Secret Mechanic: That feeling of guilt

When Lewis Hamilton's right-front brake disc shattered during qualifying for the German Grand Prix, the pain of the impact wasn't just felt by Lewis himself. Fans were shocked, disappointed and bereft of the increasingly intense battle between the two Mercedes drivers at the front.

One half of the team's garage would have felt quietly (very quietly) relieved to have their biggest rival out of Q3, while the other half, with heads in hands, would have wondered what on Earth they need to do to get the rub-of-the-green in 2014.

One person though, perhaps more so than anyone else, would have suffered a vast range of emotions in those initial moments and minutes after watching the car career helplessly into the barriers at high speed.

Hamilton's front end mechanic would have been watching the session on monitors from inside the team's garage with the rest of the crew, as his car and driver built up to a lap worthy of pole position for Sunday's race. He knew, as we all did, how crucial getting P1 would be in the ongoing contest between team-mates. He will already have felt under some pressure to give his man the perfect car.

As he watched intently, he may well have spotted the puff of black brake dust from the right-front wheel just before Hamilton lost control, but if he didn't it wouldn't have taken long for him to discover it was a problem with that particular corner of the car that caused the heavy impact. He'll have watched those few moments with open mouth and pounding heart, I'm fairly sure.

I've been in that situation myself and the period of time between your car going off, or even breaking down at that crucial moment, and finally finding out what the underlying cause was, is the most painful of all as a race mechanic.

In my situation, like the one at the weekend, it turned out to be an unforeseeable mechanical failure that caused our driver to crash, but that's not always immediately apparent. Mechanics aren't looking at data in the garage, another team of people do that and even for them it can take some time to say with any certainty exactly what's happened in any incident.

Accidents like Hamilton's are hard to mechanics too © LAT

In Germany, the team will have seen a loss of brake pressure and abnormal figures for the wheel speed sensor and perhaps the accelerometer on that particular corner of the car, but with that data buried in among a huge number of other channels and the whole event happening in hundredths of a second, they'll have needed to expand the data set and examine things in very fine detail before knowing which failure triggered which.

It's during that, sometimes lengthy, process that the mind of a mechanic, particularly the one responsible for the affected area of the car, imagines every possible self-incriminating scenario there is.

There are thoughts for the safety of your driver, obviously, but it's difficult not to think selfishly at times like these, about any responsibility you might have for the whole thing. Was there something left loose on the car? Did you check and double-check everything before it went out? Were you distracted when you were putting that particular corner of the car together last night? Were you tired? Talking to someone? Had half an eye on the GP2 qualifying session? Had the repetitive operation of assembling the brakes become so monotonous, you hadn't given it your full care and attention?

Your mind races, desperately trying to remember the moments when you were last working on the brakes, the exact sequence of events.

Could it have been something electronic, brake-by-wire perhaps, or driver error, something, anything, that's out of your control? No matter how confident anyone appears on the outside, it's almost impossible for these things not to cross your mind in a situation like this, the consequences of which could be potentially serious.

Not only is there safety to consider, but in a team where you're fighting for a championship, as I was when this happened to me, the thoughts of having maybe let your team-mates and driver down feature pretty highly on the scale too. You all work so hard and give so much to try to achieve your collective goals, it's difficult not to feel like the guy who misses the crucial penalty kick in a World Cup final, if something you've done might've meant you all fail.

It's easy to feel like everyone in the garage is looking at you, talking about what's happened but appearing reluctant to talk to you about it and that only serves to heighten the torment.

I remember finding a quiet spot out of the back of the garages, trying to take a moment on my own to reflect, smoking a number of cigarettes, while my heart pounded inside my chest and my mind wandered.

At the moment you finally discover the real cause and assuming it turns out to be nothing you've done wrong, which, depending on the failure, could even take days, there's a mixture of emotions.

I found a strange feeling of intense and overwhelming, smile-inducing relief, quickly followed by the underlying and tragic disappointment that your car's out of qualifying and has seriously dented your chances of a good result. All of a sudden you're back on the same wavelength as your team-mates again, only some way behind them in the grieving process.