© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: Pit StopsHow long does it take to do a really good pit stop? About four months.
A good pit stop is something you hear, not something you see. A couple of years ago, to take a really good look at our pit stops, we borrowed some RED high-speed digital cameras, (of the sort usually used by the BBC Natural History Unit to film hummingbirds in flight), to capture slow-motion footage of our stops, because in real time all that’s visible is a blur – but the ear is surprisingly discerning.
The perfect stop has two noises: the first noise is one, merged blat of four wheel guns firing in unison to take the wheels off, the second is another with the wheels going on. If the stop isn’t going well, the guns will be unsynchronised and discordant, but when everyone is acting in unison, you can’t hear the individual operations. After the car has gone, the final sound of the pit stop is everyone exhaling. That’s not relief: the pit crew genuinely will forget to breathe during a pit stop.
There’s a lot going on in the two-point-something seconds of a pit stop, with around twenty people operating with a balletic level of synchronisation. The car sweeps into the pit box and hits the front jack, which lifts. While that happens, the four gunners get onto the nut and loosen it, as the rear jack slides under the crash structure and lifts, the front jack pivots and moves to the side, and the wheel-off crew grasp the loosened wheels.
In a good stop they’re removing it as the car reaches its full elevation, two stabilisers have hold of the airbox to steady the car, while two wing adjusters use torque wrenches to move the front wing up or down a pre-configured amount to suit the new tyre or take account of the driver’s feedback from the previous stint. While this is happening, the driver is configuring the car for launch, new tyres are being placed on the axles by the wheel-on crew. The wheel nuts are captive on the wheel and the gunner who’s been pulling the gun away reverses direction and gets on the new nut and applies torque.
With the wheels on the jackmen hit the quick release buttons to drop the car. The members of the crew standing by with emergency kit relax fractionally, the pit stop controller checks the pit lane is clear and he has a full set of green lights, the stop/go light on the front of the gantry turns green and the drivers goes.
The fastest we’ve ever done this in a race is 1.82 seconds, and that’s a world record.
Max Comes In For A Practice Pit Stop© Vladimir Rus
TheSquarePegInTheSquareHole
Our World Record pit stop at Interlagos last year actually took about 11 months of effort. Pit stops begin in the winter. While there’s a great deal of continuity in the crew, it’s also not a job for life. During the winter, everyone in the garage will try various positions. Way back at the dawn of time, F1 teams might have assigned each pit stop corner to a particular garage group but today each position is filled by a competitive process.
There are, of course, physical attributes that make certain people the correct fit for certain jobs: upper-body strength and handedness are factors, but temperament plays into it too: gunners need to be calm; the front jack needs to live on his wits. Finally, the team needs balance – the physical rather than metaphorical sort – it’s no good if one corner is consistently quicker than its opposite: that makes the car lurch on the jacks and nobody goes very quickly. The aim is to have a pit crew that can work in unison – or as close to it as is humanly possible. For all the individual brilliance of drivers, F1 is a team sport and pit stops are the best expression of this.
Once the Team has settled on its prime crew, and its back-up crew, and the back-up to the back-up crew (even in normal times, it’s not unknown to have the race where everybody gets the same bug, or dose of food poisoning) it begins with practice. Down in the race bays at the factory we have a dummy pit box, complete with an (electric) dummy car. The crew will get to know it very well during the winter…but not too well.
There’s a fine line between undercooked and over-prepared and the job of team management is to ensure the pit crew walk that line. Performance fades if pit stop practice becomes too monotonous, so, sessions tend to be short, perhaps a dozen reps, once or twice a day and, once the crew is (re)acquainted with the basics, then some work on the oddballs: the double shuffle, the nosebox change using the side-jacks, the steering wheel swap and so on.
They’ll also practice things like qualifying crew stops, simulating the situation where half the crew is too busy working on the other car to come out into the pit lane to change tyres, or the slow stop where the car pauses to allow time to clear debris out of radiators and brake ducts, as well as occasionally trying out new bits of equipment.
Watching The Pit Stop From Above© Vladimir Rys
“You can wear the guys out and – worse – lose their enthusiasm if you don’t consider it carefully,” says Sporting Director Jonathan Wheatley, who is normally prowling pit stop practice with a stopwatch, and oversees pit stops in the race from the wall.
“There has to be a balance, and part of that means not scheduling so much practice that people start to lose motivation. We wouldn’t, for example, practice in the factory the first day back after a race – because everyone will be tired. We also won’t practice the standard stop all the time. We’ll break that up by practicing the ‘set-piece’ stops – punctures, nose cone changes and so on.”
Testing with the mule car is one thing – testing with the real thing is another. It’s different when the car is hammering in at 80kph, with worn tyres and white-hot brakes. If the winter testing programme is progressing well, some time may be devoted to getting the crew (and the drivers – they need to practice as well) comfortable by doing repetitive sequences of in-laps, swapping the tyres lap after lap after lap.
Once we’re into the season, practice becomes a case of keeping to a level of preparation, rather than seeking to push any boundaries. The Team will do short practice sessions each day at the track. They’ll also use the practice sessions to practice live stops when the drivers box at the end of runs. These are particularly useful for the drivers, who have to get used to the differing grip level in every pit lane, and the different approach to their box every week, both in terms of their sight-lines and orientation.
The Team are allocated a specific area on the pit lane apron as their pit box – usually in front of the garage but sometimes at an offset. Today, the booms carry quite a lot of sophisticated equipment, from cameras to record every stop, to the laser markers to ensure the crew position themselves perfectly. The Team isn’t allowed to artificially increase the grip in the pit box, which is why, during practice, you will from time to time see the drivers stop short of the box for a pit stop and then perform a burnout to leave a – perfectly acceptable – coating of grippy rubber right through the box.
There are advantages and disadvantages from various pit lane positions. The World Champions, for instance, are usually in the first set of garages. This has the advantage of a direct line into the box, without having to swerve around other teams, but the disadvantage of having less time to react if the driver makes a last-second decision to box. It’s also a bad box to have if there’s heavy pit lane traffic – for example during an early race safety car: it’s easy to get into the box, but if there’s a stream of traffic coming past, it's very difficult to get out again.
Down at the far end of the pit lane there’s a little more time to prepare, and sometimes the ability to angle the box to launch directly out and into traffic – but less time for the driver to set his switches and receive information on the circuit he’s about to re-enter.
In the grand scheme of things, it rarely makes much difference which box you have.
Max Rubbers The Box© Vladimir Rys
However good the team is, and however much practice they put in, there’s always potential for a pit stop to go wrong. An F1 race is loud, chaotic environment with too many variables to fully control. The trick is to remove as many variables as possible.
The first thing is the plan. The final engineering meeting on Sunday lunchtime will establish the intended pit stop sequence. It’s not an exact science, of course, and so there will be Plan A, Plan B and sometimes more.
If Plan A is a vanilla one-stop race it will have a target lap for the pit stop. As the race progresses and the engineering and strategy teams see the race position, the level of tyre degradation (ours and other people’s), then Plan A will be adapted. The drivers will be told if the Team wants them to extend the stint [target plus X laps], cut it short, or ditch the plan and move on to Plan B (which might, for example, be two stops).
For the pit crew, the important thing is foreknowledge. The pit stops that tend to go wrong are the ones that are unexpected. The more time everyone has to prepare, the smoother the process tends to be. In a regulation stop, the pit crew can rise from their specifically-allocated seats when instructed, calmly collect tyres and jog into position with the minimum of fuss. Everything should be smooth.
“A pit stop starts several laps before the car comes in,” says Jonathan. “If everything is in order, then everyone’s mental state is right when they walk out. If it’s a rushed stop I think they’re in a different frame of mind, so the first thing is to get everyone into the correct mindset. I might talk to them a little bit, give them something to think about.”
Of course, the other sort of pit stop is far more entertaining for spectators. The last-second call because of a safety car or a VSC gets everyone’s heart-rates all the way up – but the strategy tries to cater for this.
In theory, everyone should know what’s going to happen when the safety car or VSC is called. The drivers are constantly updated with regard to the status of the pit window for either eventuality. Whenever they see the SC or the VSC has been deployed, they should know to come in or stay out without being told.
The authority on calling the stops lies with the strategy team, comprised of car and opposition strategists in the AT&T Ops Room in Milton Keynes, and a member on the pit wall to whom the data is filtered. With extra input from race engineers, tyre engineers and the rest of the pit wall, it is they who make the calls. In the Team it’s either Hannah Schmitz, Senior Strategy Engineer, or Will Courtenay, Head of Race Strategy on the pit wall each weekend.
“Through the race I’m talking to Christian with my recommendation for when we open the Safety Car window,” says Will Courtenay. “If it’s a grey area – for instance if we’re starting to struggle with tyres – we might get some input from the race engineers to feed into our decision. Ultimately, it’s up to me to make the recommendation.
“What we always try to do for things like safety cars, is have a decision in place before anything happens. A perfect example is the 2018 Chinese Grand Prix which Daniel Ricciardo won for us. The safety car was deployed just before he and Max reached the pit lane. When they saw the ‘SC’ board, I didn't’ have to do anything, everybody knew what they were doing, and ten seconds later the cars were in the pit lane, doing their stops.
“I think that’s a perfect example of why you have to make those decisions early and can’t make them on the fly. We wouldn’t have been able to react in time.”
Jonathan Wheatley Looks On From Pit Wall© Getty Images
Every team has good days and bad days – but plotted over the course of a season clear patterns emerge. What makes a team good – or indifferent – with pit stop performance? There are a number of factors – but like most things in F1 is boils down to resource allocation or, if you wish to be blunt, time and money.
Pit stops are expensive. There’s a sizeable investment in equipment to stay at the absolute cutting edge, with constant redesigns of wheel nut threads, the internals of the wheel guns, carbon fibre jacks, signalling equipment and so on, all designed to shave another hundredth of a second off a pit stop time. It isn’t necessarily a good investment for everybody. For a backmarker it may make more sense allocating resources to find a tenth of a second in lap-time that’s useful every lap rather than a tenth in a pit stop, that’s useful once or twice a race. It’s a slightly different equation if you’re racing at the front: occasionally the better pit stop is going to be the difference between winning and finishing second.
There’s also the human element to a pit stop. We’re proud of our record 1.82s pit stop but what’s most telling is that it happened at Interlagos, at the penultimate race of a very long, very tiring season.
Historically, stops aren’t fast at the start of the season when everyone is still trying to locate their groove, and at the end when tired hands and dog-tired minds tend to lead to an overall reduction in effectiveness. Doing a ‘Worldie’ at the end of the season is a sign that the crew are in good shape. Again, this isn’t an accident.
While the crew would have some fairly choice, fairly short words to say about the notion they are coddled in any way, the bigger teams in F1 do get to look after their garage crews a bit better, shifting some of the burden back at the factory onto receiving and build teams, bringing in extra people to help out in the garage between the back-to-backs, and ensuring everyone can get a little bit more rest than would be the case at a smaller outfit. The result is fewer instances of mechanical failures caused by ‘finger trouble’ – ie human error, and, of course, a fresher team ready to do a pit stop.
Brining The Bull Back In From Practice© Vladimir Rys
Despite the level of technology at work during a pit stop, it remains an overwhelmingly human endeavour. Unlike many other elite racing series, F1 doesn’t allow pneumatics or any powered devices to lift the car, the front and rear jacks have to be muscle-powered. While the shuttles in the wheel guns can automatically flip from anti-clockwise to clockwise to loosen then tighten a wheel nut, the application of that torque remains in the hands of the gunners, rather than an automated system. And while those guns and the jacks are linked to the stop-go traffic light, the ultimate decision to release the car lies with the over-ride button in the hands of the pit stop controller watching the pit stop – and critically, looking back down the pit lane.
Under normal circumstances, the car is allowed to leave the pit box once the controller sees a panel of green lights – but the thing the controller can see but nobody else in the pit stop can, is traffic coming down the pit lane. The method F1 uses to judge if there is enough room to release the car is very simple. At the start of the weekend, the team takes a tape and paces out a set distance rearwards from the pit box. At the required distance, (different for 60kph and 80kph pit lanes) a marker board is attached to the parapet. When there is a car inside the marker board, the pit stop controller keeps the hold button pressed and the traffic light stays red, keeping the car in the pit box. In theory.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Team isn’t searching for the ever-faster pit stop. In fact, the opposite (or something close to the opposite) is true. The pit crew are actively discouraged from trying to set records because, chasing the 1.81s pitstop, which probably doesn’t result in a net gain at the end of the race, is what leads to the 5s pit stop and very likely a net loss. What the Team strives to achieve is consistency. If there was a button to push allowing the crew to do a 2.1s stop every time, senior management would have no hesitation in pushing it.
“The challenge is the whole season, it’s not an individual pitstop,” says Jonathan. “The challenge is to be the most consistent throughout the whole year – because we could sit here bragging about doing the fastest pit stop here or there, or what we’ve done in practice but none of that counts if you have a ten-second pit stop on Sunday because of something you haven’t allowed for or a fancy piece of equipment that has you over.”
That’s not to say there isn’t a desire to go quicker. That, of course, continues to exist, because there’s always a more perfect stop in which the driver is more precisely on the marks, the gunners onto the nut that fraction quicker, the driver on the throttle that hair’s breadth earlier – but it isn’t going to come if you’re actively looking for it.
Every team has good weeks and bad. We’ve had more good than bad over the last few years, and are currently setting the benchmark, leading the official DHL pitstop table this year, and also having the fastest pit stop of the season with a 1.90s in Spain – but what’s different between a fantastic 2.0s stop and a World Record 1.82s? The simple answer is ‘nothing’. It just happens on the day.
Max Comes In For A Pit Stop© Vladimir Rys
Jonathan’s seen his crew break records more often than anyone else, first with a 2.05s stop at the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix, then later that year with F1’s (probable) first sub-two second stop in Austin with 1.92s. Last year the Team knocked the record down a couple of times, starting with a 1.91 in Silverstone, then a 1.88s in Germany and finally a 1.82s stop in Brazil.
“The driver has to stop absolutely on the marks with no drama, so no-one is having to back away or adjust. Then everyone has to do their job properly. The gunmen have to get onto the nut correctly, the jackmen have to get on first time. That’s most difficult for the rear jack because he has to wait until the car has come past to engage it. You can be as fast as you like with the wheel nuts but you can’t take the wheels off while the car is still on the ground.
“Taking the wheel off sounds like an easy job but it isn’t. They’re heavy, and the guys have to reach forward and shift the weight at an awkward angle. Then the new wheels have to go on without any fumbles, the jacks have to come away smoothly and the driver needs to have his reactions perfect – which again isn’t as straightforward as it sounds because he may be using the time to adjust switches on his steering wheel.
“But, if you pull of that together, if everyone’s having the perfect day at the same time – then you can get something really special.”
The Team Perform A Pit Stop At Testing© Getty Images
