Burning the midnight oil
Sunday ,26 June 2011
An interesting new addition to the F1 rules this year is a curfew for team members, designed to in effect ensure that teams give their mechanics and engineers a chance to get some sleep over race weekends.
On a normal race weekend schedule it starts from midnight on Thursday and 1am on Friday, and in both cases runs for six hours. Everyone has to be out of the garages, and out of the paddock, during that time.
There is no curfew on Saturday evening, because the parc ferme rules mean that the cars cannot be worked on after 6.30pm anyway, so that automatically ensures that everyone can leave the paddock at a sensible time.
“The curfew starts 10 hours before the next day’s session,” says Force India Sporting Director, Andy Stevenson. “If FP1 starts at 10am, then the curfew starts at midnight on Thursday, and runs for six hours. At Silverstone, where the timetable shifts because of TV timings, the first session will start at 9am on Friday. So there the curfew will start at 11pm on Thursday.
“The curfew involves anyone who is involved with the running of the cars, so that includes engineers. The only people who aren’t included are catering staff. I don’t know why, because they need sleep as much as anybody else!”
The reason the curfew was introduced is simple – in F1, work expands to fill the time available. Give a team of mechanics 12 or 18 or 24 hours to work in the garages, and they will always find things to do, and will keep busy as they check and recheck everything.
The real problem is that in recent years the development race has accelerated so much that every team brings new parts to the track at the last minute. They have to be finished off and fitted to the cars during the race weekends, so there is a lot more work to do than there used to be, when cars tended to stay more or less the same from race to race.
“Thursday and Friday were becoming extremely long days,” says Andy. “All teams are trying to run to the limit by bringing in as many upgrades as they can, and to do that you’re permanently designing and testing in the wind tunnel, and then you have to produce the parts. The more time you can give yourself to do that then effectively the quicker you can make the car.
“For a normal European weekend we would arrive on Wednesday afternoon. That would be a reasonably relaxed day for us, then on Thursday we’d be waiting for components to come from the factory to finish the car. On Thursday night we’d very often go into the early hours of the morning in order to finish the car to be ready to run on Friday.
“Because there’s no testing now there’s more pressure on the teams to test the cars in FP1 and FP2, so more work has evolved because of that. But the work was getting too much. Between Friday and Saturday you could easily work all night. In this day and age, with health and safety regulations, all the teams have a duty of care to look after their staff. And we can’t expect people to work those hours systematically, and go without any sleep. Times have changed.”
One way to make the new system work is to do more at the factory, in other words ensure that new parts arrive at the track in good time – on Wednesday – and ready to go straight onto the car.
“We’ve tried to do that by using our facilities back at the factory, where obviously all our staff are, and the parts are manufactured. We’re trying to get the components finished there, rather than at the circuit, where resources are very limited.
“It’s still very early days, and some teams have been critical about the rule. But for me that’s because they haven’t adapted to the new rules. They probably feel that they’re losing an advantage that they previously had. But it’s in the sporting regulations, and the best thing to do is adapt to it as quickly as you can.
“I think the system is working. That’s not to say that it doesn’t need to be tweaked. In my opinion we need to make the curfew longer. Six hours still isn’t really enough. By the time you get guys away from the circuit, into bed, and back in the morning, they’re probably still only getting four hours sleep.”
Each team has four ‘jokers’ to use each season, or opportunities to break the curfew. The most likely scenario for that would be a major crash on Friday, which then forces the team to build up a car around the spare chassis. That is a huge job.
In theory the curfew can easily be policed, because all personnel have to swipe their personal passes at the turnstyles as they come in and out of the paddock. But the FIA mainly relies on its security guards, who patrol the paddock at night.
“It can be checked through when you swipe in and out of the paddock gates. But the FIA also has security guards on at night, and they just wander up and down and see what’s going on, and check whether people are doing anything they shouldn’t be doing. It’s reasonably well policed, because when we leave we have a look up and down and see who is still working!”
Credit: Force India (www.forceindiaf1.com)
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