The secret F1 mechanic's diary: on the road again

Hey all, I'm officially brown.

Well I say that... I've had two and a half weeks in the sunshine of Oz and Malaysia, but the truth is the bits between my long HiFlex F1 Team shorts ending and my long HiFlex F1 Team socks beginning are brown; everything else is as white as the snow on the ground when I landed back in the UK the other day.

Working on the front end of the car means the sun beams onto the backs of my legs through the garage doors all day long until we've finished work, by which time it's invariably dark.

Anyway, it's been great to get back on the road again. It's a long old flight to Australia, but being the first one there's a real sense of the lads being back on tour, and the 24 hours or so in the air's enough time to get hammered, sleep it off and get through the hangover in time to land in Melbourne.

Sideshow Bob, my opposite number with the massive hair on Felix Croissant's car, had his shoes nicked while asleep on the plane... only ever found one and that was in the paper-towel bin inside the toilet cubicle. My best buddy Deano's always favourite in these situations, but he's staying tight-lipped since Bob had to explain his asymmetrical attire to angry customs officials in Hong Kong and later to Dick, the team manager.

I do love Melbourne; it's a great city. Unfortunately the only real chance to get out and enjoy the sunshine was Monday after the race, before flying on to KL. I thought, as I do every year, that I'd escape the team hotel and head down to St Kilda beach, chill out with a schooie of VB and take in a decent feed at The Stokehouse rezzo. Sad thing is, as it is every year, the place is so full of F1 folk it's like being back in the bloody paddock!

The other unfortunate thing about Oz is that the moment we land there each year we've all slipped into pseudo Croc Dundee accents by the time we're out of baggage reclaim. It's not really intentional and we certainly don't mean to offend, but that's almost always how it seems to end up.

The race Down Under didn't go too badly for us - both cars to the finish and undamaged, which is always nice. I'm sure there's still a bit more to come, as the tyres seem to have a life of their own right now and no one really understands how to tame them.

I'm definitely thinking about asking for more money as we're going to be doing a lot more pitstops this year. Obviously that won't work for the guys at Lotus as their car seems to tiptoe around the race track like a ballet dancer on fast-forward. Kimi, in fact, was the only one to give his mechanics an easy afternoon in the pitlane, but then, as he says, he does know what he's doing!

Because Red Bull didn't win, we had the immediate complaints cropping up about the new Pirellis... from Red Bull. Fairly sure we heard the same complaints last year, before everyone got their heads around how to use them properly and Red Bull began to dominate the second half of the season, so I'm sure they'll get over it.

So on to Malaysia and, although you know this already because it's all anyone seemed to post on Twitter for the whole week, it was bloody hot.

Obviously it's no surprise (being a tropical country), although you wouldn't think that by the way we were having to cut holes in our bodywork on Friday to stop the car overheating. It's amazing - almost every year I've been there we've done the same thing.

We run the car in the morning and are then shocked that the cooling options specced by the engine and simulation department don't actually work. There's no nice way to manufacture a new sidepod opening or exit duct in the field, so it's a disc-cutter and a roll of tape to make large holes in the least-inefficient places possible.

Having said all that, there's definitely something a little therapeutic about bluntly bastardising the side of the F1 car whose technical finesse and intricacy has kept you at work and longing for your bed for the past 12 weeks solid.

Trying to work on a car during a session's hard enough when the thing's glowing hot after a run but, when you can barely hold onto a spanner because your hand's sweating like Luiz Razia's manager was a couple of weeks ago, it's even harder.

It's like trying to pick up an ice cube with two fingers. The guys at the back of the car have it worst, I have to admit, and that's exactly why I try and stay well away from the hot, smelly end as much as possible and stick to the pointy bit.

When you're in the pits, waiting for your own cars to come in for a stop, you watch the pictures on screen, but aren't privy to the team-radio messages being played out on the world-feed broadcast. Our own radio channels last week, having now heard all about the excitement further up the pitlane, were comparatively boring.

JC doesn't really say much at all on the radio for the whole race, barely even speaking to confirm an instruction. He's so laid back, he simply keys the radio switch on and off and we're all to take that as message received.

Pastry Boy, on the other hand, gets himself so wound up and frustrated with everything. His radio transmissions are so high pitched and frantic that no one can understand a word he's saying. We actually have a French guy, Jean, working on our telemetry systems who we have to get to desperately translate his screams during the race.

I'm just waiting for the day he misinterprets a rant and he gets a "buckz zis lap" confused with a "fuck zis crap", and there's no one there when he turns up outside the garage for new tyres!

I can only feel for the blokes up at Red Bull last weekend, don't get me wrong. The likes of us this far down the pitlane would take a one-two no matter how it came, but those few laps must've been heart-in-the-mouth stuff. As a team member you've every right to be angry with Mr Vettel - he very nearly lost all of their points for them, and for the guys sitting in the garage watching it all it means bonus money too, not just points.

If any one of them had blatantly disobeyed an order from Christian Horner and jeopardised a race, they'd know about it and probably wouldn't be back in China, so why should a driver be allowed to get away with it?

We're all looking forward to watching the day in Brazil when Seb needs Mark to move over and let him through to clinch the world title... awkward!

I tried to imagine what would've happened with our two pedallers in the same situation, and concluded that JC would claim not to have heard any radio messages at all and Felix would simply scream an unrecognisable collection of noise into our headsets as he does with every transmission and we'd be none the wiser anyway.

Fortunately, I can't see that happening for a while, as the only time at the moment Felix is anywhere near our car is when they're both in the garage... Early days yet though I guess.

Our pitstops so far may not have beaten world records, but they have been consistent. Mind you, so were our next-door neighbours' at Force India in Malaysia - consistently disastrous. What a fuck-up that was. Seems their new captive wheelnut system worked wonderfully while the car was pushed into the box during practice, but no one thought to try it when the car was running and the nuts had expanded at 600 degrees!

I've wondered for a while now how far the FIA will let the race for the ultimate pitstop go, before intervening on safety grounds. The boys at McLaren have got some pretty trick kit down there and it was only a matter of time before the car got sent before anyone's had a chance to even check everything's ready to go.

The wheelguns change direction by themselves between wheel-off and wheel-on, and the front jack looks like something out of a modern day Back to the Future. Their cars already launch before the wheels hit the deck and they've tested a system that automatically drops the car with an electrical signal from the wheelguns, without any intervention from the jack man.

All clever stuff and fast when it works but, if it all goes faster than a human can react to override it when necessary, it surely can't be safe, can it? Anyway, of course I'm only saying that because we don't have any of that business. It's still a good old-fashioned lollipop and proper wheelnuts for us, though I'm sure not for long.

Bit of a shock to the system getting back to Blighty's sub-zero temps after those two races, but the kids still recognised me and the wife hasn't changed the locks, so that was a relief. No doubt we'll be trying to copy the best bits from the frontrunners over the next few weeks, which will translate into more late nights for the boys and me, but things generally start to get easier the further down the line we get.

Part of me secretly hopes we start concentrating on the 2014 car soon and leave this one alone. Life would be easy if we kept it the same all the way through - we might not win the championship, but my early predictions are that we probably won't do that anyway, so let's go for it next year I say.

Right, back to the internet and more comedy Photoshops of Sebastian and Mark. See ya.

- Spanners

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