How a veteran tech guru is constantly learning

Last year Formula 1 reached its 1000th world championship grand prix. Amid much pageantry and retrospective brouhaha at the race in question - China - the commercial rights holder also paid tribute to the grandee storytellers of the paddock, awarding one of its newly minted celebratory precious metal coins to the journalist who had covered the most F1 races.

That record belongs, indisputably, to Giorgio Piola, for whom China 2019 was his 811th working grand prix.

Drawing has been among Piola's passions from an early age. In his teens he adopted cars as his preferred subject and went to college to study engineering but, at the age of 18, having fired off a collection of his illustrations to the Italian magazine Autosprint, Piola received a letter that would change his life. The editor invited him to cover the Monaco Grand Prix for them and compile a technical report.

That was 1969 and, upon his return, Piola gave up his studies and has been working as a journalist and technical illustrator ever since. His work has graced the pages of newspapers, magazines and websites the world over, including GP Racing.

Giorgio attributes his success and longevity to being multilingual as well as being well-connected - and providing a unique service.

"There have always been journalists and photographers but I invented a new profession," he says. "Nobody else was going to races and making detailed drawings of the cars at that time.

"It was my boyhood dream. I was always making drawings, in school I was very silent, and I was always training my eyes to be able to look at the teacher - so he believed I was following his lesson - while drawing. This became an important skill.

"I'm not a qualified engineer and I don't claim to be, but I'm passionate about the engineering details. I can look at a car and see immediately what is new. It's because I was training my eyes from this early age.

"At every race there are at least 60 new developments or components that deserve to have a drawing. Sometimes it's just a tiny detail. And they don't always come from the top teams" Giorgio Piola

"At this time there was much greater access to the senior engineers. You could just walk up and chat to people like Tony Southgate, Harvey Postlethwaite, Gordon Murray, Ralph Bellamy, Patrick Head or John Barnard. For me the relationship was like they were the teacher and I was the student, and I think they respected me for that. 
And they knew I would never reveal information given to me in confidence.

"And the longer you stay in the sport, the more you realise that sometimes even the very good engineers can't just look at a single component and say exactly what
it's doing. This is why I'm always very suspicious of people who set themselves up as technical experts and claim they can explain everything.

"I remember when the Lotus 78 and 79 were racing - the first ground-effect cars - and it took a long time for people to understand that the secret was the sealing of the underfloor. Mario Andretti would say it was the differential and many people believed him.

"I looked at these cars [the Lotuses] and I knew instinctively - it was like an animal instinct - that it was the skirts and the underbody sealing that was creating the performance."

Piola has adapted his technique over the years as the technological tools available have developed. He still draws by hand, using his own photographs as a reference.

Gone 
are the days, sadly, when he could stride into team garages and sketch directly from the car; now he patrols the pitlane with a digital camera and uses a scanner and a portable drawing board to produce an initial monochrome image,
 to which he (or his assistants at base) add colour.

When you look back through the archive you'll notice a significant style change in the early 1980s when his first wife, a fashion designer, suggested using a thicker gauge of technical pen.

"Straight away I took a copy of one of my drawings and retraced it, double or even three times thicker, and it looked much more three-dimensional - it was lifting from the page. And this help came from someone who didn't know anything about racing cars. You can always learn something new.

"At every race there are at least 60 new developments or components that deserve to have a drawing. Sometimes it's just a tiny detail. And they don't always come from the top teams: four years ago Toro Rosso introduced gills on the leading edges of the rear wing endplates, and everybody - including Mercedes and Red Bull - copied them.

"Most of the time it's true that the top teams lead the technical innovations, but not always. If you watch Adrian Newey on the grid, you'll see he walks up and down looking at every single car. He even used to look at the Manor..."