© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: The GarageThink a garage is a spider-infested dumping ground for old exercise bikes and bric-a-brac? Think again…
Checo Leaving His Garage© Getty Images
Ever stepped outside, stopped in your tracks and realised you’re not in the country – perhaps not even on the continent – you thought you were? You don’t have to be a rock star to experience that kind of discombobulation: it happens all the time if you spend your working hours in an F1 garage – and particularly when races are stacking-up in quick succession in the way they are this year.
The garage is our home – or at least it seems to be. With the season in full swing, the mechanics, engineers and technicians that work in the garage certainly spend more time there than in their actual homes. And like an actual home, it tends to be a fixed point of reference.
Familiarity is important for an F1 team, that’s why the garage is constructed to the same specification for every race weekend. It’s more efficient to work in a space where everything is located in the same place week to week. For the most part, that’s simply a time-saving convenience but at the sharp end – when there’s a problem with a pit stop or the clock ticking away during the final seconds of qualifying – knowing where everything is without needing to think about it can make the difference between success and failure. Nobody particularly considers the garage layout as a performance factor – but it’s a good example of those one per cent things that a competitive team can’t ignore.
Of course, there are plenty of caveats…
Max Heads To His Car© Getty Images
Every garage has an installation plan. While pit buildings conform to a certain level of homogeneity, each has its quirks. That might be something as simple as different locations for electrical distribution boxes or pneumatic lines – but there’s always room for the truly exceptional. A pit building might have pillars to work around, requiring extra panelling, or be long enough to allow each team to have more space, with an extra unit to one side for storing tyres and spare kit, or need canopies erected behind it with floor tiles laid out to lengthen the amount of space available. In Monaco, you might be one of those unlucky teams that gets holes cut in the floor and walls of the upper floors of your garage to allow tree branches in and out.
In theory, the garages are arranged in the previous season’s Constructors’ Championship order. Typically, that will see the FIA housed in the first set, with the Safety and Medical Cars, the weighbridge, and space for the scrutineers, followed by the Champions and so on down the order. That means we have Ferrari upstream and McLaren downstream of us in 2020. The order sometimes gets moved around to give fans in the grandstand a better view of the leading and/or most popular teams. Silverstone does this, and when F1 raced with Valencia, which only had grandstand seats at the pit lane exit end, the order was reversed.
Work on the garage starts long before the race weekend. The first work usually happens before the forward elements of the team turn up, with a floor being painted/poured by contractors. There is an aesthetic value in having a floor so clean you could eat your dinner off it – but it has the practical values of being non-slip, easy to sticker and very good at highlighting things that shouldn’t be there – such as errant fasteners and suspicious drips.
Garage techs will be the first team members of the team to show up, building the garage at the start of the week which will gradually be filled with equipment, mechanics and cars. The first job is basic infrastructure, laying out our wall panels, hooking up services and so forth. For front of house – the bit of the garage containing the cars that everyone sees on TV – there’s a fixed depth – catering to the need to fit a nosebox without getting wet, and be able to get a jack under the rear of the car and a starter motor inserted comfortably – but the width is variable.
The FIA stipulates minimum garage widths (though these are sometimes ignored) but there isn’t a maximum. In a roomy, modern pit building we’ll be able to push the sides outwards a bit and enjoy rather more room. Some of the older pit buildings – dating back to the 1980s in some cases – have less space and are rather more cosy. Thus, the kit is designed to expand and contract according to need. That might be something as simple as creating a wider opening into the back of the garage, or having a modular gantry onto which our overhead panels – housing lighting, air lines, driver monitor and power sockets – are hung. This also has a fixed height – though no-one really paid it much attention until the Halo came in. With his mechanics rushing to rebuild the car between FP3 and the end of Q1 in China, Daniel Ricciardo needed to be strapped in and ready to go while the car was still up on high stands – there really wasn’t much space to squeeze into the cockpit over the Halo and under the lightbox, which required a bit of a rethink…
There are nice pit buildings and… less nice pit buildings. And while the team enjoys luxuries like ceiling-mounted coolers and our own loo, the usual delineation relates to space. No-one enjoys a weekend in a cramped garage.
Checo Climbs Into His RB16B© Getty images
The front of the garage is mirrored symmetrically left and right, Max on the left, Chco on the right. Some teams arrange their drivers in Championship order, and it’s not unknown to have teams swap sides of the garage according to whether they exit the garage going left or right. That all seems a bit complicated, and our methodology has been to have the new driver simply inherent the bay vacated by the driver he’s replacing – thus Max took over the left bay from Dany, who took it over from Seb, who took it over from DC.
There’s a lot going on around the walls of the garage, with tool drawers and work surfaces around the bay, below viewing monitors. The work surfaces will also have housings for wheel guns. While everything is neat and pristine on the surface, behind the panels it’s a rat’s nest of electrical, pneumatic and data cables, worming their way around the aluminium struts that hold everything up and the stage weights that hold everything down. The drivers also have an area towards the rear where they can suit-up. It’s at the back because it keeps them out from under their mechanics’ feet when they’re not in the cockpit.
When they are in the cockpit, they’re adjacent to the workstations of their race and performance engineers. Despite the driver talking to his engineers over a dedicated comms channel, there’s still value in having them within easy line of sight. During the grand prix, race engineers GianPiero Lambiase (Max) and Hugh Bird (Checo) will work from the pit wall, during practice and qualifying they’ll stay in the garage, able to make eye contact with the driver – but also able to see the state of the car and the relative stress level of the number one mechanic.
In Monaco there is a notable lack of space as the ‘pit wall’ is on the floor above the garage, and therefore you’re unable to physically see in the garage. For all the protocols and electronic systems, there is still a huge advantage in begin able to see what’s going on with your own eyes.
Some teams put their engineers’ workstations in the centre of the garage; ours are against the wall, with the fuel bowsers corralled in the middle of the garage. Also, on the centreline of the garage, at the rear, is our viewing area for guests. It’s always nice to have visitors but a garage – particularly when it’s working at full speed – is a pretty dangerous place to be. The bespoke viewing area, fitted with comms panels and monitors, provides a spectacular view of the cars. Some visitors – David Coulthard, Mark Webber, astronauts etc., – might be allowed out of the ‘hot tub’ but for pretty much everyone else it’s better to have a safe zone out of harm’s way.
The front of the garage is very much the tip of the iceberg. There’s another area – usually much larger – behind and, frequently, to the side of the race bays in which the team houses a massive logistics and support operation. This can be high tech – there are the HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) Simplivity racks, which are the ultimate computing-at-the-edge resource, the racks house all of the team’s communications, telemetry and data-logging systems, maintaining a real-time link back to the AT&T Operations Room in Milton Keynes – or very low tech: we have storage bins containing possibly the world’s most eclectic collection of tank tape and cable ties, a fridge, kettle, coffee machine and snack table for those days when going over to the Energy Station would waste too much time.
A composites workshop houses spare wings, floors and bodywork – it tends to be large in area because the floors are the largest sub-assembly on the car, and they require constant attention between the sessions: a working life bolted to the underside of a Formula One car tends to be quite harsh, and it will be a rare session that doesn’t produce an event that requires a little bit of rework afterwards.
Back at the beginning of the Team’s existence, F1 used to have a third car built up and ready to go with its own team of mechanics. Quite how it was all crammed in amazes the younger crew, who’ve never seen it because the third car has been long-since banned. Owing to their complexity, however, teams are allowed to have fully built-up rear ends, and these, together with extra gearboxes will also be tended to in the back of the garage. Likewise, there will be an engine room, staffed by Honda technicians, looking after our power unit components.
Checo's Side Of The Garage© Getty Images
Tucked away somewhere there will also be a small tribology lab, housing mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph and the other tools of the trade used by our ExxonMobil partners to analyse oil and other lubricant samples between the sessions. Studying lube is the early warning system for gearbox and engine damage: there will be trace elements of metal in any sample – above a certain threshold this is a strong indicator of excessive wear and incipient failure, with the technician often able to point to the specific area of concern based on the composition of the sample.
While the front of the garage stays resolutely the same from race to race, the back end has greater variability. It’s a warren of corridors and cubicles, built to best-fit the space available – but it also changes according to whether the race is in Europe or at a flyaway destination. In Europe, when we have our trucks and treehouses on site. The most obvious difference is that our tyre stacks in their temperature-controlled blankets are housed between the trucks, under the treehouse, whereas on the road, they’ll be housed either in the physical garage or whatever temporary extension we build to the rear. The trucks also contain various workshop tools and test benches that also have to move into the garage at a flyaway. Finally, many of the engineer’s stations are truck-mounted in Europe, but require garage space on the road, if they can’t be accommodated in the team’s hospitality unit.
Checking The Tyre Temperatures© Getty Images
Despite the differences, everything tends to be arranged with the same organising principle, ensuring the garage we work in becomes a very familiar space in which the variables are minimised and everything comes to hand easily. It is your home away from home, with the same crew (and same neighbours) week after week. It becomes so familiar that you really can walk about the garage in the evening and take a moment to remember that, yes, this week we’re in Russia…
