Secret mechanic's diary: logistical gambles

Hi.

Where's October gone? It seems like only yesterday I was collecting my thoughts and sending my monthly moans into the guys at AUTOSPORT, and here we are again.

At that point the world was either in awe of the sheer dominance of Sebastian Vettel's Singapore performance, bored, or accusing him of cheating. Now, four weeks and two races later, we've seen him give everyone a headstart and 'fight' for a victory and it all seems OK again.

I must say I did shed a few tears as we left Mokpo, for what could be the last time...

...Oh no, I wasn't sad, God no. Bloody wasabi nuts. Had a packet on the bus to Seoul and then rubbed my eyes!

I've found myself in that little corner of the world a few times now, since Mr E did his deal with South Korea, and I'm not really sure what I'll take away from the place to add to my collection of worldly cultural experiences.

By far the funniest memory will be the moment there in 2010 - Thursday evening at the circuit, as I recall - when we had two cars ready in the garage... minus a couple of fairly crucial parts.

We'd had a tiny bit of a mishap in Japan, the preceding GP; well, actually more than one really.

The first was that the front wings we took there, even though we'd used them before, began showing signs of failing in the race. That's bad enough, I hear you say, but the next cock-up almost proved even more costly.

Korea was a close call for Spanners' team © XPB

Some bright spark decided the best way to remedy the fault was to strip them all and send them back to base on Sunday night after the race.The factory could do a proper fix and they could all come back out with the late crew arriving on Thursday morning in Mokpo, no problem.

But there was a problem. Because of the unique way in which Korea is run, you can't just import random 'stuff' into the country. F1 had a special deal with customs that everything on the team's official freight shipments coming in from Japan was cleared to go straight to the circuit, but that was it. Our front wings were no longer in that shipment.

I can only imagine the frantic phonecalls, through translators, as our team back in the UK desperately tried to get clearance to send the entire stock of wings back to the race team. With Korean customs not really understanding the importance of the items - or really caring, I imagine - we were in a spot of bother.

At the circuit, we managed to convince Jo Bauer, the FIA technical delegate, that we could scrutineer the cars without the wings and we'd have them here before Friday's practice to be checked, but the truth was none of us was really sure that would actually be the case.

To cut a very long and dramatic story short, the logistics manager back at base had to take a bit of a gamble. We put some poor, unsuspecting factory worker onto a plane to Hong Kong with a shipment of eight cardboard boxes containing the new, modified front wings. His task, upon arrival, was to immediately charter a private jet, at great expense, to take him and his 'luggage' across the water and into South Korea, hoping to avoid customs by landing at a small airfield near the track.

Amazingly, the plan worked and we just managed to get two cars on track for FP1, but a tiny part of me always wondered what plan B would've been...

It's a shame, but also representative, that it's the lasting memory I have of this particular grand prix.

Every year we climb off the plane in Japan and it takes a good day or so to adjust to the new surroundings. Not just the time zone - that's hard enough - but even more so the total departure from our own familiar cultural existence. It feels like we've landed on another planet.

Don't get me wrong, I love visiting Suzuka, it really is quite a fascinating experience. The fans are absolutely bonkers and display some of the best 'worst' fake team kit I've ever seen.

This year, as we were packing up, I saw two guys walking along the pitlane wearing old Renault F1 team jackets; you know, the blue and yellow ones from the Alonso era. I began to suspect they may not be wholly genuine as they walked away and I noticed that the title sponsor, Telefonica, had a letter missing: it was spelled 'Telfonica'. That perhaps wouldn't have been too bad, but amazingly they both had baseball caps to match with the same error. Brilliant.

Japanese fans, as committed as ever © XPB

I'm always interested in all things 'engineering' and so some of the features of our team hotel in Japan really intrigue me.

The hotel room is tiny by any standards. The only way to free up enough floor space for a human and a suitcase is to relocate the room's solitary chair out into the corridor. There's nothing very clever about that, it's just a bit ridiculous. No, the feat of engineering comes when one opens the door to the equally tiny bathroom.

The bathroom, in which I can stretch my arms out against opposing walls in all directions, is formed from one continuous piece of moulded orange plastic.

All of its major functions - toilet, wash basin and shower - can be utilised from a sitting position on the loo, which means it's actually pretty difficult to do it any other way.

The toilet itself is a remarkable piece of kit. It scares me slightly as it has more buttons than the inside of my road car and looks like it needs a laptop plugging in to work it, but it does have a rather lovely heated-seat option.

Work-wise, Japan went pretty smoothly for us. The cars remained in a very similar state to the way they'd finished the race in Korea a week earlier, so it was just a good check-over and clean-up once we'd built the garages at Suzuka.

As we nursed our cars through FP1 and FP2, with no upgrades and limited amounts of race spares, some of my chums up and down the pitlane weren't quite so relaxed.

Friday evenings present us all with a significant amount of work to get through before the paddock curfew kicks in on a 'standard' day, so when the guys on Sergio Perez's car saw it hit the wall hard, early in the session, I can tell you they weren't happy. I get the feeling one or two people are beginning to fall out of love with the young Mexican.

To be fair, he wasn't the only one to put it in the barriers on Friday, so there was a lot of work going on in a lot of garages that night. Aside from the fact that we were probably going round too slowly to have any sort of big crash, we may well have been in a tricky situation had we suffered anything like the fate of the McLaren at Suzuka.

It turned out we were short of one or two reasonably important spare parts at that race - someone took a gamble on saving money and not having replacements made and sent out after they were used in Korea, but it could've been a little embarrassing had our drivers been a little nearer the limit. Honestly, you wouldn't believe some of the near-misses that go unreported at the poor end of the grid.

Anyway, I'm writing this from my ever-so-fancy hotel room in India, a stark contrast to the shoebox of Japan. Just been for my fourth curry of the week, and I've only been here three days.

India means curry, and plenty of it © LAT

Things have gone well at the circuit, all pretty chilled out so far, although the old 'ticker' did get a bit of a shock on Tuesday as I unpacked the car: a spider, almost the size of my hand, scuttled out from underneath the cover!

I'll admit it, I screamed like a girl and ran for my life, much to the amusement of the rest of the lads, but I know I won't be first in the queue for that job anymore.

Right, time for bed. Some of the guys are trying to get me to run the track tomorrow, but I walked it last year with the engineers and I'm telling you, it's like a mountaineering exercise - up and down like a yo-yo. It's far more likely I'll come back here, have a snooze... and perhaps a curry.

See ya.

Spanners - @f1spanners