ATLAS F1   Volume 6, Issue 41		Email to Friend   Printable Version
		Men of the Moment
		by Karl Ludvigsen, England

Who are the men who can most easily lose a race? The drivers? Engineers? Tacticians? No, it's the mechanics. Contemplate the incredible complexity of the modern Grand Prix car. Rule changes have eliminated some of that complexity, such as anti-lock brakes, V12 engines and active suspension, but what remains is pretty awesome. The cars are chock-full of pneumatic, electronic, hydraulic as well as mechanical systems. And who puts it all together? The mechanics. 'Finger trouble' is the engineer's phrase for a mechanic's mistake. It's demeaning, in my opinion, because it implies that a mechanic has been clumsy or inept or inattentive in putting something together. It could well be that the engineer has in fact created something that's damned hard to put together in a well-equipped and brightly-lit workshop at leisure, let alone in a pit garage thousands of miles from home by a jet-lagged mechanic. The Japanese have a concept called poka-yoke, used in car production, which means designing a mechanism so that it can't be assembled wrongly. In other words, the engineers as well as the mechanics have a responsibility to reduce 'finger trouble'. I'd say that 'finger trouble' is a lot rarer than it used to be. I commented earlier in the year on the impressive reliability of Formula One engines these days. They're bolted together with remarkable care by prodigiously skilled and well-trained mechanics. Of course, long gone are the days when Grand Prix engines would be dismantled and rectified at the track. Fangio once pulled the sump on his Maserati and refitted a bearing himself. Now we just bolt in a fresh motor when we have a practice failure, but even those are astonishingly rare. The mechanics deserve much of the credit. With the frequency of the races and the complexity of the cars the workload is tremendous. "I'm not sure what motivates the mechanics to keep going," said John Button, father of Jenson. "The workload is incredible. They'll work for two or three days with very little rest. I'm sure they've responded to Jenson's input; he has given 100 percent and so have they." He put his finger on much of what motivates them. Mechanics like to work for a driver who gets the most out of the equipment without abusing it, as Jenson has proven able to do, and did again in Japan. And then there are cars to repair. What are a mechanic's thoughts when he looks at a racing car carcass that a driver's error has reduced to virtual scrap? They are not always sympathetic, but he has to shrug and get on with the rebuild. "Michael didn't help us at the beginning of the season," said Ross Brawn in last week's excellent interview, "because we were a bit short on chassis at the first two races and he crashed at both those first two events, and we were desperately rebuilding chassis just to keep up." Brawn smiled when he said it, but who were the heroes doing the rebuilding? The mechanics. But in today's Formula One, the mechanics have the opportunity to do more. They have the chance to help their driver win, not just to make him lose. Pit stops put the skills and commitment of the mechanics on the front line, for everyone to see and appreciate. At Suzuka, in the second stops of the enthralling race that followed a nail-biting qualifying, time at rest was crucial. The Ferrari men got Schumi out in 6 seconds flat while McLaren's crew took 7.4 seconds for Mika. That's a difference of 1.4 seconds, an important chunk of Schumacher's winning margin of 1.8 seconds. All hail the winning mechanics! "The second pit stop for Mika and McLaren was the deciding factor in the fight for the world championship," admitted McLaren's Adrian Newey. Small wonder that Michael made sure he'd thanked all the mechanics warmly and individually before ascending to the podium. We have a new triple world champion, an achievement for which Ferrari's dedicated mechanics deserve immense credit.

Karl Ludvigsen	© 2000 Kaizar.Com, Incorporated.
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