Why F1 teams' nerves are at an all-time high

It's a long and lonely flight to Melbourne for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. And it's on that flight that it really hits home that a new season is about to kick off.

Yes, you have done all of your preparation and your pre-season testing as best you can, you will have reacted to and done your best to eliminate any little - or in some cases big - problems that have cropped up. But this is the first time everyone will be competing on the same level playing field, in the same conditions with exactly the same goal: to beat everyone else.

Not everyone goes to Australia to be the out and out winner, it's only really for Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull that this is a realistic objective. But for Force india, Williams, Renault, McLaren, Haas, Toro Rosso and Sauber it's about being the best of the rest. As you can see, that's a big bunch of teams with a lot at stake and the difference between being ninth or 10th and 19th or 20th is enormous.

Doing better than you did last time out is the major challenge. So in this case, you are being compared to the last race of 2017. But that doesn't stop you wanting to win and prior to the first event that prospect is what gives you the motivation. After all, there's nothing wrong with having the odd dream.

You should always go to the first race with one objective - to finish the race. Then at the end of the weekend you take note of where you qualified and finished and react to that. If the attrition rate is high you need to make sure you are not one of the unreliable teams, because as the season progresses points will normally become more difficult to obtain for small teams.

You can never be sure what's going to happen. It has always been, and always will be, very difficult to have any degree of certainty regarding a team's performance - even your own - going into a new season. But suffice to say there's greater likelihood of a small team running lower fuel in testing than the bigger teams.

You start imagining scenarios that will stop you from racing, and the pressure just escalates - that's what kept me awake when I was a technical director

The bigger teams tend to want to hide their real performance until it is really necessary, but that can also catch you out. It's not always just about dropping the fuel down and sticking on a set of softer tyres, with lower fuel and high braking and cornering it's very easy to have a small fuel pick-up problem and that sort of thing can be incredibly time consuming to fix.

And teams going into the first race with magical update kits can very easily be fooling themselves. There will be very little time to waste in Melbourne on back-to-backing car developments, especially as it's the first time the new range of Pirelli tyres will have run in normal temperature conditions.

If too much time is spent with new bits, it's very easy not to get the best out of anything. And because of that, you underperform on all fronts.

So even if you are confident you have a good turn of pace, you can never be that confident. And there are pitfalls even if you do have the speed.

There are lots of things that can stand in the way of your win dream being realised and the last thing you need is a problem that you can't actually fix - especially when you are 10,500 miles from home.

So what are the things that used to keep me awake at night in my days as an F1 technical director? You start imagining some sort of scenario that will prevent your team from racing at all, and then the pressure just escalates. You know deep down inside that an outright do-not-start is fairly unlikely, but it has happened to teams before and I'm pretty sure it will happen again. You just hope it won't happen to you.

As the teams have got bigger, the likelihood of something like this happening has diminished. There are now lots of different departments covering all aspects of the regulation compliance and the car components will all have gone through all their individual rig tests to be signed off for circuit use.

This testing is a bit like what aircraft manufacturers do with their aeroplanes. From the flight data they have recorded, they have rigs set up to accelerate that mileage - basically, they have hydraulic rams moving the wings up and down simulating the largest deflections they have recorded with a percentage safety margin added. This allows them to identify potential failures and issue rectifications before they become catastrophic. I know they do that all very comprehensively, but I still keep an eye out of the window!

Over the years, teams have become a lot more professional. When we, as Jordan, went to our first Formula 1 race in Phoenix in 1991 we had none of these rigs or simulation tools. Actually, we only left one person behind so there was no one at base to do anything anyway.

As far as the car was concerned, we left nothing behind just in case we needed it. Back then it was all done on a bit of a wing and a prayer. And come pre-qualifying, we had a camshaft sensor failure on Andrea de Cesaris's car.

It was a small sensor mounted externally on the rear of the engine's cam carrier and a fixing bolt fell out of the trigger wheel. It was the first time this happened and, as you hope with any reliability problem, the last time.

Even after all the testing, it's usually the simple things that can turn around and bite you. Some sort of software glitch or a wiring problem that causes hardware damage - these sort of things don't creep up on you, they just happen instantly without warning and the end result can be either that the car just stops when you leave the pits or it just won't function properly.

In Brazil in 2003, Ralph Firman had a front wishbone failure. The ones on his car were brand new and Fisichella's had done a race, so we deduced that Fisi's car would be OK. As luck would have it he went on to win

I had one occasion where the car just wouldn't change gear. We could go through the gears in the garage, but out on the circuit it wouldn't change gear. We scratched our heads for quite a long time and then discovered that the quick removal steering wheel wasn't quite going into place properly.

There was a multi electrical plug connecting the steering wheel through the steering column to the wiring loom and it had one short pin in it that only connected when the steering wheel was fully in place. And as a safety feature, when the car had any road speed, which was taken from the front wheels that only rotated out on the circuit, it wouldn't allow you to change gear. Simple to fix, but very time consuming and frustrating to identify.

We saw at the Chinese Grand Prix in 2010 Sebastien Buemi braking and the front suspension failing on both sides of his Toro Rosso (one failed momentarily before the other, increasing the load on the opposite one immediately and causing it to fail!). These things can happen.

Personally, I have had wings falling off and suspension failures and these are the sort of things that take a bit of thinking about. Was there something just not strong enough, or was it down to a batch problem? Those are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself and come up with answers to and then solutions to rectify the problem.

In Brazil in 2003, very early in the race Ralph Firman had a very spectacular front wishbone failure as he braked for the Senna Esses. It brought out one of many safety cars and as it was a safety concern I was immediately on the radio to Andy Stevenson, our chief mechanic at the time.

He came back with the fact that the lower front wishbones on Ralph's car were brand new and on Fisichella's car they had done one race. So from that I deduced it was probably a batch problem and that Fisi's car would probably be OK. They were, and as luck would have it he went on to win the race.

If things go wrong at the first race and you cannot continue on the forward trajectory you want, then it can cause long-term problems.

On the Jaguar R1 in 2000, to save a bit of weight and gain a little engine power we ran a gearbox oil lubrication system that was lubricated from the engine oil system pressure-relief valve excess oil flow.

During testing, we didn't have any real issues but come the first race problems arose that were very confusing. It was eventually discovered Cosworth had fitted a finer filter on the oil return system and because of that we weren't getting the oil flow required, causing problems with the bevel gear. It was a simple fix, but unfortunately it all led to the team digging a hole for itself that eventually engulfed us.

Over the season, many of these things will be thrown at you and it is how you react that matters. But it's always nice to get the first race under your belt. After that you can start to plan what you need to do to either maintain your performance or recover from the situation you find yourself in.

As I said at the beginning, it's a long and lonely flight to Melbourne. But if it doesn't go as you expected it's an even longer and lonelier flight on the way back home.