FEATURE | MOTORSPORT
From race to base and back again Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg may be the stars of Mercedes’ Formula One team but behind them stand a workforce of several hundred, all of whom are linked like never before thanks to the latest in connectivity technologies. SportsPro was given the rare opportunity to tour the team’s UK headquarters to find out how data is driving its operations. By David Cushnan
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f the 2012 season was the statistical breakthrough year for Mercedes’ Formula One team, the year in which Nico Rosberg recorded a first victory since the German car-making giant acquired Brawn GP in 2010, then 2013 may come to be remembered as the season when it became a genuine Formula One frontrunner. As the European leg of the season ended in Italy early in September, the British-based team fuelled by hundreds of millions of German euros had recorded three victories and established itself as a true contender, if not quite yet at the all-conquering level of the remarkable Red Bull Racing. Those three victories, two for Rosberg including a dominant drive at the Monaco Grand Prix and a first for new recruit Lewis Hamilton, have their roots in a 24,000 square foot facility located off an innocuous roundabout on the edge of Brackley, itself an unassuming town around 50 miles north of London. This is part of what has come to be known as ‘Motorsport Valley’, the area of the UK in which over half of the 11 teams competing in the Formula One World Championship are based. Mercedes’ Formula One team – Mercedes AMG Petronas to give it its official name – has been based here since 2010, when the world championship-winning Brawn GP team logos were replaced by the now-familiar silver. The facility itself has been operational since 1998, 64 | www.sportspromedia.com
when British American Tobacco (BAT) announced grandiose plans to set up its own Formula One team, taking over what was left of Tyrrell. Known as BAR, the lavishly funded team endured a miserable birth and, after just a handful of podium finishes, was acquired in time for the 2006 season by engine supplier Honda. Despite Jenson Button’s debut Formula One victory at that year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Honda’s stint as owner was costly and largely unsuccessful. A particularly dismal 2008 season was the catalyst for the Japanese manufacturer’s withdrawal at the end of the year, leaving the future of the team in doubt. A management buyout led by Ross Brawn, who had been hired by Honda to run the team, followed. Remarkably, through a combination of Brawn’s interpretation of Formula One’s complex ‘double-diffuser’ regulations and the fact Honda was still virtually bankrolling the team, Brawn GP went on to win both world championships in its first and only season. At the end of the year in swooped Mercedes, keen to go it alone after more than a decade of success with McLaren as an engine partner and minority shareholder, to acquire the team. Add in its engine division, which in 2013 supplies McLaren and Force India as well as the main team, and only Red Bull rivals Mercedes’ current spending in Formula One. Back to Brackley. What is often described as a factory is actually a
collection of not particularly eyecatching buildings – five in total. In one lies what Mercedes calls its ‘experience centre’ for guests and hospitality events, a reminder that Formula One is above all else a major marketing tool. Just inside the entrance, hanging from one wall, is a scale replica of the 2009 world championship-winning Brawn GP car, alongside a Mercedes-branded model from last year. The windtunnel, large enough to test 60 per cent scale models, is also tucked away somewhere in this first building, away from public view. Next door lies the modelling department, where new components are being honed; again, prying eyes are prevented from seeing precisely what is being developed, unsurprising given that 2014 will see the largest package of Formula One technical regulation changes in a generation.
The Mercedes team is now the fourth Formula One outfit to make use of this factory near the British village of Brackley since its opening in 1998
Across the access road, another greyfronted building gives nothing away. This one, it turns out, houses three simulators, which are available to be used by the team’s race drivers and reserve driver Sam Bird, plus the occasional guest – Robert Kubica has been a visitor on more than one occasion over recent months to regain the feel for Formula One following his horrific rally crash at the start of 2011. Secrecy is once again the watchword, but the fact the team has multiple simulators gives away something about the ‘leave no stone unturned’ approach necessary to succeed in modern-day Formula One: Mercedes would rather invest in additional simulators than risk losing any time while offline machines are updated with the latest simulation tools. This technology overlap is made easier by the fact that data can be transferred
between any of the three simulators, to ensure no time is unnecessarily wasted. Walk further on through this miniindustrial park and you encounter the silver Eddie Stobart lorries used to transport equipment to and from each of the European Grands Prix, including those which are converted into office and driver areas at race venues across the continent. This Thursday morning, just a few days after a semi-successful Belgian Grand Prix in which the team racked up another pole position and finished the race in second and fourth, an advance party is already on its way to Monza to precisely measure out the Mercedes garage ready for use next week. When the bulk of the race team arrives in Italy on the Wednesday before the race, everything will be in a reassuringly familiar place. Across the way from the trucks is
carefully packaged sea freight, lying on pallets. This batch is heading for India, ready for the Delhi race in late October. More will follow and another batch will shortly be making the trip to Abu Dhabi for November’s event – only seven of this season’s 19 races are in Europe, something of a logistical conundrum for all 11 teams. Beyond another unit housing the paint shop, where it takes three or four people 40 hours to paint a front wing alone, the biggest building of all looms. The main operations centre is building 5A. Upstairs, on the first floor, team principal Ross Brawn is preparing to chair a meeting. Paddy Lowe, who was hired from McLaren earlier this year as ‘executive director (technical)’, arrives and takes his place in the office. Lowe has been hired by Mercedes with a SportsPro Magazine | 65
FEATURE | MOTORSPORT
view to one day replacing Brawn as the boss, although the team has set no firm public timetable for the transition. For the moment, he is learning the ropes. The glass-fronted room opposite Brawn’s office is the strategic nerve centre of the team. This is the Race Support Room but even today it is full. Nico Rosberg’s race engineer Tony Ross and Lewis Hamilton’s man Peter Bonnington,
familiar voices from Formula One team radio broadcasts, are at their desks, along with Hamilton’s performance engineer Jock Clear. They are poring over the mass of data collected by the cars through three practice sessions, qualifying and the Belgian Grand Prix itself, forensically retracing in particular the 44 racing laps from Sunday. One wall of the room is taken up entirely by a large screen
showing a re-broadcast of the world feed television footage of the race; on either side, more screens show telemetry traces from each car. The race will be watched and re-watched, both through the pictures and the data, in an attempt to understand what happened, why it happened and how the team can improve. Specialist departments will do likewise, focusing entirely on their own area of expertise.
The Formula One teams: location and number of employees
Marussia Banbury, UK
Mercedes Brackley, UK
600*
220
Lotus
300
Milton Keynes, UK
500
690
Caterham
McLaren
260
600
Leafield, UK
Woking, UK
Williams Grove, UK
520
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Silverstone, UK
Red Bull Racing
Enstone, UK
*Excluding Mercedes High Performance Engines (400 people approx.)
Force India
Lewis Hamilton familiarises himself with his new team and car as he tours the race bay at Brackley before the start of the 2013 Formula One season
Sauber
Hinwil, Switzerland
320
Ferrari
Maranello, Italy
700
Toro Rosso Faenza, Italy
300
It is on a race weekend, however, when the room comes into its own. A bank of engineers will sit where Ross, Bonnington and Clear now do, in full contact with the pit wall and garage at the circuit. “This is a hub of activity,” confirms Evan Short, the team’s trackside electronics leader. “Up to 24 people come in, connected to the intercoms, the video feed, the data streams and we try, to the best of our ability, to reproduce the effect of being at the track. It’s desirable to have as many people as possible working on the car, analysing the data and feedback, but we can’t bring them to every event. So we have them based here.” There are multiple streams of communication, with audio and data links improved by as much as three times this year through a new partnership the team has forged with Tata Communications. Mercedes’ Brackley headquarters is now linked into Tata’s 500,000km sub-sea cabling and 200,000km terrestrial fibre network. Signed in April, Short says the partnership has already made a huge difference to the way the team operates and its ability to analyse data and take decisions. “If I’m speaking to the Race Support Room the conversation feels natural, we’re not stopping, saying ‘over’ or ‘you next’,” he explains, adding that between 50 and 70 gigabytes of data are created and transmitted between circuit
and HQ during a Grand Prix weekend. When chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin – known within the team as ‘Shov’ – didn’t travel to Spa-Francorchamps, he was able to base himself in the Race Support Room and take part in technical debriefs in the usual fashion. The story goes that Hamilton was only aware he was absent when he turned to the vacant spot in the team’s meeting room at the circuit, having been talking to him through a headset for some minutes. The Race Support Room has other uses. During a race, Mercedes has people there monitoring the live feeds from several major Formula One broadcasters – the BBC and Sky in the UK, Sky Deutschland in Germany and Sky Italia in Italy – to glean additional snippets of information from commentators and pit reporters which may be of use to strategists at the track. Sky Italia is particularly useful, given its concentration on Ferrari. “We have now got to the point where we depend on the link and not having that connection back to the race would affect our performance,” Short says, adding that the limits on the number of personnel the team is allowed at the track makes it all the more crucial to have strong communications with a larger team back at base. Beyond the Race Support Room SportsPro Magazine | 67
FEATURE | MOTORSPORT
The work of Mercedes’ partner Tata Communications has dramatically improved links between the paddock and the team’s UK base on race weekend
lies the design office, with 50 or more workstations each filled as the team works on components for the rest of this season, analyses specific data for gearboxes or electronics and the like, and sows the seeds of the 2014 car. Even at the end of August, the team says 50 per cent of its Brackley workforce of 500 is concentrated on developing next year’s car, a function of the sweeping rule changes. The pace is relentless. The team produces some 24,000 parts per year, nearly 100 per day. That doesn’t include the engine, which is designed and built at Mercedes High Performance Engines around 25 miles away in the town of Brixworth. The Brackley workforce is also supported by additional resource at Mercedes’ HQ in Stuttgart. On the floor below the Race Support Room are the cars themselves, in the race bays. Hamilton’s tub, shorn of virtually all parts, sits in one bay, awaiting its pre-Monza inspection. Across the way sits a fully assembled Formula One car floor, patched together with pieces of carbon fibre, awaiting transportation to Italy. Another is being trimmed behind a glass panel. Alongside sits another office where more essential work is taking place. Components, new and old, are dipped in a fluorescent liquid to identify cracks 68 | www.sportspromedia.com
or defects. ‘Lifing’, as the team calls it, is essential. Each component’s lifespan must be recorded and monitored, either by number of kilometres on the car or rotations. Few components stay on the car for more than two or three races, save for regulated items such as gearboxes which must last for five Grands Prix. The importance of cataloguing and archiving means the team operates in three shifts over the course of each 24 hours, with transition periods to ensure everyone is up to speed with progress and work. On the far side of this floor is one of the team’s rapid prototyping units, which are programmed with designs and then left to automatically manufacture components. There is also a seven-post test rig on this level, which can measure the physical exertion on new components and how they work together; the team uses monocoques from the previous season as the base for this work. Here, too, the improved communication links from Tata have been worth their weight in gold. “If we were running the car on a seven-post rig, people back here would be working on it, they would synthesise the data and send us a summary of it to us at the circuit,” Short says.
“We’ll still be doing that, but we also have the capacity to directly interact with it and say, ‘Actually, the guy who did the set-up of the car this morning in free practice wants to suggest a couple of tweaks. Can he just jump on and do it?’ He will be able to get on that rig remotely, adjust the parameters of the car, watch what the car is physically doing, see the data, watch the video of the car doing it, control that car from thousands of kilometres away and apply those results to what we then do on track. “Points where traditionally, in the past, we’ve had to compress or synthesise information before we send it to and from the track, now we’ll be able to send raw. We’ll still want to synthesise and summarise but we can do that as well. That gives us a lot more ability to be flexible.” Real-time data analysis has become a fundamental of the sport in recent years, presenting a new challenge for engineers and drivers – it is not unusual for Mercedes to tell Rosberg and Hamilton how to drive a particular corner over the radio because the data has shown a quicker way. Success in Formula One has always been about teamwork, but never more so than now.