© Toro Rosso
How do you interpret the sporting regulations?
“As Team Managers, we just don’t receive the regulations, we interact with the FIA to help write the regulations. There are sporting regulation meetings where we give ideas to Charlie [Whiting] and he gives us ideas… If a rule is taken on a whim, you know it is going to be discussed again and again. So we look at the information and then come back to Charlie and say ’We think this is a good one, or potentially it isn’t because it is going to be exploited in other areas and it is going to require another rule to be written’, etc. It is a two-way street. I know what the regulations will be a few months before the rest of the team, because I have been involved in the conversations.
“It is a double-edged sword, because you can take the sporting regulations as they are written, which the average person can understand. On the other hand, the teams are run at such a high level with some very clever people that are locked into them every single week, so they get exploited. Let’s take the example of the engine regulations. If you didn’t have these regulations in play, the engine manufacturers would run amuck. There wouldn’t be any control in enforcing what was meant to be a four-engine per season limit. They would bring a new engine to every race, because there would be no penalty. Unfortunately, all this came about in trying to keep some equality between teams that can afford to have a new engine at every race and those who can’t. Some might say that is just the way the world is, but we’re trying to make things fairer. I understand that sometimes the complexities can seem ridiculous. ”
© XPB Images
Did your role as Team Manager change after the cars became more complex in 2014?
“It’s something quite difficult to get your head around. When I was the number 1 mechanic, we had the V10 engine and we had three mechanics on the car. We had a composite technician, [hydraulic] technician and a gearbox technician: we could pretty much handle the work load between us in the time available. However, we didn’t have a curfew or the “parc fermé” so we could work on the car all night if we had to, and often we did. I can remember finishing up at three in the morning. Now, with the “parc fermé” and curfew, we have a situation where the workload is probably higher, but we have less time. We do less work during race week-end on the car than we would have done in the past.
“As the work we have to do these days is more complex and with less time, we try to cut down some things that are unnecessary. We will only have three engines for the next season, but when I was a number 1 mechanic, an engine might be used for just a session, so we would make the change and continue: one for Friday, one for Saturday morning, one for qualifying and another one for the race. Now we try to make an engine last for a weekend and some do make a change on Friday night. Today, the workload is more technically challenging. ”
© Toro Rosso
How do you work to improve pit stops?
“For the last three years Toro Rosso was one of the teams that struggled with pit stops. We were not very consistent, but the confidence of the guys is now high, and the equipment has improved. We talk with the design guys all the time about small things like the wheel nut design, the interaction between the wheel nut and the socket, the wheel rim over the actual drum; all these things have to be aligned or otherwise we just can’t do the pit stop times that we want to achieve.
“In 2010, the average time over the course of the season was 3.4, 3.5s and today they are between 2.6-2.8s. It is a small gain but requires huge amount of work. The guys put in training sessions and we did a full-year of mental training with a coach, to try to give them that feeling of how you cope with the mental pressure and how you relax.”
