On the face of it the oddly-monikered European Grand Prix in Baku just passed didn’t have a great deal going for it. But believe it or not, it actually contained something remarkable. Historic moreover. And not even the fluff about it being a new venue, beautiful city blah de blah (or even that whether the European Grand Prix was in Europe at all is a matter that can be debated…)
No, last Sunday the epoch making event took place, perhaps appropriately, when a car was stationary. For the eighth time from eight in 2016 Williams bagged the fastest pit stop time, and for the first time this year in Baku the team dipped under the 2 second mark, by switching Felipe Massa’s wheels in a scant 1.92.
It wasn’t actually the all-time record though, not on its own anyway, as it equalled Red Bull managing to service Mark Webber’s car in 1.923 seconds in Austin in 2013. Ferrari claims too it did a 1.85 second switch in Japan last year but the official time was slower.
But such wavering is appropriate, as while the pit stop in F1 hasn’t been a perennial as in American racing or sportscars, F1’s pit stop previous is perhaps still surprisingly variable. Rather than a gentle rise through time their use is actually one of conspicuous peaks and troughs.
F1’s pit stop previous is perhaps still surprisingly variable. Rather than a gentle rise through time their use is actually one of conspicuous peaks and troughs.
In 1950 when the F1 world championship started planned pit stops were actually also the norm then, but throughout the 1950s various changes resulted in them evaporating to almost literally nothing. When that decade started F1 races lasted 300 miles and the alcohol-fuelled engines had but a modest 1.5 miles to the gallon while a single set of tyres couldn’t make the distance either. But in 1952 F1 switched to F2 regulations with a limit of 2 litres for engines without supercharging (from 4.5 litres or 1.5 litres supercharged before) before settling on 2.5 litres in 1954. Races got shorter and rules for 1958 forced the use of petrol rather than alcohol, and it all combined to ensure that in time pit stops dropped out of the sport’s planning, only occurring in a Grand Prix if something went wrong. What the legendary scribe Denis Jenkinson called the ‘mickey mouse’ 1.5 litre engine era of 1961 onwards only tramped the dirt down over the planned stop further. Underlining that no one then envisaged an in-race change wheels were fixed on with five nuts and indeed a single set of tyres would sometimes do as many as three races. A long way from the modern day Pirelli… And while this was so, as the afore-mentioned Jenks described it, “the pits were merely signalling bases where a car headed for only if it was about to retire due to a mechanical failure”.
Even when larger engines – of 3 litres (or 1.5 litre turbocharged) this time – were introduced to the sport for 1966, and even after suppliers not long later introduced different tyres for different weather conditions, the old habits died hard. It remained the expectation that cars got through a race on one set of tyres and a full tank of fuel. And wheel changes of the time, on the rare occasions they were brought about perhaps by a change in weather or a puncture, look to the modern eye (or any eye for that matter) chaotic to the point of comedy. If you got the wheels changed within 45 seconds it was thought you were doing well. Many took considerably longer. F1 it seemed closed its eyes and ears determinedly to the slick drills that existed in the other motorsport forms mentioned.
But suddenly, and almost without anyone seeing it coming, there was a fork in the road. And with the modern F1 pit stop most roads lead to mid-1982, the Brabham team and its genius designer Gordon Murray.
With the modern F1 pit stop most roads lead to mid-1982, the Brabham team and its genius designer Gordon Murray.
Prior to the British round at Brands Hatch the squad was spotted at Donington Park practising nothing but pit stops. Then at Brands the cars appeared with large fuel inlets behind the roll bars and in-built air jacks. Come race morning a fuel rig, ovens to heat the tyres and a Day-Glo line painted from the fast lane to the ‘box’ could be spotted in the team’s pit and moreover all of the mechanics were kitted out in Brabham-coloured fireproofs. The clues were near enough overwhelming but still incredulousness lingered – rival driver Keke Rosberg for one muttered that it was in his view “a hoax”.
But no, for virtually the first time since the 1950s the pre-planned stop was to be part of an F1 race. There is a myth that the seed of this was planted in Murray’s mind by Alain Prost’s Renault in the season opener in South Africa that year stopping to change a punctured tyre then coming through to win, but not so. “It really was one of those brainstorm things” Murray said years later, “where you could work out how much 1lb of fuel cost you in lap time which of course they do every race now.
“I’d always thought about that because obviously I was trying to get the car as light as possible. I thought: you also get a degradation in the tyres. And I started doing some maps. It was all on paper, all mathematical…”
And with it too, for the first time since the 1950s an F1 team also brushed up on its tyre change drill. “I had done a lot of video work and practice with the crew on wheel changing to see how you could change wheels very quickly” Murray went on, “because in three and a half seconds you could get the fuel in. We got special wheel nuts and wheel pins, did all sorts of special things for the wheel changing. We trained the people like crazy”.
As an aside too, Murray also as part of the process invented the tyre warmer, as his initial calculations suggested that time lost from re-joining on stone cold rubber meant the strategy suddenly lost its potential gain.
Brabham’s poor reliability record meant its stops were hardly seen for the rest of the 1982 season, yet in 1983 not only was Brabham now a title contender but its stops quickly were honoured by imitation up and down the pit lane as their benefit became obvious. But Brabham as the only team to build its car around a half-size fuel tank due to being ahead of the game had an inherent advantage and took that year’s drivers’ title. But even by then, and indeed almost before it all begun, the whole shebang was being nipped in the bud. In the weeks after the ’82 season ended FISA (as the FIA’s sporting arm was then known) pushed through a raft of safety changes, most notably outlawing the lethal ground effect. Yet it also included too a ban on in-race refuelling, though curiously this part all alone was held off by a year, to come in for 1984. This, combined with who the Brabham team boss was (a certain B.C. Ecclestone), elicited some dark muttering. But whatever the ban perhaps was just as well, as in the 1983 season in Nigel Roebuck’s words, “some of the hideously primitive ‘refuelling devices’ used by the lesser teams had to be seen to be disbelieved. It was a time for keeping clear of the pits…”
Riccardo Patrese’s run to sixth place in the Benetton in Spa in 1993 doesn’t most readily spring to mind as being remarkable, but his 3.2 second tyre change that day was for years widely regarded as the record for a tyre change in anger.
But now with drill in place and their eyes opened even as ‘83 gave way to a refuelling-outlawed ’84 teams continued with the tyre change. And their time taken was whittled down over the years, from a good stop being around 8 seconds in 1984 to the very best teams getting down to half that or even better by 1993.
Riccardo Patrese’s run to sixth place in the Benetton in Spa that year doesn’t most readily spring to mind as being remarkable (just as much of Riccardo’s swansong season doesn’t), but in one way it was, as his 3.2 second tyre change that day was for years widely regarded as the record for a tyre change in anger. It probably isn’t entirely coincidence either that Pat Symonds, considered a master in F1 logistics and drill, was at Benetton then just as he’s at Williams now. The 1993 time seems particularly remarkable given it was also done without the various mod cons of the modern day (more of that anon).
But at that season’s end for whatever reason refuelling was brought back and this meant that the amount of fuel, rather than the wheel change, became the critical element in a stop’s length, particularly as the sport now had centrally-supplied rig equipment with a standard flow rate. There was therefore no incentive at all to shave the wheel change time, rather there was a disincentive given chasing that would not only use up precious resource but also risk introducing an error.
Arms were laid down, not taken up again until 2010 when refuelling again was knocked on the head. Meaning again the time of the wheel change became crucial. The teams in large part picked up where they left off almost two decades earlier, with four second stops the initial norm. In another odd occurrence it wasn’t really until the following season that the arms race to shave small amounts of time off the tyre change really began in earnest.
As ever each individual gain was small but they also were several and accumulative and added up to something remarkable, eventually as outlined to the effective halving of stop times in six years.
And while then Mercedes was underwhelming on the track (strange though it sounds now) it was the Brackley squad that took the lead in pit stop performance – though with an honourable mention to Red Bull which was not far behind. As early as the Chinese round in 2011 Merc managed to turn a car around in 2.82 seconds, and most were impressed.
And how? As ever each individual gain was small but they also were several and accumulative and added up to something remarkable, eventually as outlined to the effective halving of stop times in six years.
Traffic lights rather than a lollipop to minimise loss from reaction times (though that pre-dated 2010), swivel jacks to allow the jack man to get out of the way of the released car in advance, various improvements to the power of the wheel guns, wheel nuts that require fewer turns to tighten (three rather than the previously standard six), teams even have long since got the torque of the nut broken before the car has even stopped, in-rim wheel nuts that Mercedes brought in from DTM so errant nuts – once a common sight – cannot happen, Red Bull’s introduction of lasers to position mechanics’ hands perfectly for the wheels’ arrival, among many other things. Add to all of this, not least, plenty of analysis – gone are the days that teams just time stops, they’ve long since been filming them too, the ergonomics taken even to the level of accounting for which mechanics are left handed… Then there is fitness training – the routinely chiselled figure of an F1 mechanic tells you that story – and, of course, practice. Of course too, things that are seen to work quickly are copied by rivals.
Williams this year seems in the main to have continued the incremental gains in these sorts of areas. But in so far of what else the team’s doing to steal a march, observers have so far picked up a couple of things. One is splitting the role for checking other cars coming down the pit lane from the chief mechanic who checks that the front wheels are on. Now the former is the job of one extra individual who stands facing the fast lane where cars approach, almost with his back turned to his colleagues, and can override the traffic lights if needed. The other is that the driver and the front jack man get a simultaneous green light, so, in theory, the jack man reacts to release the car at the same time the driver does, meaning in Ted Kravitz’s words the team is “saving one person’s reaction time from the system”. Whatever is the case, results suggest its solutions have not quite been put into practice by its foes yet.
And I love it. For me the modern F1 pit stop, a host of individuals descending on a car in apparently perfect synergy, work unbelievably done in a blink of an eye, is something like poetry in motion. And it seems I’m not alone, as it surely is not chance that with what F1-themed television adverts there are so many of them use the pit stop as their basis. It’s even had its help for important things, such as news recently that Williams was using its learnings from pit stop drill to aid the resuscitation of newborn babies, another time critical task involving various people working in synchro.
For me the modern F1 pit stop, a host of individuals descending on a car in apparently perfect synergy, work unbelievably done in a blink of an eye, is something like poetry in motion.
Not everyone agrees that it’s all good though. I’ve heard from some who reckon it’s silly that so much effort goes into such marginal time gains, perhaps especially so in an age of financial strife in the sport (a lot of the stuff listed above hasn’t come cheap). And objections intensify after things go wrong, such as at the Nurburgring in 2013 when a wheel not attached properly to Webber’s Red Bull flew off and struck a cameraman. To some extent they have a point, as surely there is a saturation point close, when pit stops physically cannot get faster. Though then again this sport has a tendency to surprise itself – Ferrari claimed in 2012 indeed that stops quicker than 2.4 seconds weren’t foreseeable and 2.2 seconds was pretty much a no-no…
Often such voices refer to other series such as WEC and Indycars wherein there are maximum numbers of crew allowed to service the car, while some may favour a minimum pit stop time a la Formula E.
I sincerely hope F1 doesn’t do anything like that though. For one thing I always think stops in those other series cited just look terrible. Apparently lonely and disparate mechanics scuttling around the car doing the jobs seemingly of several, the stops look almost amateurish. They’re not of course, but I often wonder what someone uninitiated must think. “Can they not afford more people?” It’s nonsense as outlined, but as the slave philosopher Epictetus said in the first century, “Perceptions are facts because people believe them”.
And, bottom line, I’ve never understood why they would be safer beyond the base fact that there are fewer around to be hit if something does go wrong. As I recall being said just after the Webber incident mentioned, it doesn’t matter if there are 200 or two in a pit stop crew, if the last person in the chain triggers early there is a risk of the worst happening. It has been argued in response that very rarely in the two series mentioned do wheels go astray after stops but to touch upon a point already made that may owe something to them both have refuelling which takes much of the time pressure off the wheel change.
In any case on the safety matter the teams organising the stop have a happy and highly effective self-defence mechanism. They perhaps are the biggest bulwark against errors, as they have the most immediately pressing incentive not to have things go wrong even occasionally, even once a season, given it will ruin a race at a stroke. Ask anyone in charge of the drill and they will confirm that consistency and the average pit stop time over an extended period, say a season, is always taken over chasing an ultimate solitary best mark on the watch with an accompanying risk that something will go wrong. “The most important thing is to keep up with a good average” said Ferrari’s head of trackside operations, Diego Ioverno in 2012, “because in the end the importance of a pit stop is to guarantee a fixed time delta to whoever does the strategy, avoiding surprises and the risk of falling behind traffic after a stop.”
Think about the pit stop. All innovation; technology; team work – in the voracious pursuit of accumulative time saving so to establish a competitive edge. Surely it is as close as it gets to the sport’s most lasting and deeply-held principles.
Merc’s chief strategist James Vowles in 2011 agreed. “Consistency is more important than being frantic for the best overall time” he said. “If we really pushed it, I am sure there could be a few more tenths found in an out-and-out perfect stop, but ultimately that is not what gains you points in a race.”
We can argue also all day of course about the knotted matter of ‘what F1 is’. But think about the pit stop. All innovation; technology; team work – in the voracious pursuit of accumulative time saving so to establish a competitive edge. Surely it is as close as it gets to the sport’s most lasting and deeply-held principles. It may not be coincidence either that it also is one of the few parts of F1 not yet constrained a great deal by regulation, with almost no outside effort to keep a lid on what you can do. And in the modern sport about the only time we get that is when the car is stationary. Surely, once again, there is a metaphor in there.
