© Thomas ButlerBulls' Guide To: The Pit WallOutdated anachronism or beating heart of the racing team? Want to know what happens on the Red Bull Racing Honda pit wall? Read on…
Some racing circuits are designed, others grow organically. Silverstone definitely falls into the latter category. Racing originally began there on the perimeter roads around what had been a WWII airfield. The original racers navigated between hay bales and had to dodge so many sheep, legend has it racing here became known as ‘the Mutton Grand Prix.’ While there’s a little more planning involved in the modern era, it’s still a case of a venue needing to work with what it has. That’s particularly noticeable with in the new (since 2011) pit lane, and its decidedly unusual pit wall.
Unusual because the pit lane and the pit-straight are neither parallel nor at the same elevation. The garages near the beginning of the pit lane have a rather attractive lawn between themselves and the pit wall; those near the exit are closer to the track, but can’t see it because, while it rises in elevation towards Abbey, the pit lane stays resolutely level – with a large concrete retaining wall ensuring anyone at that end of the Silverstone Wing isn’t going to see much in the way of sunlight over the race weekend.
They also won’t see much of their senior staff on the pit stand, but given the ubiquity of monitors, comms channels and headsets, that isn’t always regarded as a great impediment to working effectively. And if that’s the case, it does rather beg the question: in this day and age, what’s the pit stand really for?
Team On The Pit Wall© Thomas Butler
The pit wall is a genuine wall. It wasn’t always the case: look back to the early days of F1 and at some tracks the demarcation between the main straight and the pit lane is a white line painted on the asphalt, guaranteed to bring modern crews out in a cold sweat. The obvious danger of this led to concrete being poured, first for a low wall little more than an overgrown kerbstone and, more recently, a much broader rampart topped with a substantial catch fence. For obvious reasons, holes and gates in the pit wall are kept to a minimum. This is primarily why, during the current pandemic, grid procedures have been altered: when the grid has to clear three minutes before the formation lap, it’s very difficult to get twenty car crews and their kit back into the pit lane through two, or perhaps three openings in the wall, while maintaining social distancing. Thus, the hooter at three minutes instructing non-essential crew to leave the grid is now a hooter at five minutes.
Our pit wall structures – often referred to as simply ‘the pit wall’ or ‘pit stand’, are built on top of the chemin de ronde (wall-walk), behind the parapet, pushed right up to the fence. Every team does theirs a little differently, but broadly speaking they will have between four and eight seats, with each position having a stool, intercom panel and monitor. The lightweight stalls tend to have an awning to keep off the glare, and, if wet weather’s on the way, the garage techs will add a transparent plastic covering – not entirely dissimilar to the ones used with popular makes of prams and push-chairs.
That depends on the team. Some teams will have the same people on the pit wall for every session, others have a revolving cast of characters. In some teams, whether or not a person is seated on the pit wall will depend on the session: our race engineers will work in the garage during practice and qualifying – to have physical proximity to the car, driver and crew – but work from the pit wall during the race.
Our pit wall on race day will host (from left to right) Jonathan Wheatley – Sporting Director; Adrian Newey (if present) – Chief Technical Officer; Christian Horner – Team Principal; Hannah Schmitz – Senior Strategy Engineer or Will Courtenay – Head of Race Strategy; Guillaume Rocquelin (Rocky) – Head of Race Engineering; Gianpiero Lambiase (GP) – Race Engineer Car 33; Hugh Bird – Race Engineer Car 11.
Sporting Director Jonathan Wheatley Watches The Practice Pit Stop© Thomas Butler
Even though everyone on the pit wall is sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, they’re still communicating via the intercom– an F1 circuit is simply too loud and busy a place to get by with shouting alone – but sometimes a tap on the shoulder, or pointing to a particular piece of data on a monitor can be useful. The strategist sits in between the Team Principal and the Head of Race Engineering because they may have to make the occasional big decisions concerning both cars; the Sporting Director sits on the end nearest the pit entry because he’s going to be watching the car arrive and priming the crew to be prepared for it – either for a pit stop or to pull it back into the garage during practice or qualifying. The race engineers are on the other end to get a view of the track, if required.
Everyone will configure their display to suit their own requirements (which is why it’s considered very bad form to move windows around when borrowing someone else’s seat). They may watch video feeds following their own car, GPS trackers or simplified graphical representations of the gaps between competitors. They may have timing screens open of their drivers or competitors, or more in-depth telemetry from the car. A weather radar, supplied by The Weather Company, complete with a predicted storm track can be useful, or they may even be watching exactly the same world feed picture everyone at home is seeing. Which means every so often they get a rather disconcerting view of their own ear. These are highly configurable, and so in different sessions people may set up their monitor to look at different things: mini sector times may be critically important in qualifying but less relevant during FP1.
Christian Analyses The Action© Thomas Butler
The people on the pit wall are very much the visible tip of the iceberg, supported by a large group of people behind them, either located in the garage, in the transporter treehouses behind the garage or, in our case, back in the AT&T Operations Room at the factory in Milton Keynes. Given the real-time communications technology, the physical distance isn’t particularly noticeable. In theory, everybody has the ability to communicate with everybody else; in practice, those team-wide communications are largely restricted to a few announcements from the Sporting Director, and communication tends to stick to smaller groups. A race engineer, for example, will talk to the driver – but also be receiving support from a performance engineer, and a group of engineers back at base tasked specifically to that car, including an aerodynamicist, a vehicle dynamist, a strategist and, in our case, a trackside engineer from Honda. At other times during the weekend he’ll also be maintaining a dialogue with the car’s number one mechanic, fuel filler and tyre technician – though less so during the race.
Isallofthisreallynecessary?
Yes! Or possibly no. When stopwatches and pit boards were critical to the operation, there was obviously a need for proximity to the track but in the modern era, the reasoning is a little more obscure – though we still have pit boards because pit boards don’t break. For the operational staff, there’s a certain logic to being at the edge of the track: they can hear the car going past which can sometimes identify a problem and, as was the case for Rocky at the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix, sometimes get a good look at damage as the car flies towards turn one. There’s also the advantage of situational awareness: the weather radar may express ‘light rain’, but there’s something about sticking your hand out into the falling water that gives you a feeling of exactly how ‘light’ it really is – which could substantially change the strategy reaction.
A perhaps more pertinent example comes from what can happen when there isn’t a pit wall. If the set-up at Silverstone is strange, then the one in Monaco is utterly bizarre. The configuration of the pit lane puts the garages between it and the track, with the wall opposite the garages looking out on yachts and, some way below, the Swimming Pool chicane exit. There’s no catch-fence there and no reason or room to put the pit stand – so instead the structure is built inside, up on the second storey of the pit building, directly above the garage. It presents a limited view of the pit box from above but, crucially for us, no view into the garage. If 2016, when Daniel Ricciardo’s pit stop cost the team a probable victory, the disconnect between what was being said on the radio and what was happening in the garage was the failure in communication that led to the critical delay. Had the Sporting Director been able to see the crew struggling to prepare tyres in the tight confines of the garage, different instructions may have been given with a more positive outcome.
For other people, being on the pit wall may be a little anachronistic. Adrian Newey certainly thinks so, and more than one Team Principal over the years has confessed to using his seat during the practice sessions as a way to get out from under the feet of busy mechanics, or to have some quiet time, or simply to avoid people they wish to avoid. For them it may be slightly redundant – but that doesn’t make it bad. The pit wall has become part of the furniture of F1 and, in high stakes moments, this is where the cameras tend to dwell, trying to second-guess the decision making process, recording the level of tension, or simply showing the agony and ecstasy which is part and parcel of being out there on public view, quite literally in the middle of the action.
Whether it’s essential or not, it’s pretty difficult to imagine F1 without its pit wall.
Gianpiero Lambiase Looks At The Car 33 Garage© Thomas Butler
