Secret mechanic: Blind panic time

Pre-season is always a tough time for every Formula 1 team. Some of my lowest moments have occurred in the run up to a new season as working hours hit new limits, fatigue builds and frustration begins to counterbalance the excitement and optimism of the upcoming campaign... even before a wheel's been turned in anger.

The worst thing was, we'd all have a slightly longer Christmas break than many outside the sport due to the accrued holiday throughout the previous season, so we'd just about slip back into some form of normal life with friends and family, and then get that 'back-to-school' feeling ahead of the first working day of the year.

We'd all know what was coming over January and February, we knew it was part of the job we loved and we did it every year, but it never stopped us all dreading those two months each time.

F1 teams may like to give the impression that everything's always under control, carefully measured and refined, but I can assure you that, particularly in the early part of most seasons, some come a lot closer to all-out disaster than you might think.

This time around, with the wholesale and extreme changes to technical regulations and limited testing, I can imagine that some outfits are currently running around in 'blind panic' mode behind the scenes.

Most of the stress generally comes through tight timescales constantly slipping. A slight issue in any one of the many departments involved just compounds that.

Late green lights for new parts can be a challenge © XPB

When a new car design and build schedule is initially set out in the middle of the preceding season, it's carefully planned to give each department the time it needs to do its job.

Whereas in some industries it might be possible to simply stick to that schedule until the job's complete, F1's a highly competitive environment where each team is desperately looking for finite gains in performance over its rivals.

So if someone comes up with a tweak, or new bright idea that might have an impact on laptime, even if it's in late December, it can't be ignored.

The result might mean that weeks of completed work is now redundant, but not many team MDs are in a position to turn down the chance of a faster car if someone in the drawing office tells them that's what they can have.

I can recall many occasions when it's been necessary to work right throughout the night, both in the factory and even more commonly at the circuit during pre-season testing.

The thing to remember is that an F1 car is a prototype. There's no instruction manual or expert on that particular model like you might find in a road-car garage.

As the car is wheeled into the race bays from the carbon shop for that very first time in a new year, no one in the team of mechanics and engineers really knows what to expect.

A finished F1 car looks serene, but fitting it together is not easy © LAT

Yes everything is made to a drawing, the designers know exactly how things 'should' work and the manufacturing team generally do a very good job of making parts to pretty exact dimensions. So, in theory, it should all go together like a precision jigsaw and work perfectly.

The reality is though that it doesn't always turn out that way.

January and February in particular, were always months when my own relationship with the drawing office (DO) was at its most strained. How on earth did they ever think some of those far-fetched designs were really going to work in the real world?

I remember one occasion when at the factory in the build-up to the car's first test (I'm pretty sure it was late into the night in an otherwise deserted building) that I was trying to put together the new front brake duct assembly.

As designers do, they'd probably all high-fived each other right around the DO after coming up with a package that was smaller, lighter, more aerodynamic and yet still housed and cooled all of the necessary components within the uprights.

I'd spent hours struggling to get the individual parts to fit together in among the suspension. Trimming, trying, marking, removing; trimming, trying, marking, removing and so on, before deciding I was happy and going to finally bolt them all together.

That simple final task proved to be an outright impossibility as three of the four fixings in the upright were positioned in such a place that they were entirely obscured behind wishbones and pushrods.

Crews have to make designers' ideas work in practice © XPB

It wasn't going to be an easy fix and the upshot as far as I was concerned was that the whole thing would have to come apart and be sent back for some kind of modification, after which I'd likely have to repeat the entire process.

I'd skipped dinner that night, barely seen my family for weeks, was covered in carbon dust from all the trimming and more than a little tired and emotional, while the chirpy little bloke who'd drawn the parts was probably tucked up next to his wife dreaming about computer-aided design at home. I can't tell you how much I wish I'd had his phone number!

Occasionally at this time of year, F1 has to pull out the 'big bucks' card to overcome a problem.

We're in an industry that may be tightening the purse strings a little, but only relatively speaking. As deadlines draw nearer, sometimes there's only one way to get what you want, or need.

When things were running late before a pre-season test, we often had no choice but to delay sending the cars so we could continue working on them at base. The trucks would have to head off to Spain or wherever, to set up the garages, leaving us with no transport and no time to get there.

What do you do in that situation if you're an F1 team? Charter a couple of planes of course.

Ideally all F1 transportation should be this organised © XPB

I've had to send my car at the very last minute, on more than one occasion, to a racetrack in Europe by special military cargo plane with the rest of us following on by chartered private jet because we were behind schedule.

A few years ago we even had to send an entire racecar out late to the first GP in Australia by chartered plane after a fairly soul-destroying incident the week before.

After much pain, effort and weeks of long hours, we'd finally managed to assemble two brand new cars a couple of days ahead of the freight shipment date to Melbourne. As was customary, and normally prudent, we'd take any new racecar to a circuit or local airstrip, just to give it a quick 'shakedown' and make sure all systems were working correctly before we got to the race.

It was no more than 50km of fairly gentle running and just gave us peace of mind that nothing major was wrong before travelling across the globe, thousands of miles from our factory and facilities.

On this one memorable occasion, I remember opting to stay at the factory to take stock of my tools and spares after the previous weeks of crazy hours and chaotic working, while the test team took my car to a private airfield to go through the formalities of shaking it down.

At around 3pm, just as I'd got myself and my crew back into a state of relative re-organisation and control, a call came through from the track.

On the last run of what had been an otherwise pretty straightforward and successful day, a traction-control issue lurched the car heavily into the wall and while the driver was fine, if not a little embarrassed, a front wishbone had punctured a hole straight through the bottom of the chassis.

Scenes like this are even more depressing for mechanics when the car is only just finished © XPB

When I say this was soul destroying, you have no idea. The point in late February or early March when the team's freight is packed onto a lorry and sent to Heathrow, heading for the first race, is the second most welcomed sight of the season, as with no car, tools or kit while it travels all the way to Australia, we get the first and only short break of the early part of the year.

(By the way, the most welcomed is the point when the last cover goes onto the last freight container at the end of the last race of the season and we're all on holiday).

When that call came through, we all knew we wouldn't be heading to Oz after a couple of restful days off at home with the family, but instead would have our own flights delayed so that we could spend that precious time building up another brand-new racing car.

We'd then get there at the last minute, be straight into a couple of all-nighters and deal with the inevitable 'bun fight' trying to make it to free-practice one on Friday morning.

No matter which end of the grid you are, teams are working equally as hard right now with no real idea of what's to come when they hit the track.

I've been fortunate on occasions to have had the pre-season nightmare rewarded with a car that exceeds all expectations at the first test, but equally there's not much worse than when a car falls flat on its face on the track after all that effort.

One thing's for sure right now: every single member of every single team is in exactly the same boat. They have absolutely no idea just how fast, slow, reliable or otherwise the fruits of their considerable labours will turn out to be.