The secrets of in-race radio chat

In recent years, television viewers have been party to an ever-increasing number of in-race radio transmissions.

Some are mysterious, referring to traction metrics or magic paddles. Some reveal an imminent strategy change from pre-arranged Plan A to Plan B or even C. Some seem to state the obvious.

But just how important is in-race radio communication between race engineer and driver?

AUTOSPORT asked Andrew Shovlin, world championship-winning race engineer with Jenson Button in 2009 and now chief race engineer at Mercedes, and Lotus trackside engineering director Alan Permane, who has worked with the likes of Jacques Villeneuve, Giancarlo Fisichella and Jean Alesi, to share some of the secrets of the airwaves.

ANDREW SHOVLIN
Mercedes chief race engineer

How do you balance the need to feed the driver with information without distracting them?

It depends very much on the driver. The problem with the modern era is you can't let them drive around in silence and never interrupt them because there are key things they need to understand.

You've got KERS charging levels to make sure the batteries don't top out because that changes the balance of the car and you are managing fuel, changing mixture modes.

Drivers don't really mind if you talk to them on the straights and I've never known a driver that has any issue with that.

If you start talking to them in the corner [it should not be] in the braking zone where it's just as they are trying to hit their braking point with one or two metres accuracy.

If someone comes on, it can throw them and they can miss their braking point.

Shovlin with Nico Rosberg © XPB

Some drivers just want to know what's going on around them. It's not just the race they can see, it's the race they can't see behind them.

I've never known a driver who's happy to have any information on a qualifying lap. So you get everything set and as they're coming round into the final sector you make sure you've given them everything they need to know.

From that point you just leave them alone and they go and do it.

Is it difficult to strike the right balance when you first start working with a new driver?

It's difficult to understand. You can sit down, you can discuss it, you can spend days doing that but until you start going through all the sessions that make up a race weekend, it's very hard to understand what they want to know and what they don't want to know.

When we had Michael [Schumacher], he wanted to know everything. You almost couldn't give him enough information.

Lewis [Hamilton] and Nico [Rosberg] are a bit more normal in terms of what they want to hear. But we are always putting more instrumentation on the car, we know more about what the tyres are doing now, it's all of that information.

If you can derive performance from it then they want to know what it is.

So when they start a lap they want to know that the tyre pressures are in the right region; they want to know halfway round the out-lap that the front tyres are still a bit cold because they can do something about it.

They don't want that information just before they brake for Turn 1 when they can't do anything about it.

There are things they want to know about: who else is quick, where can they find time, how is my team-mate doing?

A few years ago, we'd do all of that work in the garage, but now you're giving them live comparisons.

The two drivers will try different gears or approaches to where they compromise a sequence of corners to get the best end result.

If we see one driver trying something new, we'll do an analysis of it, see which is better and get the information to the other driver so he can try it if it's an improvement.

To some viewers, the information can seem obvious, for example instructions at the end of the warm-up lap...

A lot of the way you operate is because something, at some point, has gone wrong. You just remind them. There's no cost, no penalty to being reminded, so you do it.

Shovlin worked with Michael Schumacher at Mercedes © XPB

It's very busy now, the cars are very complicated and there's a lot more to do than just driving. Look at everything they're doing: they're following a KERS schedule very closely, they're moving their brake bias around from corner to corner.

It does help them if they know that when you speak it's to remind them and they just [need to] do something. They just start reacting to commands because it's a lot easier than having to think, 'What have I got to do?'

Setting aside the flow of information, is it a part of the engineer's job to ensure that the driver maintains focus, or give some encouragement?

You see it a lot, people telling drivers to push. OK, they are in a race, they know they have to drive fast. Some respond well to that and for some it winds them up and they don't go quicker.

Every driver is different in how they react to that and you don't want to be telling them the obvious.

But there are points in the race where if you can find two tenths over three laps, it means you are ahead of another guy, you finish one place further up.

With the way these tyres behave they can normally push a bit harder for one or two laps. It's not the quickest way to do a long run, but they are rarely sticking together a series of qualifying laps. So it's important you give them that information at the right time.

The most frustrating thing is if they are going down the straight and suddenly someone drops out of the pits five metres in front and they will think they could have been ahead.

When someone's in the pits, you'll tell [your driver] to use all the KERS on the main straight if you think it's going to be close because the frustration is if the information was there earlier, we'd have been one place further up the road.

It's about making sure all that critical information goes to them, so if you do get beaten it's not because you didn't do everything to stop it.

The mindset of an engineer is take in all the relevant information and process it, but the driver is doing a different job. Is there a clash of cultures, that you have to remember the driver isn't an engineer and vice versa?

Drivers can be very different. Nico has got very much an engineer's mindset so he tends to get quite deeply involved.

You do get cases when the engineers are telling drivers how to drive and they won't necessarily agree and vice versa. Over the year, you build up a relationship.

Ross Brawn and Shovlin on the grid at Monza © XPB

It's why certain driver/engineer partnerships do click and you get a nice synergy where between the two engineers - now three or even four on a car - you have all areas covered.

Do you ever get to a point where you must calm a driver down?

Drivers can get a bit panicky because it's more stressful for them in the car, they are the ones who have to qualify it and race it.

If the car is off the pace and you've got a bit lost on set-up or you've lost your baseline, you can't seem to get the balance to work, the drivers do start to get a bit jumpy.

The engineer's job is to calm them down and not to panic themselves.

It's actually one of the hardest parts of engineering. When you have a quick car that's nicely balanced and keeps getting on pole, it's relatively straightforward. But when you have a difficult car it's much more complicated, it's harder to make sense of any test because the car doesn't behave in a consistent way.

Not trying to take three steps at a time is the important thing.

Things happen on track, drivers come together and if you have an incident in a race and drop back it's an engineer's job to refocus the driver.

Maybe you were looking like being on the podium, but suddenly you're 10th and it's the engineer's job to get refocused on that.

Every race, you want to score the maximum points and things do happen that mean suddenly that isn't quite what you wanted. You have a puncture and you have to switch plan and recover what's possible.

Getting a driver to refocus can be a result of what seems very mundane communication to the outside world...

Yes. For them, the races are complicated. There are a lot of cars that are quite similar in terms of performance.

Take Lewis's situation at Silverstone: he was leading the race and suddenly he's at the back and has no idea where he can finish.

A driver in that situation can't know whether they are going to finish 17th or whether they could finish fifth.

They want to know what they're going for - if they don't know what they're going for, it's hard for them to give 100 per cent commitment.

If you tell a driver the best he can do is finish 17th, there aren't many that will give that as much commitment as if you tell them you can get back to P4 or P5.

For those who are watching at home, the messages are such a tiny part of the story and often out of context because of the time delay. Does that make it easy to underestimate how relevant the dialogue over the radio is?

Shovlin on the pitwall © LAT

It can do. The other problem is that teams will often come up with a code. There are a lot of things that we will talk about but we don't want to broadcast.

The more interesting and useful it is to other teams, the more likely it is to get broadcast so they do tend to contort things.

When you watch races on TV, it does give you a better perception of what the driver and the teams are doing, what they're thinking about and how the race is progressing.

But the teams are keeping an eye on what's being said with other drivers.

If you hear that a guy 15 seconds up the road has a gearbox issue or is in trouble with the brakes, then you're going to go and put more pressure on him.

They do listen to it and it's probably as useful to the teams as it is to the fans at home.

ALAN PERMANE

When you worked as Giancarlo Fisichella's race engineer, we used to hear you giving him the hurry-up very regularly. Is that part of the race engineer's role, ensuring the driver is in the zone?

The driver/engineer relationship is tricky. You have to have a healthy respect for each other. The driver has to trust the engineer and the engineer can't be in awe of the driver.

He has to be able to tell him this isn't good or that isn't right, and it's not easy when you have a multi-millionaire driver who is worshipped by the rest of the world!

You've got to criticise them and that was something I think I managed to do. I get on well with all of my ex-drivers and I still keep in touch with Fisi.

But there were times when he needed a bit of a wake-up. That's just his nature and he would respond well.

So you would see a response in the lap times?

Absolutely. It wouldn't necessarily be a 'this isn't good enough' thing, it could just be 'you've got five laps to the pitstop so string some good laps together'.

When Pat Symonds was engineering Michael Schumacher, he wouldn't have to kick him or wake him up, but he would feed him what the critical points of the race were.

It's important to have a relationship where you're not scared to tread on the driver's toes sometimes.

And the flipside is if a driver is not told and they come out of the pits just behind someone they will justifiably be annoyed?

Permane and Romain Grosjean © LAT

Yes. It's even more important in this era of tyre management. They need to know if they have got to look after the tyres or they can push and destroy them.

We drill into them where their anticipated stops are and we can tell them it's going to be target minus three, meaning stopping three laps early so they can go to town on the tyres.

But we might say, can you go target plus five? It's something we asked Kimi [Raikkonen] in Germany, we asked him if he could go to the end and he said he didn't think the tyres would last that long.

So it's about balancing up whether your driver wants lots of information or not much?

Yes. Kimi doesn't like a lot of information. There is certain information he needs. A lot was made about his comments in Abu Dhabi, 'leave me alone' and all that sort of thing.

Fair enough, but some of it was very valid. His tyre temperatures were too low. He can't see that and he can't judge it behind the safety car, so it was a valid message.

That was a valid bit of information Simone Rennie, his engineer, gave him. The other thing was updating him on where Alonso is, but he didn't want to know that. Fine.

With Villeneuve, he wanted talking to every lap. Even if it was just chit-chat, he wanted to know positions of other people, what was happening with the car, everything. They are really at opposite ends of the scale.

Most drivers want to be updated but don't want to be disturbed. They want to know what's going on, but want it done in a concise way so they can get on with it. Kimi is the exception one way.

The good guys, the really quick guys, don't lose any time when they are spoken to on the radio or they speak. But there aren't many drivers like that.

Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumacher, Raikkonen, the top five, so I imagine Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel as well, don't lose any time at all.

There are some that can drive a lap time, but it takes up 100 per cent of their capacity. People like Alonso can do the laptimes, but have plenty of capacity to do something else.

You also occasionally hear drivers being told to do things like remember to have a drink - will there be specific triggers for that?

Raikkonen's radio messages have become popular © XPB

I've had a driver before that I had to remind to look at the pitboard! As he came out of the last corner I used to say 'pitboard'.

Some of them do need a reminder to have a drink, but that's more in practice sessions if you've fitted a drinks kit to test it out.

It must be a difficult path to tread, to judge the flow of information.

You start with the premise that any time you talk to them is detrimental. That's how I do it. Certainly, Kimi doesn't like it and most drivers do lose time, so you just give them the essential stuff and nothing more than that.

Another thing is you see them getting into a nice rhythm and if we need to tell them something you might say leave them and not disturb them.

If it's something like fuel mixture, we need to turn it up or down but it's not critical, we can delay those things and do them when they come down the pitlane or something like that, rather than disturb them when they're in a groove.

You give them what they need and nothing more than that.

In communications, you are conscious of where they are on track...

It's much easier for them to hear in the slow corners, but you don't want to interrupt them. You certainly don't want to talk to them in fast corners.

The way I tend to do it is on the straight: you keep the radio up so they can hear something and as they start going round you give them the short instruction. That's a typical way of doing it.

One incident that a lot has been made of, not in your team, was when Sergio Perez was chasing Fernando Alonso for victory in Malaysia last year. He got a message telling him to be careful and that the team needed not to risk losing second and he later made a mistake that cost him the chance of a win. Are there times when you give a driver an instruction to go for it, or be more conservative, things go wrong?

It's not an easy one to answer because we tell them quite a lot to go for it and to make use of the tyres, so sometimes that will happen just because of how often we do it.

Rather than tell them to go faster, we give them information. Sometimes, and it has happened with Romain, he will do a lap with two or three mistakes in it and I will say to his engineer just tell him to calm down, bring him back if he's had a ragged couple of laps.

It's no good coming on the radio saying you are doing an awful job, stop making mistakes. That's not of any help! You have to fill them with confidence if they are struggling.