Secret Mechanic: When F1 lets its hair down

As the flag dropped in Abu Dhabi for the last time in 2014, there'll have been a mixture of emotions throughout the paddock.

At Mercedes, there was clearly a split down the middle of the team, with one side elated to have realised their dreams, happy beyond belief and ready to celebrate long and hard into the night as reward for all the hard work.

On the other side, they'll have known the title was perhaps a bit of a long shot going into the last day, but would've felt the enormous pressure to deliver and that chequered flag, despite confirming the disappointment of losing, would've lifted that pressure if nothing else.

Burning troublesome cars at the end of the year tends to be frowned upon © XPB

For many of the other mechanics and engineers in Abu Dhabi, that last day of the season brought with it an enormous sense of relief, a feeling I know all too well.

If you've struggled as a team throughout the year, the end can't come soon enough. I can imagine the guys at Lotus wishing it had come about six months earlier!

The only thing to celebrate is that it's all over and although there's still plenty of work to do after the end of the race, the final 'pack up' is a lot more relaxed than normal.

When you've had a 'dog' of a car all season, you can quite easily feel like leaving it behind and setting fire to it in those garages at the last race, rather than meticulously cleaning and carefully packing it up to send home.

Sadly though, that idea always seemed to be frowned upon, so there's always one last obligatory push to get everything neatly back into boxes before anyone can really let down their hair.

Despite warnings to the contrary from management about still having a serious job to do, people inevitably slip straight into holiday mode, the music's turned up and there's a 'last day of term' feeling throughout the garage.

The mischievous among the group come into their own at this point and no one's safe from the traditional round of practical jokes and schoolboy stunts that move throughout the pitlane like a wave.

If anyone's been foolish enough to announce they're leaving the team after the last grand prix of the year, they're pretty much guaranteed to be given some sort of 'send off' by their comrades.

I've seen people incapacitated with fear as Sunday night draws nearer and they're systematically reminded they're going to 'get it' come the end of the day, a fear that, from experience, is often wholly justified.

I've known people tied up to tyre trollies and covered in the week's left over food slops, before being wheeled along the pitlane in a ceremonial parade for other teams to come out and contribute their own disgusting additions to the festering cocktail.

I remember a mechanic being tied naked to the pitwall fence while the rest of the team unloaded their foam fire extinguishers at him and the rest of the pitlane stopped work to come out and cheer the process on.

In the days before health and safety became fashionable it was worse.

Cars have to be packed up one last time before the fun begins © XPB

One poor chap was bundled into a large industrial bin on wheels, together with the contents of a huge drum of gearbox oil and pushed at great speed around the paddock until colliding in a massive shunt with another poor victim getting exactly the same treatment by another team. Both eventually emerged from the overturned wreckage dazed and confused and stinking of nasty gearbox oil, but luckily not seriously injured.

Taking things to another level altogether, one particularly visual memory I have is of a young electronics engineer at Benetton who was leaving the team. Not only was he bound into an uncomfortably contorted shape on the pitlane floor outside their garages and covered with something horrible (an almost standard procedure by then) he was then encircled in a burning ring of fire by his 'mates' having lit a trail of flammable brake cleaner around him.

By the time the foam extinguisher had been emptied all over him and the flames were out, it became clear it was all a little too close for comfort as his hair was badly singed along with the edges of his team shirt!

The McLaren team has developed a tradition over the years of deploying the intense blue dye, used in the engine's coolant system for detecting leaks, to turn anyone leaving the team into a Smurf-like figure on the last night of the season.

It seems the stuff takes days to get off as I've seen many of Woking's finest boarding flights home the next day, still with distinct blue skin tones and the whites of their eyes not white at all. A very strange look.

Someone who left the team once told me they'd gone for a hearing test weeks later and was asked by a very confused audiologist how on Earth it could be possible that the inside of his ear drums had a strange blue hue?

These stunts aren't just reserved for the likes of mechanics and engineers, oh no. The drivers are as much a part of the team as anyone else and can be the butt of an end of term joke too.

I remember being at a private test in Spain in late December one year, where we were the only team present. Once we'd sent our driver out for what was going to be the last run of the test and the year, we quickly cleared whatever equipment we had in pitlane and packed everything into the garage and pulled down the doors.

Raikkonen was the victim of pranks when he left McLaren in 2006 © LAT

At the end of the run we all watched and listened in great amusement as our star driver entered a deserted and very long pitlane without any clue which garage was ours. After much shouting and swearing on the radio, he eventually gave up and abandoned the car a few garages away, before we all emerged wearing Christmas hats to go and get him.

Years ago I found myself gate crashing an impromptu party in the pitlane at the end of the night when Olivier Panis was leaving his team.

His team-mates had planned a nice presentation and speeches to thank him for his contributions, but all had descended into an enormous and unruly food fight, with members of various teams becoming involved.

I won't go into all the details, but suffice to say it all eventually ended when two people were taken to hospital, one with a cut head and the other with a broken arm and Olivier was left stranded at the circuit when the mechanics stole all four wheels from his hire car and left it up on bricks.

I also have it on good authority that when Kimi Raikkonen left McLaren, in order to ensure he didn't escape the team tradition, his mechanics put some of the aforementioned engine coolant dye into his gloves before the race, leaving him with bright blue hands when it was all over and he was waving goodbye to the team.

Of course today, things are a lot less raucous.

This is a highly professional sport, with highly professional people involved, but at the end of a very long season when those professionals have been under intense pressure and away from home for most of the year, the fall out can occasionally be quite spectacular...and a lot of fun.