It couldn’t really be a mistake, it was clear to all of us that Lewis would drop to third and finish there. But with GPS being unreliable in the streets of Monaco, all of us back in the UK were looking at predictions based on car positioning from sector times, while those at the track had left their software in GPS mode. In GPS mode, it looked like Lewis had the gap, while in reality he didn’t. We didn’t question the decision, Lewis came in and that was it.

The next year we somehow found ourselves in a very similar position. Lewis was leading the race with a very fast Ricciardo behind him. The track was wet, transitioning to dry. RIC ended up pitting for intermediates before HAM and immediately started taking chunks out of HAM’s lead. HAM got called in, and again in the race support room in Brackley we were pretty convinced we were throwing a race away. All everyone talks about ahead of Monaco is that you can’t overtake and that track position is everything. And now we were called HAM in to put intermediate tyres on, which mirrored RIC’s strategy too late and hence would lead to us being undercut. This time we did intervene. We only had about 5 seconds. My friend jumped on the radio and said “We are throwing the race away, the only way to win is to stay out and go straight to dries, if we are ahead on track RIC will not be able to get past”. We immediately got shouted down, but a few seconds later the call to box was cancelled, I presume after an exchange on the pitwall. We won the race off the back of that call, pulling off the switch from wets to slicks.

Why I left after 2 years

So why did I leave after just two years? There’s quite a few reasons, among which:

  • I didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t in the centre of the action, and being in the centre of the action means giving up everything outside F1. It dictates your entire schedule and life. The divorce rate amongst the travelling team is astronomical.
  • I didn’t want to spend my life living in the middle of nowhere in the UK. 7 of the 10 teams are based in the UK, and not in the most hip and happening areas. I wanted more options.
  • Related, I realised very quickly that outside of F1 people don’t know where to place your experience at an F1 team. If I did this for 5 years it would become very difficult to leave and do something else later on.
  • While F1 really is cutting edge when it comes to aerodynamics (although a very niche type of aerodynamics - essentially vortex management), and logistics, prototyping and production, it is (was) definitely not on the cutting edge when it comes to tech. Even in a leading team, the strategy modelling was for a large part stacks of VBA in Excel, very basic monte carlo simulation, and a lot of guesswork from experiences in previous years. There was a huge amount of tedious, manual work and instead of automating it intelligently and in a modern way, they just threw smart interns and grads at it and churned through them. There was little drive or opportunity to change this, as it was working for them (well enough), and the eternal two week cycle between races leaves very little time to invest in building good processes. It was also a wake up call that the guys at the top in the racing (not the design) team are massively experienced in their little bubble, but have had little exposure to how things have evolved outside of F1 in the last 15 years. Hence the spreadsheets.
  • I’d been lucky enough to have 80% of the experience I wanted in only 2 years. I’d met drivers, travelled to races, had an impact on them, been on the pitwall (during a test!), I’d even driven the simulator. It felt like I could easily pump in another 5 years and yes I’d be on the pitwall somewhere. But would I want to fly from car park to hotel to racetrack for the rest of my career without actually seeing any of these countries? If I didn’t like it, it would be pretty hard to leave at that point. Which is why the senior core race team never really changes. It’s just groundhog day for decades. And they get really good at it of course, but it is very detached from advances outside F1 and at this point is all a bit embarrassingly old school.
  • You’re very tired all the time. And it’s not a good tired, it’s not tired from thinking hard about interesting problems. It’s tired from pumping in the same mind-numbing tasks week after week, tired from fighting jet lag even though you haven’t gone anywhere.

I really, really enjoyed the intensity of my time at Mercedes. It was a dream come true. But I’m even more happy that I was able to realise that dream in the first two years of my career, before moving on to something that I can actually build a life around, something I can do for myself.

It’s also nice to be able to watch the races as entertainment again, even though I have to admit I miss the millions of timing screens, the radio traffic and the split second decisions.

r/F1Technical Jan 06 '21

Industry Insights The 15 years road to F1 : from supporting Alonso as a kid in '05 to working on Alonso's car in '20

1.1k Upvotes

Hi all,

To keep everyone entertained during the off-season the mods asked some of the reddit-bound F1 engineers to share their respective experience. Here is mine, don’t hesitate to ask questions if any !

All opinions and experiences are personal and I am, in no way, shape, or form, talking on behalf of the team I am working for. Had to be said 😊

My very first F1 memory goes back to Alonso's big crash in Brasil '03. I started actively following and supporting Renault in '05. I have not stopped ever since and have not missed a single race, but now I have a good reason not to!

What do I do

I am currently a Composite Design Engineer at Viry-Chatillon in France working on the Renault power unit within the « fluid departement » and have been since 2018. Prior to that I was working on the Renault chassis at the Enstone factory. The department I am in is responsible for the design of the parts in contact with a fluid (air, water, oil, fuel) except for the TC and ICE themselves. This could be for example water pipes, oil tanks, air inlets, manifolds, fuel system, hydraulics...

When designing such parts, you will often come in late in the project life, meaning you will have to make sure you are aware of the state of design of all other components you are working around. Indeed some other areas have bigger parts, are more complex, have more restrictions from the regs, etc.. so they could be considered as a “priority”, both in time-management and space-management. Around those “vital” functions come some auxiliary functions like the cooling system for exemple, providing the adequate level of cooling using the least energy possible and best mass and overall packaging. A lot of work often goes into finding the best performance/packaging balance and not necessarily based on pure engine power quest. To win races you need the best car on track, not the best engine on a dyno.

Daily tasks consist in gathering information to make sure you have an up to date environnement and technical needs to design parts for the various power unit projects. These projects vary a lot and you are not only working on the race engine, there are various sideprojets that could or could not end on the car. To me this would be the main difference between my experience in Enstone vs in Viry : when working on aero parts for the car, the workflow is pretty much streamlined. CFD model > Windtunnel tests > Design Office > Production > Race track. When working on an engine you are aiming to get as much mileage and performance feedback on your systems before hitting the track. Whereas on car aero, the track is the only way to get both mileage and performance data… The FIA understood that and are putting a cap on hours spent on engine dyno in the new engine regs, exactly like they already did on windtunnel and CFD time. Of course there are feedback loops in chassis aero design, but I felt less part.

Beside that, as a pure mechanical design enthusiast, F1 can blow you away when it comes to the amount of time, money and energy can be invested in the smallest details. There is such a high level of precision and intricacy in the whole power unit design and assembly and nothing is ever left to chance. You get used to work on your huge screens and A1 drawings, but when the part comes in, you’re blown away by the actual size, precision, and complexity sometimes. Some are a piece of art...

How I got here

I studied engineering in France at Ecole Centrale de Lyon. This is a “general engineering” school, meaning you don’t specialise in anything particular but learn lots of various fields. This meant I had to specialise if I wanted to make it in F1 and got a Master in Systems and Structures Dynamic (~applied math to mechanical vibration analysis). I worked in the school’s Formula Student project (EPSA) for two-years and I was in charge of designing the outboard suspension system (hub, uprights, wheel assembly). You probably heard it a hundred times but FSAE is really a game changer when your ultimate goal is to work in F1. It gets you hands-on experience, technical knowledge, project management experience, teamwork experience, late night experience… The F1 teams know that and participating in such student projects shows your commitment to the sport.

For my final year internship I was incredibly lucky and secured a position as Data Engineer within the french Formula Renault 2.0 team Tech 1 Racing for 6 months. My original goal was to work trackside in F1 and that was the dream internship to get there. I worked 6 month on the road, going to every single european F1 tracks (even Monaco!) working on operating the data acquisition systems of our 4 cars. Every weekend was a whole new and crazy experience, going to Monza, Spa, Silverstone... Just talking about it makes me miss it. It was a dream come true but it also made me realise the raw reality of trackside work (even more so in support series than F1 imho). In that 6 month, we had 12 race weekends (Eurocup and NEC championships) with 2 to 3 races each, 2 test weekends and some rookie scouting. A typical week would be : on Monday you come back from the previous race, get some rest. Tuesday, go to the factory to prepare the next event, work-out the event schedule, do some simulator work. Wednesday go to the track. Thursday, set up the whole garage : empty a full truck and build a garage for 4 single seaters. Get the cars ready for the next day, briefings, trackwalk. Friday, 2 FPs. Saturday quali+race and Sunday quali+race then take everything down and put it back in the truck. Eat sleep repeat. And all that whether it is 40°C in sunny Budapest of -4°C at the Nurburgring (yes true story). To give you an idea, on May that year I worked 27 straight days, no days off : Silverstone, Pau, Monaco and RedBull ring were back-to-back weekends. In 12 races, I only managed to do 1 track walk, at Spa, my last race with the team. I had too much work on the other weekends and trackwalk was not a priority (I was not a race engineer). Anyway, this is not about F1 so a bit off-topic but I still wanted to get this message across. Trackside positions truly are an amazing experience, but they are incredibly hard on the body and mind (and social life...).

During this internship I applied to the INFINITI Engineering Academy, had another sheer amount of luck and won the European final. I am going to skip a bit over this whole process because sadly the Academy does not exist anymore, but I can go into the details in the comments if asked. The Academy gave me a position at the Enstone design office and I came in during the 2017-2018 off-season. I worked on composite parts for the RS18 suspension system. Being there during the off-season and witnessing the coming together of the RS18 was incredible, everything was sooo fast. In about a week all the parts came together around the chassis, then the engine and then the fire-up then flown to Barcelona. We had 2 hours to actually get a look at the complete car.

At the end of my contract within the Academy, Renault did not have any openings at Enstone so I asked about the possibility of going back to France. I remember asking my senior about it and he said “-Oh yeah that’s a great idea, come with me we’ll have a chat with Bob, he often goes to Viry”. So here I was, about to walk in Bob Bell’s office and ask him for a job... My heart was racing ! He was not here that day but he eventually passed-on my resumé to Viry. They were looking for a junior composite designer, had an interview, and here I am !

Drivers

Feedback on how drivers are irl is often asked so here is my bit. I was not directly working with Nico and Carlos but had the opportunity to do some media shoots with them through the Academy. I also saw Esteban and Daniel at Viry but not much because of covid.

Nico was incredibly serious during all the briefings but always trying to be the funny guy during media events. Once we had a photoshoot in the racebays in Enstone with him and some of the Academy engineers, one of the guys took his work laptop and we had to pretend to work on it with Nico, pretend to look at some data and whatnot for the camera. At some point Nico said smtg like "OK let's be serious for a moment"', took the laptop and typed 'p*rn' on Google, and went on blocked websites. The guy whose laptop it was completely fliiiiipped and we all had a big laugh. So if you see a pic of Nico with Academy engineers on a laptop in Autosport or smtg, he is probably looking for nsfw stuff… Later that day the guy received a legit warning from IT and HR asking him to not consult such websites on work equipment. He explained and said sorry it was Nico, as a joke. They responded saying please don't lend your equipment to another member of staff, you are responsible for it. Good times...

I did not interact much with Carlos but he was really nice the times I did. I mentioned him Tech 1 Racing and he remembered most of the people there after having only tested a couple of days with them years ago.

Same thing with Aitken, really nice bloke. Every media event I participated in were light-hearted but you could still feel Nico and Carlos were not best friends and Nico very much tried to stay top-dog by showing Carlos that Renault was his home.

Upside

Working in F1 is a great experience as a whole, but here are some things I will never forget :

  • When in Enstone, I volunteered to work as race-support in the control room for the 2018 Aus GP. We switched to Australian time, waking up at 1am for half a week and participated in every session and briefings remotely. During the race I was in charge of listening to other drivers radio in order to pass-on important information to the pitwall. The radio feeds are available to everyone and all teams listen to try and anticipate strategies. I was listening to GRO (P7) and MAG (P6) radios. The GPS data and livestream are both delayed by about 10 sec so radio coms is as close to live you can get. I can remember MAG’s engineer on the radio saying “Kevin stop the car, stop the car”, I immediately communicated that to the pitwall, then saw his wheel wiggling about and KMag stopping on TV a few sec later. A few min later, same thing for RoGro. And yes we were behind both Haas’s at that time of the race…
  • The RS18 fire-up was our “first-time” for all the Academy engineers and I so we were all incredibly excited. We stayed late at the office to see it but the whole installation had little gremlins and some work had to be done prior firing up. We were given an estimate of 2am for the next try. We went home for a quick nap, woke up at 1:30am, went back to Enstone and witnessed the very first roar ! (Sidenote : If you wonder what “little gremlins” could be, I advise you to watch the Amazon series “Grand Prix Driver” it gives a great inlook at what how a car built and fire-up goes about).
  • Then lots of little things I guess, Bob Bell was really nice when hooking me up with the Viry position, we still chat when he comes over (he doesn't much anymore…). Had a drink and an interesting chat with Marcin Budkowski at the Christmas party. I could go on and on, talk about the time we went to Barcelona for the RS18 shakedown, the filming with Nick Chester… Seeing the arrival of Luca De Meo and the immediate change from inside was nice, the coming together of the Alpine project and whatnot... All of this is really exciting.

Downsides

As I read in previous posts, working in F1 is not all fun and games… There’s a saying that goes, you either do 6 month in F1 or your whole life. And there are good reasons for that.

  • The 2018 season was alright for Renault. Some good points, a solid 4th place. After going 9th in 2016, then 6th in 2017, snatching Danny Ric and Red Bull going to Honda… Hopes were high for 2019. I really saw us fighting for 3rd with RedBull. The whole year was a big desillusion. I am surely not divulging any sensitive info if I say performance was not there and reliability was bad. This was a coming-down-to-earth kind of season for a lot of people, me included. As a result there was a serious reshuffle at Enstone, some senior figures left and others came in. You saw it on the media. I am still relatively new to the sport, but I remember colleagues telling me, in 20+ years in F1, this was one of their hardest. 2020 had some nicer moments, even if the championship position ended-up the same. All that to say, watching F1 has become stressful, and not in a good way. Remember when your team had a bad race ? You were mad but forgot about it at the end of the day. In F1 you go back at it on Monday. Talk about it at the coffee break, have some team debrief, get some hindsight. As much as everyone tries to control everything, a lot of it comes down to luck sometime. But luck favors the brave, so you don’t let it affect you and continue giving your best at work. You hope for better races. If they do come, these are the best times… But they sometimes don’t. For a loooong time. Only Mercedes AMG has one bad race a year. The lower down the field you go, the higher the number of s*** races the staff has to put up with, keep that in mind...
  • Most of the UK teams are located in rural areas and if you are looking to keep an active social life, they do not provide the best opportunity. Providing you have the time and energy left to do so obviously. I am very lucky to be back in France as I can both live in Paris, where my friends and family are, AND work on a F1 car. But I don’t see myself moving to the likes of Oxfordshire again soon.

Other negative things could be said but I don’t tend to dwell on these. Yes it changed the way I follow F1, but the experience I had along the way makes losing this sort of naive enthusiasm worth it.

This being said, I still can’t wait to see what our team will look like in blue, I still can’t wait to see what an Aston Martin F1 car driven by a 4 times world champion looks like, I still can’t wait to see how the driver that made me love F1 and Renault, will do in an Alpine I worked on. I still can’t wait to see the 2022 cars.

I could go on and on but this has been long enough! Hope we’ll have a good year! Thanks for reading :-)

r/F1Technical Jan 23 '21

Industry Insights Industry Insights - F1 Vehicle Dynamicist

646 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’ve been asked by the moderators of this subreddit to give some insight into my work in F1. Sadly I can’t go into too much detail about my background because I’m not sure my employer would appreciate it, but my intention is to give a brief insight into vehicle dynamics, which is a part of the industry which I feel is widely misunderstood by those outside of the industry. I apologise if this post comes across as something of a rambling mess; despite it being the off-season it’s been a very long and frustrating week so my brain is a bit fried!

Before I get into the swing of things, a few brief notes about myself. I am currently employed as a vehicle dynamicist at one of the current F1 teams. Since joining my current team several years ago, I have performed a variety of roles, including working on the most abstract side of VD, i.e. helping develop the mathematical vehicle models that we use to run our simulations, as well as some more trackside-focussed work including running simulator sessions and directly supporting the trackside operation from the factory-based support room.

My path into F1 was relatively conventional; I studied Mechanical Engineering at a top UK university, took a year in industry at an F1 team in the middle of it, then moved onto a graduate role after getting the degree. I was also heavily involved in the uni’s Formula Student team, primarily focussing on Vehicle Dynamics as you might expect, but also helping lead the team more generally as someone with real-life experience. For anyone looking to get into F1, or motorsport generally, my top tips would be:

• Study a “standard” engineering subject at the best uni you can get into, preferably in the UK. I know a lot of people who are very keen to do the various motorsport engineering courses that are available in various universities (and for sure a lot of people from Oxford Brookes do end up in F1), but they’re not the competitive advantage that the universities offering them advertise them as. You’re generally much better off getting a proper, solid degree. If nothing else, it will serve you better if you’re one of the unlucky 90% who don’t end up quite making it into F1. As for studying in the UK, I’m a native so don’t have much experience of the visa situation, especially after Brexit. All I know is that it’ll be a lot easier to get a job with a UK-based team if you’re already based here. • If your uni has a Formula Student/FSAE team you really should be getting as involved as you can. I would give this advice to anyone studying any degree and looking at any career, regardless of their interest in motorsport. FS is by far and away the closest thing you can do at uni to working in the real world (though given I’ve worked in F1 my whole career I’m not sure I’m really an authority on the real world…!) and it teaches you much more than how to build a racing car. If you want to get into F1, really you have no excuse for not doing it. • Don’t expect passion for the sport to get you a job. Focus on being the best engineer you can possibly be. To do the job well you need to be a good engineer; passion helps you put in the hours, but it doesn’t turn you into a better worker. • Apply for all the teams; the working environment is very similar up and down the grid and the sort of work people are doing at Williams will be pretty much the same as they’re doing up the road at Mercedes so you won’t be missing out on the “F1 experience” at a smaller team. People move between teams all the time as well; don’t think that you will be less employable going forward if you started at a team towards the back.

Before getting my year in industry placement, I had never had any real interest in vehicle dynamics. I applied for all the placement roles I could find; I wasn’t that bothered what job I was doing as long as I could get that foot in the door of F1. What I discovered when I was doing that job was that VD is an incredibly deep subject which is full of incredibly counter-intuitive facts (as an example, the coefficient of friction of a tyre goes down as the vertical load on it is increased, so for every extra Newton of load you get, either from aero or dynamic load transfer, you get a little bit less lateral/longitudinal grip out of it. This effect is why load transfer makes a car lose grip; the loaded tyre gains less than the unloaded tyre loses. It took me a very long time to get my head around that fact!). It combines very abstract and complicated physics and all the “hard” technical skills that you learn at uni with the need to accommodate the very, very human needs of the driver. It’s not good enough to write the world’s best optimal-control lap simulation, with the minute details of the car modelled, the world’s best tyre model, etc etc, because your results will always, always give you a car which would be virtually undriveable anywhere near the limit. So you need to build an understanding of the human side of vehicle performance and work towards making the car as nice to drive as possible, because a comfortable driver is a quick driver.

VD is a field where I’ve always found everything to be both incredibly complicated but also very simple; as an example, modelling the behaviour of tyres is incredibly difficult – many extremely talented engineers have spent their careers building tyre models and trying to understand their behaviour, but we still regularly find ourselves baffled by them at times. But, while we might not have a full understanding of exactly what does on inside the tyre, we can still reliably predict the impact of a degree of front wing flap or a step of rear anti-roll bar stiffness on the tyre’s force generation capacity and as such the car’s behaviour. These sorts of contradictions mean that VD is a field where there remains a good amount of intuition required to do well; it’s no good to just blindly go where the lap simulations tell you to go if the performance the models are finding doesn’t translate into reality.

There’s also very little of the almost “magical” sorts of explanations you often see in the media/fan community to explain how things work. For example, there was a post yesterday on r/Formula1 with a “conspiracy theory” that Red Bull could have some sort of rear-wheel steer system on the car. The effect described (which was effectively changing of the rear toe angle with vertical suspension travel) is not only legal, it’s extremely simple to achieve. I’m not going to speculate as to whether they’ve designed such a characteristic into their suspension, but it can be achieved by simply moving the vertical position of the pickup for the rear trackrod on the upright. This induces a geometric effect called bump steer, which causes the wheel to turn slightly as the suspension moves up and down. Hence, you get a rear wheel steering effect as the car rolls. Traditionally suspension is usually designed to minimise or eliminate bump steer, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use it. And the same goes for all the trick suspension components people used to run before ~2017; they were indeed very complex non-linear hydraulic systems, but they were very very far from the “mechanical computers” that many in the media seemed to think they were. In fact some of the systems that garnered the most attention are actually incredibly simple (for example, to make the rear ride height drop on the straights all you need is a preloaded spring, not complicated hydraulics). Although we’re generally a pretty smart bunch in F1, we don’t over-complicate things if we don’t have to!

One of my favourite parts of my current job is the time I spend in the simulator. Despite what many people seem to think, the sim is not a tool for drivers to learn tracks; they’re more than capable of getting up to speed on a new track within a few laps anyway. While we do use the simulator to help train drivers on new procedures with the steering wheel, its primary purpose is to get driver comments for various setup changes; using the simulator you can sweep a wide range of potential setups in a much more controlled (and cheaper) environment than you can with the real car. The vehicle models we have these days are extremely sophisticated; the technology has progressed so far that the only real points of uncertainty in the modelling are in the tyre and the aero. Both of these aspects of the car are similar in that they’re extremely difficult to measure accurately and reliably (try to imagine how you might measure the aero loads acting on a car as it’s going round the track at 200 mph; it’s incredibly challenging!). As such we spend a lot of time doing correlation work, going back over previous races/tests with the drivers and trying to adjust the tyre and aero models until the results match what was happening trackside both in terms of data and driver feedback.

The great thing about simulator testing is that you can control all the variables you want to keep the same and do proper back-to-back tests. This very rarely happens trackside; not only is the weather constantly changing lap after lap, but usually you’re so short of time that you have to test multiple things in each run. It’s very easy to get a bit lost with track data, but in the simulation world your only variables are the vehicle model and the driver.

There is always more to say on this area, but I’m somewhat short of time so I’ll have to leave it here. I like to think I have a good, broad understanding of how the cars work, so I’m more than happy to try to answer any questions (preferably related to my area of expertise!) you might have. Going forward, if this sort of insight is appreciated I may do some other posts going into a bit more detail of parts of the VD/Race Engineering process.

r/F1Technical Jan 08 '21

Industry Insights My journey - School to Race Team in 6 Years

903 Upvotes

Hello Redditors,

I’ve been invited by the mods of this subreddit to give you guys an insight into my job in F1.

I’m hoping I can give you a different aspect than what the two people before me wrote due to my experience requiring less formal education and more of a hands on approach - basically showing that achieving a job in F1 is possible to everyone.

Everything written here only reflects my own opinions, experiences and thoughts which is in no way affiliated with the opinions of the team.

My Role

My job title is NDT Technician, which means that I monitor the material integrity for most of the components which make up the car. Typically, the factory based role of an NDT technician would be to check the components which have reached their service life or done R&D tests. Most components would last from 1 to 3 race weekends, after that they would get sent back to the factory for a full service and proof loading. If some items haven’t faired too well they will either be repaired or scrapped, but it totally depends on the type of part it is and this will be managed on an individual basis with communication from the design engineers and production managers.

When in the factory we have a comprehensive amount of equipment and methods at our disposal to make sure that we can fully assess each part and make sure that they’re not carrying any manufacturing defects before signing it off to send it trackside.

The methods we use in the factory are;

Ultrasonic Testing (UT) - CFRP & METALS- Using high frequency sound waves we can find defects in materials with an insane amount of precision and map the defected area to show the design engineers.

This’ll be used for mainly CFRP & metals

Eddy Current Testing (ET) - METALS - Using an electric AC we can induce an electromagnetic current within a metal (around the probe head) and find finite cracks on the surface of metals.

This’ll be used for mainly metals

Dye Penetrant Testing (DPI) - METALS- one of the simplest of the techniques, we basically dip a component in a fluorescent dye, wash off the excess dye with water or another emulsifier then visually check the surface under a ultraviolet light to see if there’s any cracks.

Magnetic Penetrant Test (MPI) - METALS- Very much the same method as DPI but we are inducing a magnetic current through the component and using an oil based fluid with fluorescent magnetic particles that fill the cracks (if any) on the surface of metal components.

X-Ray/CT Scan - CFRP & METALS - We can X-Ray and CT scan all components using a live fluoroscopy which gives us a real time digital look at components such as radiator cores and pipes.

Phased Array - CFRP - Pretty much the same concept as UT but we’re able to create almost a 3d image and remove each layer of CFRP of the survival cell to make sure the weave pattern is correct etc.

So with that being what we can do in the factory I’ll now focus on the aspect of the Race Team NDT role which is my job specifically.

I’m expected to monitor any high stressed items such as suspension components, gearbox and chassis, but also make sure that items that have reached their service life can be checked over before being fitted back on the cars. Normally this would be for double and triple headers so that we save time by not sending it back to the factory for a full turn around, we can rotate certain items that is fresh to then make that the prime part and anything which has been serviced trackside will be 1st or 2nd spares.

From time to time I’ll be asked by the engineers trackside who have seen on their data an overloaded component to check that specific item and make sure that with the overload there hasn’t been a material dis-bond, for example titanium to carbon bond within a suspension arm, but the most obvious time would be when there’s been a crash and mechanics need to know the extent of damage so we can make changing those damaged parts an easier and quicker decision, sometimes you don’t always see the damage we could have a spin into a wall causing rear wing damage but we could also potentially have a gearbox mounting damage or even worse engine mount damage, you don’t know fully what to expect so it’s always best to make sure the structural components get a full check and given the go ahead to be used again.

Capabilities we have trackside are very similar to the factory minus the x-ray/CT scan (I wish we could have this) so most things will be done using UT and we’ll be checking important CFRP to Metal Bonds or CFRP to CFRP bonds, secondary would be DPI because it’s quick and easy to drop parts in the dye and check with my UV torch after that we have ET for most titanium and aluminium surfaces and MPI for things like wheel nuts.

My Race week

Monday or Tuesday

Wake up, have breakfast and take the train/drive to the airport, usually LHR. We’ll arrive at the location to then get in our hire cars (fly aways) or company cars/vans (europeans), and drive to our hotel which normally is around 15-30mins away from the circuit.

Wednesday - 9-12hrs working

Wake up, travel to the circuit and set up my area. We have portable cabinets which carry all the tools and equipment we need, some people require more than one cabinet but my stuff doesn’t take up too much room. Once set up it’s a check of my emails to see if the factory have released some design notice or if Factory NDT dept has informed me of things to look out for from their findings in the previous week. I’ll probably do a couple of pieces which didn’t do a turn around service and that’ll be the day done.

Thursday - 9-12hrs working

If there’s more NDT to be doing I’ll do that for a while and then see if some of the guys need a hand either building some assemblies or composites. Finish the day, get food, sometimes I will take my bicycle and ride back to the hotel in the evening if we finish early.

Friday - 12 - 16hrs working

FP1 & FP2 Help with the running of the car during sessions just be on hand to help a car mechanic out with removing body work, putting tyres on and removing brake/engine fans when asked. While that’s the case I’ll always have my NDT equipment on standby to check any damage which arises from curb damage or vibrations, so you’ll see me walking around the car and checking critical areas for any visual damage. Once the day has finished and the cars get stripped it’s being on hand to check most items of the cars such as chassis, wings, gearboxes, body work, floors and many more. Everyone in the paddock finishes late on Friday’s so we normally get back to the hotel and just sleep!

Saturday - 10hrs working

FP3 same checks as Friday while the car is in and out of the garage. Quali day is probably my favourite day of the week as it’s so fast paced, and due to parc ferme regulations I can’t actually use any of my equipment unless a concession is given by the FIA. So just back to visual checks and report any findings to the Chief Mechanic. We normally finish early so I can have some time back at the hotel to chat to my SO and grab something nice to eat.

Sunday - 12-14hrs working

We arrive at the circuit a bit later in the day, and it’ll be a morning where we’ll make sure the car is ready for the race, I’ll be normally doing the pit board during the race so I can set up and watch the race on my laptop. Once we’ve finished the race we start packing the garage down before the cars are released from parc ferme, after about an hour or so the cars arrive back and I’ll start my NDT checks and logging any important information which could be passed onto the reliability engineers back at the factory. Once everything is packed I’ll head back to the hotel and packing my bags to go home early Monday morning.

How I got here

I never actually wanted to go to university when I was younger I just wanted to start making money, and buy myself a car. I went to 6th form (12th Grade) but politely got asked to leave so I needed to start getting serious. In my local newspaper there was a advert looking for people who can work with carbon fibre and they were prepared to train me, they specialised in making floors and body work for Force India and Marussia so that’s where started to learn how to laminate and trim CFRP for F1 teams. I stayed at that company for around 1.5 years until I moved to another CFRP manufacture that specialised in aerospace composites which taught me to be more precise and understand slightly the material science behind composite such as certain resin systems and weave patterns. Within composite technicians you have a lot of opportunities to become self employed and hire your services out to companies which are short on staff or require a semi permanent specialist, so I eventually set off and became a contractor which I managed to land my first proper F1 job with Toro Rosso in 2015 to help laminate the new 2016 chassis (STR11). Once my contract finished there I was able to move to Ferrari to help with their LaFerrari Aperta manufacturing and transitioned into Gestione Sportiva which was the F1 devision and I was able to help with their chassis for 2017 (SF70). Both contracts were great, it was my first time moving away from home and I got to live in Italy for a couple of years.

The next job had no relevance to F1 as I got hired to consult on some composite manufacturing for the Airbus A350 in Belgium which was a great experience. This is when I found out about NDT

by a New Zealand colleague who told me about what he did and most importantly how much money he was making contracting, which spoke volumes to me! I finished my time in Belgium with an old Italian friend I had at Toro Rosso contacting me asking if I’d like to help out at Sauber in Switzerland which was a very short contract because of Swiss working laws, but I got to live just on Lake Zurich which is possibly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been too.

After completing my NDT training in the UK, I had to find a job in the field within a year to get my full certifications, but it’s not a very easy field to get into if you’re not fully qualified. I ended up having to take a couple more contracts doing some composite work, and when they didn’t work out I decided to accept a night shift position at Renault F1 to do composite laminating. While I was there I got to meet the NDT night shift guy, and within a few months a position opened up for NDT on the race team. I applied and ended up getting the job as Race Team positions aren’t always easy to fill, and most NDT people aren’t in their 20’s with no ties so they’d rather not be on the team.

I definitely didn’t have a clear path to follow from the start, I just took little steps at a time and worked really hard at each of those steps. I always thought it would be cool to work at all the F1 races but it wasn’t necessarily my ultimate goal.

Negatives

As it was put on the couple of posts before, the lifestyle is intense. You’re running at 100% the whole week with long days and that can be tiring mentally and physically which some people just can’t handle, I’ve seen many people not be able to handle it and eventually they implode.

You find yourself away from home for around 6 months of the year, so you need a very understanding partner/family. This isn’t something which is documented much about F1 and not many people seem to think about the mechanics who have to travel to 20-23 race weeks (not just weekends) a year plus tests, it all takes a toll on marriages and families.

Most business travel isn’t glamorous and F1 is no exception - we fly economy and share hotel rooms (in non covid times) but it’s still a really fun lifestyle.

Positives

I think the biggest positive I have is that I’m able to be right at the centre of the action - the factory based personnel does a great job but I like being able to see the fruits of my labour and being on the team allows me to do that. Everyone trackside is a master of their trade, they work with absolute precision, speed and cool to make sure that if there’s an incident that we can get that car out on circuit for the next session. It’s nice to know that you’re a part of that environment which only a certain amount of people get to experience.

Working with DR, the two years he drove for us we were able to have a chat now and again, and I think having him join us in the garage the atmosphere was lifted. His charisma was quite contagious and that helped us no end, we saw that he had the capabilities to put the car on a podium and with that we were trying harder to make sure everything was perfect and nothing left to chance.

I have the chance to visit so many places around the world with the freedom of actually travelling to new places in-between events and normally my SO would come out to a few destinations and we’d then fly off somewhere else for the week after for a small vacation before going to the next race.

I’ve learnt so much and the opportunities the team gives you if you’re eager to have a go at doing something new people will teach you and eventually it’ll be something which if the mechanic is busy you’ll drop on it and help out to make the whole process quicker and more efficient. Most people have numerous skills which makes them a better fit for the race team.

A small positive is that I get to steer the car during pitstop practice. It’s just a cool perk.

Conclusion

I’d like to say that it’s no walk in the park to achieve the career I’ve taken but I would say that you dont have to go to university as long as you work hard, take relevant steps and a small amount of luck you’ll get there. Most of the guys on the team have worked a lot harder to get where they have and probably their progression was much longer than mine but still we’re all where we want to be right now.

I’m currently thinking of actually doing a motorsport engineering degree while racing so it’s never too late to go back to formal education and earn my salary at the same time.

I’ll be on Reddit most of the day so if you have any questions no matter how obscure I’ll try to answer.

r/F1Technical Jan 22 '22

Industry Insights Industry Insights – Factory Based Performance Engineer

549 Upvotes

Hi All,

I’m been asked by a few people now to give some insight into my job and how I got here. As per previous posts I won’t go into too much detail on some of my days to day tasks but have given a rough outline of some of the more regular tasks so hopefully that is interesting, also worth noting this is 100% from my perspective, not that of the team.

u/GaryGiesel has already covered a fair few elements of what I would have said so I’ll try not double up on what he’s written too much!

From a young age I have been interested in F1 and my parents always suspected I’d end up in engineering of some description as always been tinkering or buildings things. I knew I wanted to work in F1 from around the age of 10 after being hearing that my teachers’ husband worked for a local team, which to my young ears sounded the coolest job ever, so I really tailored my education and experience towards this as much as possible. I was also very lucky to grow up local to lots of F1 teams in the “motorsport valley” so was able to get school work experience and summer jobs at my current team and a year in industry at another team as part of my degree course.

As you may expect, education wise I was always biased towards maths and the sciences but also enjoyed applied/engineering subjects so focused on these from GCSE onwards. A-Levels I took Maths, Physics and Design and Technology, also taking Further Maths to AS.

I went on to study Automotive Engineering at University as I was recommended this course by a few colleagues when on summer placements. Looking back, I feel this was the ideal course for me, as it was car focused and there was a good mix of modules that allowed me to specialise in the direction I wanted, whilst also being general enough to avoid the pitfalls of some (not all) motorsport engineering courses that sometimes aren’t highly valued outside of the motorsport sector. As is often said on here, something like Mechanical Engineering would have been a good option too but would have contained a more modules that would have been less interesting to me, so I have no regrets with my choice. It’s worth noting a good percentage of the students on my course have had no issues getting jobs outside of the automotive sector.

Whilst I didn’t get involved with formula student at university, I would definitely recommend getting involved as much as possible, I was very lucky to be friends with someone running a formula Renault car so spent a fair few weekends helping him out gaining experience there and later on I got myself a project car that took up all my spare time fixing and competing in autosolos. That paired with Uni work left no spare time for FS!

Whilst doing post A-level and Uni summer/short term placements at my current team I completely a range of tasks, from developing ride analysis and GPS competitor analysis tools to debugging and evaluation tasks. I was also involved in the suspension pre-event tasks for a couple of events which was fairly daunting as I had just finished my A-Levels (admittedly my boss had assumed I was degree level as I knew MATLAB fairly well, and they only found out on my final day when they asked what I had planned after I graduated and I replied I was starting Uni next week…).

On my year in industry I worked for a different team, where I was situated in the design office, working primarily on suspension and steering design. I found this very interesting and really enjoyed the work, although at points it was fairly stressful and full on, but I loved seeing my parts at the track and believe the team still use an evolution of some of the setup kit that I designed when there. Whilst working there I also volunteered in the race control room, it was a very small group at the time (6 people including me) which allowed me to get involved with lots of different tasks such as GPS and Audio competitor analysis and pit stop analysis, this was mostly focused on the timing of the individual mechanics in the stop, but also looking at how the driver could save time on entry and exit, even getting to speak directly to the drivers on occasions which was more than a little daunting at the time – especially when a certain Brazilian driver answered back!

After graduating I spent a year doing a ski season and travelling mixed with a few shorter-term placements at my current team, before landing my current permanent role, whilst this is a fairly unconventional route after Uni, I’m 100% glad I did it as feel I got the “ski bum” bug out of the system and confirmed a customer facing job is definitely not for me (not at all my fault but managed to get a named mention in a 1 star TripAdvisor review whilst working as a ski tech!)

My current day to day role is within the Performance Optimisation Section, which is within the Vehicle Performance Group, a department which looks at various performance sections, such the ride and suspension, mathematical modelling and includes the simulator section too. As a section we perform computer simulations to investigate the effects of changing components on the car and analyse track data to provide information and support to various departments such as the trackside engineers, aerodynamicists, design office and production.

I can’t list all of my day to day tasks as a few are fairly specific, but the main elements of mine and my colleagues day to day jobs are tool development, pre-event analysis where we optimise the aero, suspension and brake cooling setups for race weekends and even future cars and post event model correlation where we match our vehicle model to laps from the weekend using a variety of scalings and offsets.

I also work in the race operations room on race weekends, the work here is very different to the weekday tasks and we need to be working similar hours to the track – e.g. for Australia we get up and midnight and Austin or Mexico don’t leave until around 5am. One of my key responsibilities is reliability/loads monitoring, making sure the suspension and chassis loads aren’t exceeding the design limits, and passing the information on to the relevant trackside staff should they do so – you never see an F1 car clip a wall or hit the curb hard the same way again after doing this, as I’m always imagining all the overload alarms the engineer monitoring that car is seeing! We also try to act as an extra set of eyes for the trackside performance engineers, keeping an eye that general setup changes are having the expected effect.

Another task that we do at the weekend is the brake cooling analysis, this is a surprisingly detailed task where we have to evaluate the best cooling and disc option, balancing keeping the brakes cool when the car is heavy with fuel and in traffic whilst maximising aero performance and not letting the brakes be too cold nearer the end of the race, paired with the fun that you sometimes have to react quickly should there be a “change of climatic conditions” (aka rain). An interesting example of where a team got this very wrong is Imola last year where Aston Martin sent the cars out on a damp track with way too aggressive brake setup and overheated the rear brakes on the laps to the grid, forcing a pitlane start for one car.

The final task that I do at the weekend is GPS competitor analysis, we look at a variety of factors such as comparing corner and straight line speeds to help assess where we are in terms of setup and where we are losing time compared to competitors.

Overall it would be fair to say I love my job, it may have some wacky hours and a fair few long (but normally interesting) days, but overall the reward of seeing your car hit the track and score points is amazing, if you’re lucky enough you may even get to experience a podium or win!

I’ll be checking the post over the next few days if anyone has any questions – please ask here rather than dm to keep the answers open to all!

r/F1Technical Dec 05 '22

Industry Insights Industry Insights – Head of Vehicle Dynamics

368 Upvotes

I was recently asked by the moderators of this group to compile a short summary of my career to date for anyone who is interested in the life of an engineer working within Formula 1. Working in this sport has been a lifelong dream for me and I hope that by sharing the story of how I got here, I can show that there’s no magic required, and hopefully encourage others to pursue their passion as far as they can. I’ve included some advice for those who are serious about pursuing this career at the end of the piece. Please note that all opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the teams that I’ve worked for.

Early Years

My interest in all things with four wheels began at the age of seven or eight, playing with Hot Wheels cars and 8-bit racing games on my parents’ brand-new PC. My favourite car of the day was the new Lamborghini Diablo, a picture of which occupied the prime real estate above my bed in my first bedroom. Whilst I loved racing, it was a few years before I started paying any attention to series like Formula One. For whatever reason, ten-year-old me didn’t really appreciate the look of the open-wheel cars compared to the styling of the supercars that appeared in Top Gear magazine every month. When I eventually did catch on, by following the ITV coverage every Sunday afternoon, the best-looking car of the day was the ‘West’-Liveried McLaren in the hands of Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, and this quickly became my favourite team (I’m sure that the fact that they were winning everything at the time never came into it…). Many evenings were spent checking testing times and downloading images from motorsport websites, creating new desktop wallpapers in the process.

The idea that I could one day work for a team like this never entered my head. It didn’t seem likely that there’d be any way in for someone like me, who had zero connections in anything remotely resembling the automotive industry. I’m not even sure I’d be able to tell you what an engineer did before I finished my GCSEs.

That all changed in my final year of school, when some of the kids in our class were encouraged to apply for the ‘Arkwright Engineering Scholarship’ (from The Smallpeice Trust) – a cash award that we’d be able to put towards our final projects in Design and Technology. I remember folding up the application form and putting it in my bag without thinking about it, until my teacher at the time asked me directly whether I’d be applying. When we discussed it on one evening after the class had finished, we talked about my current grades in maths and whether I’d been able to do any kind of design projects outside of school. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like there’d be enough there to stand a good chance of succeeding, that is until I talked about my passion for F1 and the amount of time I’d dedicated to following and learning about it. It was then that his eyes lit up, and he persuaded me that, while my application wasn’t particularly strong, it was worth sending in and seeing what happened.

After the initial application, and exam and an interview, in which I talked about a dream of one day working at McLaren, I got the letter telling me I’d been successful and that I’d been paired with the Ford Motor Company for my scholarship. This came with the opportunity to attend the prize giving at Somerset House in London (a trip that my parents keep reminding me cost almost as much as the value of the scholarship itself!) and to go to some industry days at different engineering companies. It was only then that I really started to believe that a career designing cars might actually be possible. For my A-Levels, I took Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Design and Technology, with a hope of getting into either Bath University, whose Formula Student team had been featured on ITV’s F1 coverage, or Loughborough, who had their own department for Automotive Engineering. After visiting both, the MEng in Automotive Engineering at Loughborough became the first choice, largely because Bath was very close to home at the time!

University

I don’t think I was really the typical student in a lot of respects. In fresher’s week, rather than going out drinking for the fifth day in a row, I went straight over to the Formula Student lab and volunteered my services. My opening line was basically, “I don’t know anything about cars, but I can use a computer and I know which end to hold a saw, so please give me something to do.” This turned out to be a valid approach and I spent most weekends throughout the year working on simple machining jobs and designs for that year’s competition. As for the course, many of my fellow students were getting little bit irritated by the ‘academic’ (rather than practical) nature of the modules, wondering when we were going to learn about how to make cars. For me, the academic stuff was a blessed relief, as it meant my meagre knowledge of automotive systems wasn’t coming under much scrutiny. Subjects like maths and computing were my bread and butter and I gained a lot of confidence in scoring well in these compared to students that had grown up surrounded by cars. I often found myself selecting what others considered to be the most difficult modules, not because of their difficulty or their program leaders, but because I thought they would suit my skillset and give me a good foundation in the very fundamentals of the subject. My advice to anyone in a similar position is not to choose modules that you think will be easiest, or the ones you think you will enjoy most, but instead the ones that you think will be most valuable. Knowing the value of the lessons you’re being taught will help you through those long hours in the university library in the middle of the night, when any thoughts of enjoying a particular ‘easy’ module have long disappeared.

It was in my second year that year-long student placements started being advertised to anyone who was interested in gaining some work experience before graduating, together with a DIS (diploma in industrial studies) certificate. To my amazement, some of the companies that were advertising placements were the local Formula One teams! The idea that they would consider taking on students seemed completely amazing – an opportunity to work in Formula One came as a complete surprise. From the other end of the telescope, this process makes a great deal of sense; teams can hire multiple students for mere peanuts (maybe £14k a year), get them to work their fingers to the bone and hire the best and brightest once the year is over. Unfortunately, my applications that year weren’t especially successful. While my grades were strong enough to get to some interviews, my interview technique was particularly rusty. The closest I got to a position was a second interview at Honda F1, but a very poor answer to one question (which still makes me cringe to this day) was the end of that. No matter I thought, as there would be another opportunity to do it again in the following year…

By my third year, I’d made it to head of design in the Formula Student project. This was by far the toughest year of my time at Uni, as it meant balancing the requirements of this, my course, applying for year placements in industry and my hobby of playing guitar in heavy metal bands. Needless to say, this led to some stressful periods. One day I found myself in the department computer lab, feeling particularly low. The music ‘critic’ in the university magazine hadn’t really enjoyed one of our band’s recent performances and I’d been arguing with him over whether or not he should keep his mouth shut in future. It was then that I received a call from the Human Resources department at Williams F1 team – they were sorry that I’d been rejected for a job in their design department, but they would very much like to offer me a position in Vehicle Dynamics. To be offered a job (albeit temporary) in the sport I’d been watching as a kid was just about enough to lift my spirits into shouting “Yes!” repeatedly, at the top of my lungs from my seat at the computer. Given my mood up to that point, the others in the room were probably wondering whether I’d finally lost it…

Predictably, I was a little nervous before starting my first day, so much so that I’d spent many hundreds of pounds on vehicle dynamics textbooks in the hope of absorbing enough so as not appear completely out of my depth, but I needn’t have been so worried. My placement year at Williams was an incredible experience. My first day involved sitting in on a simulator session with Kazuki Nakajima, one of their race drivers at the time, and learning about how the engineers translate the information they see on their monitors into performance of the car. My early jobs involved things like running simple batches of lap simulations, modelling subsystems and helping build the simulator track library. There were a couple of opportunities to attend straight-line tests at Kemble Airfield, where I could see the car running up close (unfortunately, this type of testing is now banned in F1). I was so determined to make the most of the opportunity that I didn’t take nearly as much annual leave as I should have done, and I extended the placement all the way up to the weekend I was due to go back to university to start my final year. With hindsight, a little more time off would have been sensible!

Returning to university after a year in F1 felt very difficult. Dealing with the coursework, presentations and exams felt like a far cry from the dream job that I’d been doing for the previous year. Fortunately, I was able to stay in touch with the team by arranging to do my dissertation with them on the topic damper modelling, which meant trips back every few months to gather some more data and catch-up with old colleagues. Obviously I had already made everyone aware that I would love to come back after graduating if there was a vacancy, and I was optimistic that they might be able to find space, but bad news came around Christmas time. Far from looking to recruit more staff in the team, there had just been a round of redundancies and the engineer that was supervising my dissertation was one of the staff who’d been let go.

It began to look like returning straight away wasn’t on the cards, and I needed to look for more options. I had interviews at Sauber and McLaren before I was flown out to Qatar to visit the brand-new Williams technology centre, who were recruiting for their commercial simulator project. It was while I was mulling over the opportunity to live halfway around the world with my future wife that my boss from my placement year got in touch to say that one of their software engineers had just resigned and they wanted to offer me the position as his replacement. Queue round two of delirious celebration…

Early Career

The final term of university went very smoothly, and the work experience I had gained helped me to graduate top of my year, winning the Henry Ford Prize. It's basically obligatory for all new recruits in motorsport valley to rent a flat on Cowley Road (and the surrounding area) in Oxford, and that’s where we moved after the graduation ceremonies. The flat was far too small for two people but graduate salaries don’t go that far when renting in Oxford!

The first day back at Williams felt like I’d never left, and I was able to pick up a lot of the responsibilities that I’d taken on during my placement straight away. The team was planning the construction of a brand-new simulator motion platform, and while my main interest was always the F1 car, I was very happy to volunteer my experience in multi-body system simulation to help on this project. This grew from a few simple simulations into designing and commissioning the entire control software, including design of the ‘washout’ algorithms that help to cue the driver of disturbances to the handling. Creating these algorithms involved some of the hardest maths I’d done before or since! The finished product was completed two years later, with the first race driver tests exceeding all expectations for a simulator so early in development. This became an instrumental part of the car development process, with tests taking place several times a week focussing on car development, event preparation and driver training. The simulator design has since been licensed to AB Dynamics (AB Dynamics Simulators) and has been bought by the Alfa Romeo team.

I was promoted to a more senior position three years after re-joining, at a time when I was the only engineer working on vehicle dynamics projects. This meant I was exposed to everything from simulations to rig testing and track data analysis. This experience was invaluable for my later career when I would need to appreciate the relative importance of all these areas in developing the car. It was around this time that my wife and I got married and we had our first chid on the way; something that focussed my mind on the real purpose of work – to make enough money to support your family. It was certainly true that I felt very privileged to be doing the job I was doing, so much so that I probably hadn’t pushed hard enough to increase my salary in line with my growing responsibilities. Unfortunately, there a came a point when it was clear that the role wasn’t compatible with raising a family in the Southeast of England.

In my attempts to highlight my own market value in pursuit of a raise, I started applying for similar positions at other teams. I was invited for an interview with McLaren during my paternity leave, and visiting the factory, together with speaking to their engineers was a very exciting experience. It was a difficult decision to leave Williams, given all that they had done for me so early in my career, but having just become a new father, I knew it was the right thing to do.

Recent Career

I joined McLaren at the end of 2015, in the position of ride performance engineer. I found the prospect of moving to a new house in a different county to start work at a new team (where I didn’t know anyone) quite scary, but after joining I found there was a great spirit in the factory. My new role meant having complete responsibility for the vertical dynamic performance of the car, which had been a subset of my previous responsibilities at Williams. With this role however, there was a great deal more time to dig into details in the pursuit of improved performance, and it was a fantastic learning experience.

While the role itself was quite narrow, there were plenty of opportunities to branch out into other areas of development. This was at a time in the sport where there was a great deal of investment in novel suspension devices that could improve performance whilst avoiding areas of the technical regulations that were trying to ban them. My first experience of working in this area went very well and in 2017, I was given my own team of people to work on similar systems that we hoped would keep us ahead of the competition. I quickly found managing engineers required developing a completely different set of skills to being one, and while I’ve certainly improved in these over the years, my core principles have led to a lot of success and have barely changed since. These have included things like focussing on process over product and achieving good results by supporting those in the team to deliver it, rather than thinking I knew best.

Unfortunately, there were huge clampdowns on the kind of devices my team had started to specialise in, and by the start of the 2019 season, virtually all of them had been outlawed. It was then that my group was pivoted towards a more traditional Vehicle Dynamics group role. This involved ownership of things like suspension kinematic development, trackside remote support from the factory and simulation work for performance development. The group was officially renamed Vehicle Dynamics at the start of 2022, with my role becoming Head of Vehicle Dynamics.

Outside F1

During the COVID pandemic of 2020, the team was furloughed and I suddenly found myself with a big hole in my life that my job used to fill, with no idea how long it would be before we returned (or indeed whether we would return at all). This was a scary time for everyone and I found myself wondering whether there was anything that I could do to help make our current situation better, in the event that there was no sport to go back to when it was all over. I took the decision to try and give something back to the industry that had given so much to me, by writing a book that I wish I’d read at the start of my career. This would include subjects that were not taught in my university education that I felt were essential for a career in engineering, as well as sharing my vision for how these subjects can help us to solve the problems in Formula 1 and beyond.

The majority of the book wash finished by the time we eventually returned to start the 2020 season in July, but the workload from my day job meant it was another two years before it was finally finished and put on sale. Because I wanted this to do as much good as possible, I decided to donate all the profits from the first edition to The Smallpeice Trust, without whom I would not be an engineer today. The initial reception took me completely by surprise and we’ve already been able to raise a great deal of money for this excellent cause. The book is called ‘ACE Thinking: Life Lessons from Engineering the Ultimate Racing Cars’, and it is available to buy on Amazon in all territories (links to amazon.co.uk and amazon.com).

ACE Thinking - Cover

I’ve also been very fortunate to have been invited on the Tech Heads F1 podcast, where I discussed this book, as well as some of the important vehicle dynamics questions of the day with the fantastic group of people that produce this (episode to be released shortly).

My Advice for Those Interested in a Career in F1

I’m often asked on my advice for those wanting to start a career in engineering in F1, and while there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy, I think there are a few ideas that will be common to all roles. These are the areas that I will typically look for when we’re hiring into our group:

· You’ll need a good degree (2:1 or above, preferably masters level) from a university with a strong engineering reputation

· It’s useful to have participated in extracurricular activities that demonstrate dedication to this career (this could be something like the Formula Student project, or similar)

· Try to have something to set you apart from the other candidates, who will all have very similar skills and experience. Maybe something that isn’t well catered for in the team already (for example, experience in machine learning techniques or experience with the latest must-have software tool)

· You need to have a love of engineering, as well as a love for the sport. Watching races is one thing, working until 4am trying to fix a fault in the system your developing is something entirely different

o Personally, I’ve always been a bit disappointed when candidates have pushed their karting experience on their CV. Again, it’s great that you love racing, but the skills required to succeed in engineering are not the same as those required to enjoy karting on your weekends (this may not be the case for all hiring managers!)

· You’ll need a good deal of luck!

Closing

I hope that anyone interested in pursuing a career in this industry sticks with it. Yes, there are more pragmatic choices to make a living, but for me, you’re far more likely to make it in a career if you wake up every morning excited to go to work. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough places for everyone but if you take anything from my experience, it’s that you don’t need to have grown up surrounded by cars and family connections to break in. You’ll just need to understand your shortcomings, seek out new learning and grab hold of opportunities when they present themselves. I wish anyone trying to follow this path the very best of luck!

(If anyone is looking for specific advice, I’m very happy to try and answer questions on LinkedIn or on Twitter – '@ACEMike88')

r/F1Technical Dec 17 '22

Industry Insights My journey in motorsports

215 Upvotes

I was talking to the moderators of this sub, after reading the journey of the F1 engineer poster here a few days ago. Just to be clear from the beginning, I never made it to F1, but still might be interesting for the people here dreaming about a job in F1 / professional motorsports.

So, my name is Waffle. A 24 year old engineer (well, almost).

Early life

As any kid, I watched F1 since as long as I remember, during the days of Michael Schumacher at Ferrari. With other hobbies taking over, and F1 not being broadcasted for free anymore I stopped watching it for a while, and racing went completely out of my head for a few years.

When I was 15, I got a knee injury. After 3 years of hospital visits, physiotherapy, surgeries etc etc I had to quit competitive cycling. So I suddenly had a load of free time on my hands, and not really anything to do. So started following motorsports again. Mainly SuperGT, F1 and GT3 (back then the Blancpain Series, now World Challenge bla bla bla... you know what I mean).

High school

Here when you are 18, you chose between high school (for a professional bachelor) or university (for a master). I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do, besides that I would never go to university, but as I had an interest for cars, decided to go study Automotive Technology in high school. Not really knowing what I was getting into.

In the summer of 2017 (after my first year of high school), I wanted to learn more about the "behind the scenes" of racing. Got in contact with a local team competing in Lotus Cup Europe. Asked if I could join them during a race to see how everything works from the pitlane. They said yes, and I joined them for a race at Circuit Zolder. Had a blast there, and was sad when the weekend was over.

In the fall of 2017, I had to to a short internship for school. Asked again if I could do that for them, and they agreed. That was in the workshop, learning all about being a mechanic. After that period, I asked if I could join them for more races in the next season. After looking at the schedule, we agreed upon on me doing 3 races in 2018 (Zolder, Silverstone and Le Mans). Again, it was a blast. And I thought: "Damn, I would love to make a carreer out of this".

So when for my final year I had to chose a specialization, and one of the option was "Motorsport Engineering" with classes from a GT3 and ex-F3 engineer, the choice was easy.

I also had to pick a bachelor thesis. I knew there would be some rule changes for 2019, with the cars being allowed to be lighter for that season. Interesting. What would the effect of that be on the driving dynamics? How would it influence the set-up? I had found my bachelor thesis! Thus, in 2019 I worked in the workshop for 8 months, as a mechanic, as an engineer, as a bit of everything, whilst working on my thesis. Obvously joining the team to all races. Hockenheim, Paul Ricard, Spa, Assen, Brands-Hatch, Nurburgring and Le Mans. During that season, when learning more and more about race engineering in school, I transitioned from a mechanic to "the data guy" (ei, race engineer).

But, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself know. Hockenheim was the first race of the year. As usual, we were running late, and one of the cars wasn't ready. So I stayed in the workshop finishing up the car with the driver, and we left a bit later then the rest of the team (hoping the buildup would be finished by the time we arrived). On the way to Hockenheim, we were talking about everything, I mean, it is a 6h drive, you talk about a lot then. When talking about school, and what I would do when I graduated (as usual, I didn't know what I wanted to do... I mean, I wanted to work in motorsport professionally, but did I have the right credentials etc?). He said: "why don't you get a masters degree?". I never really thought about that being something for me. But from then onwards, it was on my mind.

The rest of the year was working hard, thinking about my future, and applying to jobs, like any almost graduate does. My parents forced me to also apply to "normal" jobs, but I didn't really care about those. I wanted professional motorsport. F1, GT3, whatever, as long as it would make me a living. But, it didn't work out. The usual response (if I got any) was: "well, nice you have some experience, but, you don't have a master degree." Damnit. So, I decided to go for a masters degree. As that is what was necessary.

University

I went to uni. Again, totally not knowing what the heck I was getting into. But, I wanted pro motorsport. As I already had a professional bachelor, I was only 2y away from a master degree. As I don't have motorsport specific universities here, I went with "Electromechanical Engineering - specialization Automotive Engineering". And then corona hit. And everything was a mess. Failed my first year. Hard. I passed barely 50% of my classes, all the others where a complete failure. Never had that happen before.

"Is this really what I want?" "Is it worth it?" "I could be making a lot of money by starting to work rather than go through this". But, I didn't want to quit. I wanted to work in professional motorsport. So I continued. Due to corona we only had 2 races in 2020. Damn I missed being on track. I NEEDED to be on track.

Then I got ill. I will not bore you with details, but 2021 was a mess health wise. I realised that with being ill, and struggling at uni, I had couldn't go to all races. So again, I only did 2 races (out of 6 that year) during the summer, and not the ones during the academic year. But also realising more then ever, I needed the racing.

End of 2021, we found out what was wrong with me. I finally got on the right meds, and went back to healthy. Now I just had 1 year of uni to do (which mainly was my master thesis). Ok, I wouldn't get the support I needed from the Lotus team for a master thesis. But I would from our Formula Student team. So I joined them. With a thesis about set-up simulation. The plans for 2022 were set!

And then my mom got cancer. And my world fell apart. But, life continues, and how hard it was, I had to continue my own journey. I had the chance of going to Barcelona to test with a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, from a team competing in the 24h Series and PCCB. With the option of a full time job depending on the test. They were happy. I was asked to do the rest of the season, and after I graduated we would talk contracts, as first they wanted to see how I managed the car, the pressure during races etc etc. All pretty understandable. But then mom got more and more ill. I had issues with my thesis, and the planning of Porsche and Lotus didn't allign (well, it did allign, that was the issue, the races were on the same weekends)... I had to skip some races because I just didn't have the time with uni. I decided I would do the Lotus races. Less work. Less stress. More of "a weekend away with friends to clear my head". But it didn't work. I couldn't get home out of my head. Every time I was away, I felt like I was in the wrong place. That I should be home taking care of my mom, and being with family. That that was more important then any race. So it got me thinking if I really wanted to do that professionally? Always being on the move, away from friends and family. Yes, the odd race weekend every now and then was fine, but week after week? Did I really want that?

After some time, I came across an opportunity with a nearby bus manufacturer. Where I could join their hydrogen fuel cell bus team. Which would give me the chance to do something good in the world, work with state of the art technology, and help make a brighter future. Whilst it would (more then) pay the bills, and I could stay close to family, whilst still having time to continue my work in motorsport as a hobby. So I decided to go for that. Signed the contract. Before I graduated.

Beginning of september I got the news. I didn't pass my thesis. Well, that's a small issue. Loads of meetings later, we decided I would start working 50% at the bus manufacturer, whilst spending the rest of my time on my thesis. Which is now in its finishing stages. Continuing on the set-up simulation, but looking more into the effect of driver (in)consistency on those simulations.

Work

Right now I am still at the very beginning of my career, and as usual (again) having no clue of what I'm getting into. From what I have done now, I absolutely love the job. I rolled in during the testing phase of the new generation of FC busses. But development of the higher power version will start shortly. It honestly is a really interesting world. Now during the testing phase, a lot is actually the same as what I do on track. Data logging & analysing and optimising systems. Just, applied in a different field. And at way lower driving speeds ;).

End note

I'm honestly really looking forward to what the hydrogen world has to bring us. Really learning a lot in a very short amount of time. Just as in racing. Nowadays there is a lot going on, both in the motorsport world and outside of it. If you want to get into motorsport, by all means, follow your dreams! Do what is necessary to get in. However, if it doesn't work out, don't hang your head. There are tons of other interesting, rewarding jobs available, all over the world, that come very close to motorsport jobs. But most of all, find something you really enjoy doing!

r/F1Technical Feb 04 '23

Industry Insights Industry Insights - Professional Racing Coach

167 Upvotes

Hi, my name is Adam Brouillard. Some of you may know me from my book The Perfect Corner and its follow-ups in the Science of Speed Series. I was asked by the moderators to do an Industry Insights post to share my thoughts and experiences. I focus on the driver side of the equation and although this does involve a good bit of vehicle dynamics, it’s quite different from what the vehicle engineers do that I see typically do these Industry Insights posts, so I hope you enjoy this alternate perspective.

Ever since I was a kid doing pinewood derby and Odyssey of the Mind competitions, I’ve always enjoyed cars and creative problem solving. Although I would have loved to go racing, my multiple requests for a kart went unfulfilled by my parents and about as close as I got back then was playing Rad Racer. Not until after I graduated college did I get a chance to do the real thing in the early 2000s when I started doing autocross and karting before moving on to purpose-built racecars. It was never really the direct competition aspect of racing that interested me the most however. Other than the fact that racecars are just simply cool looking and amazing fun to drive, there was always that goal of a perfect lap that could never truly be reached. It’s not a sport where you are just trying to beat whichever competitor is on the field that day; the stopwatch is always there to push you further.

So as many analytically minded people often do, I read everything I could get my hands on in my pursuit of knowledge and speed. While there was a lot of great information and sources available dealing with vehicle dynamics, I found the books dealing with driving technique to be lacking. They seemed to mostly offer only general advice and got very vague and handwavy when dealing with specifics. When they did offer specifics, they turned out to often be wrong. I’ve always had the kind of brain that won’t leave me alone until I understand a concept backwards and forwards, so this began what turned into an over decade long study into the physics of racing, culminating in the publication of the Science of Speed books. I suppose like many authors, my aim was to write something that I wish I could have handed to myself when I first started. If you aren’t familiar with my work and are interested in learning more, I often recommend people start with this video and this article as a good jumping off point.

Since the books have come out, I’ve enjoyed working with all kinds of different drivers, doing presentations and technical commentary at races while also still taking time to put out articles that you might have seen here posted on F1 technical. Mostly however, my energies have been focused on creating a training program to turn the theory in the books into reality. The physics principles in the books were distilled into a set of rules designed to help a driver on track, but they didn’t seem to help everyone in the same way. For more novice and mid-level drivers that didn’t have a solid picture of what they were trying to do on track, they were typically quite helpful, but for the more advanced drivers, it sometimes wasn’t. Ironically, if I left a top-level driver to their own devices, you could see that they followed all the rules very closely, but if I asked them to purposefully try to follow some of them, they would actually often be further from the ideal and lose pace. The goal then was to bridge this divide and essentially reverse engineer what was going on inside these elite driver’s heads to not only help them get even faster, but to help those with less natural talent hopefully someday reach those levels.

With the relatively easy access to data nowadays, many drivers go looking for speed by essentially trying to copy the inputs and lines of faster drivers. I went through this phase as well. While this seems like it might be a good idea and can help a novice driver gain some speed in the beginning, they often quickly plateau and it can be counterproductive to their long-term development. Those top drivers didn’t produce that data by executing a memorized sequence of inputs, so someone can’t hope to replicate their performance by doing so either. In order to do what they do, high-level drivers have to operate at an instinctual level as they drive, constantly adapting and correcting tiny mistakes before they become big ones. A master performer juggling on a high wire. Everything looks smooth from the outside of the car because of the subconscious balancing act done with the controls. If you watch the constant movement of the steering or pedals of an elite level driver at the limit, understand they every single one of those movements is a reaction in the same way that all the little muscles in your body move to keep you balanced as you walk. Looking at the data of some drivers, we’ll see throttle input modulations reaching near 10 cycles per second coming out of a corner. This is not something that can be memorized or copied.

So my recent focus then has been to take this more instinctual type approach and quantify it in a way that can be explained and taught. While the physics rules are really good for analysis after the fact, while in the car, a driver needs to learn to pay attention to the forces that actually created those rules in the first place if they want to reach the top levels. This is done by driving while focusing on maximizing the movement of the vehicle in the ideal directions of force through a corner almost as if they are viewing it from overhead like an RC car. To help a driver learn to do this, I primarily use training exercises and a three-tier visualization system. For example, one of the earlier exercises is done with a high power front-wheel drive car that helps a driver learn to find their ideal apex and corner exit technique without the help of any shortcut cues you get from rear-wheel drive cars. They are instead only relying on their ability to sense the vehicle’s movement in the ideal direction to optimize their technique. In this exercise, as well as many others, a common strategy is to have a driver try to predict their time through a corner. As they complete a sector, they try to guess what their time will be before they check it as opposed to simply checking their time to see how they did. Over time, this allows them to develop the ability to actual feel the time gains and losses in response to their technique. I like to say that they are trying to learn “what fast feels like,” and the top guys predictions are often within a 20th of a second.

While the exercises are a big part of the program, I think the visualization techniques are the most important. This starts by teaching drivers to properly visualize how they interact with the vehicle, as it’s very important that they try to make a direct mental connection with the tires on the track. For example, I ask that they try not to think that they are testing for the limit by increasing steering, but rather that they are trying to push the tires over sideways on the track. Or that instead of increasing throttle until they need to catch the rear tires with countersteering, they are pushing the front tires from behind as hard as they are able while moving them left or right to keep them balanced in front. This may seem like a silly semantic difference, but it has shown to pay dividends on the time sheets. If I ask a top driver to do a lap while trying to pay attention to their controls rather than the tires on the track, they are almost always slower. Next up, we expand our scope to learn to properly visualize the track. Humans have a natural tendency to focus their vision on one thing at a time, but a driver needs to overcome this instinct and learn to take in the current track section almost as if they are using their eyes like a 3D scanner. Always moving, but creating one seamless 3D image in their mind. Lastly, we learn to properly visualize the goal. This is about bringing everything together into an overarching strategy that is simple, but specific and is about focusing on quickly reaching the ideal states during deceleration and acceleration. One way I like to introduce this early in a driver’s training is to show them that most people already have a very natural instinct for racing, but the complexities of driving a car on a large undulating track often overshadow this. We do this with a fun exercise where we set up some cones in a few different corner configurations and then run through them while holding a heavy weight. Most people will very naturally start to run along the shape of a racing line. I then use this to help a driver start to equate this instinctual feeling with what they are trying to accomplish on track.

I hope you enjoyed this brief overview of what I do. If you have any questions, feel free to message me through Reddit or contact me through our website. Thanks for reading.

r/F1Technical Nov 23 '21

Industry Insights Introducing r/F1Technical's Industry Insights

271 Upvotes

r/F1Technical's "Industry Insights" series will be back this off-season, with a whole new range of F1 personnel, past and present, providing a closer look on what it takes to be part of a team competing in the highest echelons of the motor racing world.

What is Industry Insights?

It all started last year, when we were approached by a few members of this subreddit, who wanted to share their experience of working in a Formula 1 team. What was meant to be a small post, turned into a huge AMA-type event, with lots of engagement from the community.

Basically, participants are encouraged to talk a bit of how they got into the sport, and what their job entails, to give us armchair-experts a bit of actual knowledge of the inner workings of the sport. It also has elements of an AMA, as we encourage the community to leave their questions in the comments section, which will hopefully be answered by our guests.

Do I have to work in F1 to be a guest?

Experience, either past or present, in an F1 team is preferred, as F1 is the main focus of this sub. However, if you do not have experience in an F1 team, but feel that your career is somehow relevant to the topic of this series, please do not hesitate to reach out to the mod team.

What's in it for you?

You'll get a shiny new flair, which will let everyone know you are a verified expert. (You can decline of course)

You will be able to pass your wisdom down to those who want to pursue a career and really help them make the right choices to land a job in F1.

Most importantly, you'll have a lot of fun.

Past "Industry Insights" Posts

u/PetrifiedFire - Former F1 Strategist

u/damien__f1 - F1 Composite Design Engineer

u/mattbrom - F1 NDT Technician

u/GaryGiesel - F1 Vehicle Dynamicist

r/F1Technical Jul 22 '23

Industry Insights Motorsport Industry Redditors - Become a Verified User!

52 Upvotes

All,

It's a few months since we last posted this, the sub has grown and we've welcomed many new members to our community.

As such, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we would love to verify more motorsports industry individuals!

If you are a team member, someone who has industry knowledge, we are always on the lookout for you!

We would like to verify you as a member of our community and apply a flair to your username which is in keeping with your role within the industry. You don't have to be in an F1, but your experience and knowledge is something we welcome.

Its important to state that your privacy is paramount to our verification process. You will not be 'outed' if you choose to come forward.

Technical is broad. Perhaps you're involved in the industry but not necessarily a team member. We want you all!

We aren't looking for insider, or secret information, and we will never expect you to divulge more than you are prepared to. We're looking to add credence to our community, and hope you could offer perspectives your average F1 fan will not have encountered before.

We would also welcome your posts regarding your experiences, careers and roles if you'd be prepared to submit anything, posts such as this one - https://www.reddit.com/r/F1Technical/comments/zd14to/industry_insights_head_of_vehicle_dynamics/ are incredibly popular and we were extraordinarily grateful for the insight. With that in mind, we do recognise this may be a busy time of year for team members but we would like to see this sort of content during the off season!

If you'd be interested in becoming a verified community member, send us a modmail, or send me a PM, and please allow me to reiterate anything sent to us will be treated in the strictest confidence.

Cheers

B