© Vladimir RysBulls’ Guide To: FlyawaysWhat’s the practical difference between a European race and a Flyaway? Hopefully, as little as possible…
WatershedmomentsinFormulaOneoftenpassunremarked,onlytoattaindeepersignificanceatalaterdate.Onesuchmomentwastheannouncementofthe2010calendar,publishedinSeptember2009.Itdidn’trevealanyparticularsurprisestothepaddock–thecalendarrarelydoes.However,whatthiscalendardiddowasrevealavisionofF1thatcontainedmoreracesoutsideEuropethanwithinforthefirsttime.
These ‘flyaways’ as forays outside of Europe have become known, are nothing new. Leaving aside the oddball presence of the Indy500 on the World Championship calendar, F1 first left the bounds of its ancestral continent in 1953, adding the Argentine Grand Prix.
Back when F1 was predominantly a May-to-September World Championship and the venues that couldn’t be reached by truck were typically offset by several months to take advantage of weather and allow for travel time. Buenos Aires held its race in January; when Morocco was added in 1958, it appeared at the end of a season, six weeks after the final European round at Monza.
Despite the compressed timescales, and with several notable caveats, the basic form survives to this day: flyaways to start and end the season with a European core of races sandwiched in between – except since 2010, that core has been a minority.
Welcome To Circuit Of The Americas© Vladimir Rys
With international travel becoming easier, the number of flyaways have steadily increased. The US Grand Prix arrived a year after Morocco, South Africa followed in 1962, Mexico in ’63, Canada (‘67), Brazil (‘73), Japan (’76) and Australia (’85) followed and all became permanent fixtures. There was even a second and –briefly – a third race in the USA. The big change, however, didn’t occur until the end of the 20th Century, when the arrival of the Malaysian Grand Prix in 1999 changed everything.
The Malaysian Grand Prix at the purpose-built Sepang circuit was different to the flyaway venues F1 was used to because it placed a round of the World Championship in a country that didn’t have a particularly strong or longstanding motorsports tradition.
F1 had become an attraction and a status symbol. The races that followed in Malaysia’s wake were of the same pattern: Bahrain; China; Turkey; Singapore; Abu Dhabi; Korea; India; Russia; Azerbaijan, and later this year Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Some races don’t stick around for very long, others will last for decades, but 2010 was the first time the flyaways (Bahrain, Australia, Malaysia, China, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Abu Dhabi) out-number the races reached by truck (Spain, Monaco, Turkey, Valencia, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy).
Red Bull Racing Truck© Getty Images
The concept of what is and isn’t a flyaway can be a little nebulous but, in the broadest of terms, a flyaway is a race to which the team transports its cars and materiel via air-freight and sea-freight, rather than in a fleet of trucks. It’s almost but not quite a binary choice between Europe and extra-Europe.
Races like the Turkish Grand Prix make this difficult: there isn’t a particularly well-defined border between Europe and Asia, but Istanbul Park, located east of the Bosphorus, is in what generally has been referred to as the ‘Asian’ side of Istanbul. In the past, it’s been a race at which the teams transported everything by truck; in the modern iteration, however, sea-freight and air-freight have taken over, albeit supplemented by the motorhomes delivered by truck.
In the future it might become wholly a flyaway, while races such as the relocated Russian Grand Prix at Igora Drive, near St Petersburg may (or may not) see the Russian Grand Prix switching from a flyaway to a truck race. In essence, however, the flyaways are the races to which the teams either cannot drive, or find it impractical to drive.
So, what difference does it make arriving at a race without a convoy of 44-tonne rigs? If the team and the circuit are doing their jobs correctly, the answer to that one should be ‘very little’. The basic differences are easy to spot.
For flyaways, we operate without motorhomes or treehouses, but instead work in facilities provided by the circuit. The quality of these installations is variable. The circuits purpose-built for F1 often build accompanying team buildings in the paddock and larger pit-buildings that allow for some back-office space. The more mainstream venues, tracks like Suzuka or Circuit of the Americas, which in other weeks would be welcoming domestic series complete with their own trucks, builds temporary structures on their paddock aprons: anything from portacabins to tents.
The rhythm of the team is different at a flyaway. The Energy Station shows us in our best light, and thus the races when we have it are filled with marketing, promotional and partner activities. Despite considerable skill, it’s impossible to provide the same level of service with a hot-plate and some garden furniture at COTA as it is with a team of award-winning international chefs in their bespoke Energy Station kitchen.
Our New Energy Station© Red Bull Content Pool
For the most part, the operation of the garage is identical, regardless of location. It’s important that the garage looks the same everywhere we go, because there really isn’t time to waste learning where everything is in a new layout, and so the team carries in sea-freight the same garage set-up that travels in the trucks.
At any given time of year, including the off-season, there will be up to five sets of sea-freight crossing the world’s oceans, heading for the next sequence of races. Each set comprises of a series of 40-foot sea-freight containers, containing everything that a team needs to set-up for the weekend. They will occasional come back to Milton Keynes for restock, renewal and repair, but for the most part they’ll keep travelling.
The time taken for sea-freight to get to where it needs to go is a strong determining factor in the shape of the calendar. People can be moved from place to place in a day, but sea-freight doesn’t travel any faster than it did when F1 began. Quirks of the calendar, like separating the Singapore and Japanese Grands Prix, with a trip to Sochi in between, makes more sense if you’re looking at a shipping timetable, rather than an airport destinations board.
Of course, not everything travels by sea. F1 obviously flies to the flyaways, and it does so with around a thousand tonnes of kit, flying on seven chartered cargo planes either 747 or 777 freighters. Each of the teams loads-out with between 25,000kg – 35,000kg, with the rest either belonging to the FIA, F1, sponsors, Paddock Club or the F2/F3 support series.
While the cars need to travel by airfreight because of time considerations, the decision of what flies and what floats is primarily done on cost. Flying a lump hammer around the world every week is an expensive business; buying five lump hammers and putting each in a shipping container is not. At the other end of the scale, it’s much more cost-effective to airfreight our spare chassis than construct five more than we need.
Taking Good Care Of The Tyres© Vladimir Rys
In theory, once the garage is set-up, there really shouldn’t be much in the way of difference between a flyaway race and a European round. The cars are the same, the kit’s the same and our real-time comms with the factory ensures the Ops room back in Milton Keynes really doesn’t care where we are in the world. The only real difference is that we perhaps won’t be carrying quite so much workshop kit as would be the case when we have the trucks. This, however, matters less and less.
In the past, a team would almost certainly have, for example, a lathe stashed in their truck in Europe. For flyaways, they need to have an arrangement with a local workshop if they needed work done in a hurry. These days, that would still be the case – but the circumstances under which a team would be making the sort of mods requiring machine tools during a race weekend are almost unthinkable: the sport simply doesn’t go down that route anymore.
If a flyaway is almost indistinguishable from a European race from a racing point of view, it raises the question of what it’s like for the crew. This varies from job to job, track to track, and on the state of the calendar. The final six races of 2020 are all flyaways, with a standalone race, followed by a globe-spanning triple header, followed by a local back-to-back. A standalone flyaway can be tough, because the workload at the track doesn’t decrease, but you’re losing a lot of time in transit, mostly the hours you might have spent sleeping!
On back-to-backs, it probably goes the other way, with it generally being a little easier than a back-to-back in Europe. The packdown on Sunday evening is quicker without the need to de-rig and pack the trucks, and while the 14-hour flight between São Paulo and Doha won’t be anyone’s ideal day off, it is at least time away from the garage which wouldn’t be available when travelling from Spa to Zandvoort.
Packing The Pit Wall For The Next Race© Getty Images
For engineers and drivers, it may be a little different. On European back-to-backs, they’ll try to get home on Sunday evening, do two-and-a-half days’ prep at the factory and in the simulator, before dashing back to the next race. While that sort of schedule tends to be hectic, there is something to be said for being able to sleep in your own bed.
The provisional 2022 calendar was published last week and the sight of 13 from 23 races being flyaways drew no particular comment. It’s become normalised. More interesting is how the calendar will evolve in the future. Having passed the 50 per cent mark in 2010, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that, within a few years, flyaways will account for two-thirds of the F1 calendar. While it won’t change the way F1 races, it may change the way F1 goes racing.