© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: Technical DirectorsWe take a look at the role of a Technical Director in Formula One, speaking with our very own Pierre Waché.
There’sanamusingphotographtobefoundonawell-knownFormulaOnephotolibrary.It’s
Pierre And Checo On The Podium© Getty Images
If your team is lucky enough to win races on a fairly regular basis, then one of the nicer ways to celebrate is sharing around the honour of standing on the podium and collecting the trophy. It can be a nightmare for the photo technicians with a deadline to hit and little help to find out who that front-end mechanic or electronics technician is. This one, however, was Pierre Waché, our technical director of the last four years. He’s quite important in the whole process of Red Bull Racing Honda.
It does, however, illustrate how a technical director can fly under the radar, despite holding one of the most senior positions in one of the world’s most visible sporting organisations. Drivers and team principals, we know. Thanks to the miracle of radio broadcasts, race engineers and strategists are also becoming a recognised commodity, but with technical directors, it tends to be more a matter of choice: you can be the face that launched a thousand YouTube technology guides or… not. It’s a vital cog in the machine that functions with or without public recognition.
Pierre came to F1 via a route more unusual than most. He has a PhD in fluid dynamics and studied bio-mechanical engineering. His first field of speciality was… blood. Or more specifically, the interaction between cells in the bloodstream. By happy coincidence this had him recruited by Michelin, to study the interaction between tyres and road surfaces, and when Michelin departed F1, he moved into an engineering role within a team. He came to us in 2013 to be head of vehicle dynamics, before taking up the long-vacant position of technical director in 2018.
Pierre Wache And Max Discuss The RB16B© Getty Images
The role of technical director is one which as grown with the times. Back in the day, when an entire F1 team could comfortably fit into a minibus, the entirety of the technical department might be a designer with perhaps an assistant or two. Technical directors didn’t exist because they didn’t need to when the department shared a desk. People such as Adrian Newey, who began their careers in the 1980s, would design holistically: working on every aspect of the car from nose to rear wing.
Gradually, however, as teams grew, specialisation set in. The chief designer appeared, and had a room filled with assistants, then, as the science of building F1 cars evolved into an engineering discipline in its own right, the technical director arrived, overseeing the work of the chief designer – and today a dozen other departments that must harmonise to create a competitive car.
Back when F1 had a little more room for obvious distinctiveness, the technical directors achieved the sort of virtuoso fame they perhaps lack now. The likes of Newey, John Barnard, Gordon Murray, could still put a stamp of individuality on their work. Those that followed were valued more for their ability to organise and get the best out of others. Quite what that entails can be nebulous. Not every team uses the same nomenclature. Some have a chief technical officer or an executive director of engineering instead of a technical director; others have those roles as well. Some teams have more than one technical director, drawing a line in the sand between chassis and power unit. In our case, the technical director has the day-to-day responsibility for the entire engineering effort – design, production, test & inspection, trackside, etc – at Red Bull Racing Honda.
Passing The Pit Wall© Getty Images
A modern F1 team is a complex and insatiable organism: it sucks in resources and talents at one end and disgorges performance at the other. Overseeing the technical aspects of this is a role sometimes likened to conducting an orchestra, or being the head chef in a busy kitchen, albeit with a broader scope that, of necessity, includes areas beyond the technical director’s field of expertise.
“Before becoming technical director, I was responsible for vehicle dynamics,” says Pierre Waché. “That always involved working with other departments, but now I’m responsible for them as well. Interestingly, the management is not different, fundamentally, but the topics you are discussing are broader.”
There’s a great deal of administration that comes with the job, which seems a particularly cruel use of time for someone who’s previously excelled in whatever hands-on discipline they’ve practised. This has within it, however, the function of being the ultimate decide the direction of travel. While a lot of responsibility devolves to the heads of department who are experts in their field, there needs to be guiding hand who, Solomon-like, arbitrates between the often-conflicting needs of the various departments.
“You have to deal with the compromises and try to set-up a direction for the team. That really tends to be the main challenge in comparison to running a department,” says Pierre. “Before, you are trying to follow that direction, now, you are setting it. You have to take difficult decisions, sometimes because a compromise is not obvious. Sometimes there is no good decision, but a decision has to be made and somebody has to take responsibility for the decision – that somebody is you.”
It takes a certain sort of personality to give up the creative aspects of working in F1 in favour of the shepherding the larger organisation – and, in several notable cases, an emeritus position beyond that of technical director is created to allow a very senior engineer to offload much of the day-to-day admin and get back into hands-on engineering. For the technical director, however, the requirement really is to take one for the team.
Pierre Wache On The Pit Wall© Getty Images
“You try to not look too yourself,” says Pierre, “You try to make the best for the company and the team and sometimes you have to give away some interesting aspects of your job. Of course, in your expertise areas specifically, you still contribute – but you really have to trust the people in that area to do the job first. Fine if you can find the time but the other work has to come first. The people in the team have to come first, not the individual. You have to help, discuss, challenge and nurture the creativity and performance.”
For a job that deals in hard engineering science, there’s an awful lot of people skill involved in being a modern technical director, more so that was the case in the 1990s. When teams were smaller there was a natural tendency for an autocratic style of leadership to develop. It favoured what, in polite terms, might be called a ‘strong personality’. The size and scope of a modern team means that even the most energetic of tyrants couldn’t lead by volume alone. While technical leadership isn’t a democracy, there does tend to by a leadership-by-consensus style that fits the needs of a modern organisation very well.
“Most of the time, you are challenging what the various departments say, rather than taking decisions yourself,” says Pierre. “They know their job, and they are the best-qualified people to do it. Your job as technical director is to ask the right questions. Of course, you can’t question everything – you have to choose your moment such that the team doesn’t have to use a lot of resources to deal with the questions you’re asking, but posing the right questions is what keeps the team flexible and moving in the right direction.”
Very few of those decisions are taken at a race track – but what happens on the track naturally influences everything else the team does. The ubiquity of the technical director at the race track is one of those things that varies from team to team.
Red Bull Racing Factory© Getty Images
Some technical directors are rarely absent from the pit wall, others pay only fleeting visits to a circuit. A popular model is to do every other race, or most of the races in the first half of the season, tailing off in the second when the design of the next car enters its final few critical months. For Pierre, it’s a case of trying to do around three-fifths of the races.
“We always try to have myself or Adrian (Newey) at the track,” he says. “The track experience is useful. It’s a vital tool in developing the car because you need to understand what the driver wants, what the race engineer wants, how to set the car up, what the problems are. It forces you to see the realities. Even with the excellent tools we have at the factory, being here in the Operations Room doesn’t replicate being there.”
Which brings us back to the beginning, and just why was technical director Pierre Waché up on the the podium in Baku? Was there some crucial piece of technical direction that proved critical in Checo’s victory? Did he ask the right questions that helped the team create a superior technical package for F1’s most demanding street circuit? Perhaps he did – or perhaps it was that Pierre was head of vehicle dynamics at Sauber a decade ago when they signed a young Mexican kid who’d been pulling up trees in GP2. They’ve both come a long way since then.
