Secret mechanic's diary: no rest for the wicked

Well, what can I say... another Formula 1 season done and dusted. Unbelievably, that's my 15th in a row and unless my lucky numbers come up in the next couple of months, I'll be heading off for number 16 before you can say 1.6 V6T ERS-K with MGU-K and MGU-H.

It's been a long old season, this one. Not simply because of the length of time between the start and finish, but also because by around the Singapore GP back in September, most of the grid had pretty much given up.

There was only going to be one winner. The rest of us were there to pick up the scraps and unless you were one of the top three teams, work on this year's car had ground to a halt to 'concentrate' on 2014.

It was a slightly bizarre set of circumstances, almost as if most of the teams had agreed not to bring any more upgrades, a kind of, "we'll all give up together and then at least it's fair" type situation.

Our chums-along-the-pitlane at Red Bull not only won both championships by a mile, but were still having boxes of new bits turning up last week in Brazil. It's pretty impressive to say the least and I understand a lot of the parts were experiments for next year's car... Not sure anyone else was doing that. We certainly weren't, I can assure you.

Impressive it might be, but having spoken to some of the guys down there, that's not the word they were using. They haven't stopped all season - the car's been different at almost every race.

Red Bull kept trying hard. The others, not so much © LAT

These upgrades you see turning up on cars at grands prix, they don't just bolt on you know. The truth is they get designed on a CAD system and are then normally so late out of production that they get sent straight to the race track and often arrive at the last possible minute.

It's uncommon, in my experience, that anything made out of carbon fibre just comes out of the box from the factory and fits; there's normally a certain amount of 'fettling' involved to make it work properly.

I once did an all-nighter in Australia trying to get a set of front brake ducts to fit the car, finally emerging at around 5am, covered from head to toe in carbon dust and with my ears ringing from the constant whining of my pneumatic grinder.

So, for mechanics, while we all want the car to go quickly, there's always a certain trepidation when a box of new bits gets delivered, late on a Thursday evening, to the back of the team's garage.

From what I understand, although Mr Newey's clearly not too bad at making fast cars and then making them go even faster over the course of a season, not too much of his thought process goes into the practicalities of actually fitting, removing or adjusting the bits he designs.

On that basis, it seemed only fair that it was Red Bull that rewarded their team with the most enormous party on Sunday night after pack-up.

Red Bull has always done a good line in parties and I, being modern, friendly and socially unrestrained by corporate boundaries, have always attended them.

I was lucky enough to be invited to three 'end-of-season' events on Sunday evening, Red Bull's bash, one at Lotus and our very own cosy little gathering.

Out of respect for HiFlex F1 team management, of course I went to ours first... Oh no, hang on, it wasn't so much out of respect, more that they told us we all had to go. Yes, that was it.

Anyway, we popped along for a drink, for which we were duly charged an extortionate number of Brazilian reals. This triggered an almost immediate exodus from the venue, leaving no one but management and a few sponsors behind, before we all headed directly to the far more awesome and completely free Red Bull party. Awkward.

Anyway, looking back at the race on Sunday it was actually pretty good. We got two cars to the finish, undamaged, so they rolled almost straight onto their pallets to be sent home, but not before we did one last fire-up of the old V8 engines.

I don't know if you've ever seen how the engine guys warm them up inside the garages, but they use a little handheld, thumb-operated button to gently bring up the revs until it's warm enough to hand control of the throttle to the driver before he goes out into the pitlane.

Well, I've always wanted to have a go on that little button, and on Sunday afternoon I did just that. Instead of being gentle, it was unanimously agreed that as these engines were being confined to the history books, it was OK to just rev the nuts off it, flat-out.

Grosjean was the only one who managed to blow up an engine in Brazil © LAT

I can tell you, there's a incredible sense of power being in control of something that makes such an earth-shattering sound and vibration. I didn't hold back and only stopped when the heat shielding and then eventually the wiring harness caught fire from the extreme heat from the white-hot exhausts.

Try as I might, I just couldn't blow it up. Ironic, really: 10 years ago we couldn't stop our engines blowing up, and now this.

It sounded like all the teams up and down the pitlane did pretty much the same thing with their old V8s as a bit of a send-off; apart from Romain Grosjean, who got the wrong end of the stick and did his halfway through the race.

It was a very quiet flight back to the UK on Monday. Lots of paddock folk weren't feeling very well and I'm not even sure everyone who was supposed to be on the flight was actually there.

As I said, it's been a very long season and there was a palpable sense of collective relief as the covers finally went onto the freight pallets for the last time in 2013. What hair most people still have was most definitely let down on Sunday night.

The truth of the matter is, though, that while we're all currently in holiday mode, catching up with washing and reacquainting ourselves with friends and family, work is already very much underway on next year's new car. It won't be long before they're pushing the first chassis round to the race bays at our factory for us to start assembling.

The whole process begins earlier than usual this year with all the changes, so while I usually spend December hidden away in the fab shop, making new bits for my motorbike and having embarrassingly extended tea breaks, it might all have to be a little bit different this time around. Oh deep joy!

Spanners - @f1spanners