The Mechanic’s Tale

by Steve Matchett

  As engineers, both Barnard and Brawn could appreciate these mechanical concerns perhaps far more that the aerodynamicists; certainly the 1991 and later Benettons seem to suggest this. In Formula One, everything is a compromise.

  The biggest advancement on the B192 (apart from the introduction of two-piece brake ducts) was the installation of the front dampers. They were mounted on top of the chassis and covered by an easily removable carbon panel. As far as Benetton was concerned, this was a major breakthrough. The B190 had dampers mounted inside the chassis, in an X-pattern: the bottom-mounting of the right damper attached to the left of the chassis, the left damper to the right of the chassis, allowing the driver’s legs to pass underneath. Access to the springs was gained by the two holes in the chassis where the top mountings of the dampers attached to the push-rods. All very awkward.

  The B191 was even worse, but there was good reason for it. The 1991 car had the dampers running parallel and above the drivers’ legs. Gaining access to them in order to change the springs, the bump-rubbers or the ride-height involved the rather intimate business of sticking one’s arms in between the driver’s legs and groping around, unable to see, with one’s head resting in the driver’s lap. All rather undignified. The reason for this was that John Barnard had originally intended the B191 to be an active car. Hence, after the actuators had been initially fitted at the factory, there would have been no need to adjust them during the practice and qualifying sessions; all that would have been done via an engineer’s computer. However, as we now know, the B191 was late coming into production and the active programme was shelved in order to try and meet the immovable deadlines of the season. The solution was to fit dampers and springs instead of hydraulic actuators, temporarily turning the suspension into a passive system, but because of all the political upheaval it was a temporary solution which lasted for the entire life of the car.

  On the B192, having the dampers mounted atop the chassis was bliss. No further need to stick one’s head inside the cockpit, only to hear Nelson fart and have to listen to him crack up with laughter while one was delving in between his legs, unable to move for fresh air for fear of dropping the spring or a bolt inside the chassis. What a relief! Thankfully, Nelson’s replacement, Martin Brundle, never struck me as the sort of chap who would expel gas on to his mechanics but, nevertheless, being able to readily see and adjust the dampers and not having to blindly grope between the driver’s legs made for altogether more dignified working conditions.

  Oddly – despite its rather unsavoury side effects – the fact that someone can possess the ability to pass wind almost on cue has always struck me as being quite a talent. I remember reading somewhere that many years ago, around the turn of the century, a Frenchman became so good at it that he managed to produce his own stage show entirely based on that very skill. Apparently, he became famous throughout the music halls of Paris and as his fame spread, people would pack the theatres to listen to his nightly performances, where – using just the lower half of his body – he would recreate amusing incidents of daily French life. What a curious evening’s entertainment.

  With all the comings and goings throughout the latter months of 1991, the development of the B192 was considerably behind schedule, something which was only to be expected as the design of the following year’s car normally begins in June or July of the previous season. So, knowing that we had lost over six months’ design time, the decision was taken to start the season with the 1991 car and introduce the B192 as soon as it was feasible to do so. The B191 was used for the first three races, the long-haul, intercontinental ‘fly-aways’ of South Africa, Mexico and Brazil. The car was renamed the B191B (although, as far as I can remember, there were no significant changes made to it to really warrant the B suffix). Certainly it was sound logic to use the old car for these three long-distance races; when the team is out of practical reach of the factory, they want a car that they are familiar with, that they thoroughly understand and that, above all else, is going to be reliable. When you’re stranded in the middle of South America, having new-car teething problems can be a terrifying prospect. When racing in Europe the teams can easily have new parts machined and flown out to them within the space of a few hours of encountering a problem at the circuit, but when encamped on the opposite side of the planet, things aren’t that easy.

  This gradual phasing-in of new cars was something that was quite common at one time: for example, Benetton issued the B190 in Imola, the third race of the season; the B191 was introduced at Imola too; the B192 in Barcelona; and as we mentioned earlier, Williams didn’t bother issuing a new car in 1992 at all. But the constant rule changes that the sport has been undergoing since 1994 have meant that it has proved impossible to continue with such a useful policy. A car that was built to the 1994 rules was outside the 1995 regulations, therefore the B195 cars were unable to be raced the following year (the same thing happened in 1996, 1997, etc.). The 1992 season might not have brought Benetton or our drivers any championships, but it wasn’t a disaster by any means. We were making progress, and we finished the year with a third place in the Constructors’ Championship, just nine points behind McLaren.

  Martin Brundle didn’t win a race during his year with us in 1992. In fact, he failed to win a race throughout the whole of his Formula One career. However, he should have done, there’s no doubt about that at all. He was good, he had the talent, but it just never quite happened for him and that was a great shame. He did everything right but sometimes that just isn’t enough. In Canada he most certainly should have won. He was comfortably reeling in Berger’s McLaren and the race looked to be in the bag; but then we experienced an incredibly rare mechanical failure: a bolt broke in the transmission and destroyed the diff’. It was a most bizarre fault caused by a slight machining error, one missed by the machinist, the inspection department and the gearbox mechanic. A rare fluke, but we lost a Grand Prix victory because of it. I suppose that for Benetton it was a case of good fortune and bad fortune in Montreal, remembering Nelson’s lucky win there the year before. You win some, you lose some, but that philosophy was scant consolation for Martin Brundle’s valiant and wasted efforts. For reasons which I won’t ever understand, he was replaced at the end of the season by Riccardo Patrese from Williams.

  My defence of Martin is in no way a condemnation of the arrival of Riccardo, who was another terrific character, but I just do not understand why we had to lose Brundle. He wasn’t as quick as Schumacher (but then none of Michael’s team-mates ever have been) and this hurt his qualifying performances, but in the race he was very useful. Martin has great ‘race craft’, the ability to preserve the car, to take care of the tyres, to conserve fuel and not to take stupid chances in the early laps. We scored points in every race of 1992, which was due to having bright, intelligent drivers who thought about what they were doing. Schumacher’s team-mate was replaced every year until he finally left to join Ferrari, a situation I didn’t agree with. What the team needed was a competent, stable partner for Michael, one who could constantly bring the car and the points home. Let Schumacher battle for the Drivers’ Championship while his team-mate keeps racking up the extra points for the Constructors’ Championship. However, it wasn’t my decision and Martin left us after Adelaide.

  Martin had great rapport with Pat Fry, his engineer. He would describe the handling of the car in the most extraordinary ways to Pat, using terms like ‘wishy-washy’ and ‘speedboaty’.

  ‘I just can’t get on it!’ he would say, ‘It’s all wishy-washy, I just can’t get on it, it’s like a speedboat!’ Another memorable line was, ‘I feel like the car’s riding on the track, not in it, I need to get into the track more!’ Pat would listen and scribble copious notes, translating his driver’s colourful descriptions into mathematical percentages of understeer and oversteer, and calculating possible solutions to reduce the car’s speedboatiness. Martin is quite aware of the technicalities of car set-up, it’s just that he loved to play the game with Pat.
In Adelaide, the last race of the season, he finally had Pat completely stumped. The mechanics had primed Martin before the practice session and he carried it off flawlessly. After completing a five-lap run in the car, Martin returned to the garage to discuss the need for any changes. As we pulled the car back inside the garage, Pat keyed his radio and asked Martin how the car felt.

  ‘I just can’t drive it, Pat, it’s way too stage-coachy!’

  ‘Sorry, I think I missed that, Martin, say again.’

  ‘It’s way too stage-coachy, we’ll have to do something.’

  ‘Sorry Martin, did you say “stage-coachy”?’

  ‘Yes, you know, much too like a stage-coach!’

  ‘Yes, I understand that stage-coachy must mean taking on the characteristics of a stage-coach, Martin. It’s just that I haven’t got the faintest idea what on earth you’re talking about!’

  Michael Schumacher had been improving his form constantly throughout the year and had stood on the podium no less than eight times. Four thirds, three seconds and on 30 August, at the circuit Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, exactly one year after his Formula One debut, he took his maiden Grand Prix victory. He was elated, we all were, but I have never seen a driver so absolutely ecstatic at his achievement. He didn’t weep in the way that Moreno did in Japan, he was simply utterly elated. For Roberto, Japan was an unbelievable result, something that he never expected, but for Michael winning a Grand Prix was always coming; we didn’t know exactly when, and if it wasn’t Spa, then it may have been Barcelona or Hockenheim or Monza or Adelaide, but it was coming.

  His rapture at winning that race is something that he has continued to show with every successive win. Here is a man who delights in winning and takes no win for granted. He understands that to cross the finish-line ahead of all the others involves a massive amount of effort – effort by the whole team, as well as the driver – a simple fact that some other drivers have clearly forgotten. On the occasion of that first win, as with each of his subsequent wins, Michael’s sheer happiness is recognition of all that team effort, from the work of the fabricators, the machinists, the composite specialists, the electricians, the mechanics and the drawing office. The toil of hundreds is reflected in the utter joy of his podium celebrations.

  On returning to the garage he shook everyone by the hand, thanking us all individually for our help, another genuine show of appreciation that would continue with each subsequent win. I have never felt such an integral part of a team than when working with Michael and sharing in the pleasure of one of our victories.

  As the crowds bulged from the circuit gates and we began packing equipment in to the back of the race trucks, Michael changed out of his overalls. He waved us farewell and set off on a bicycle, his victor’s trophy strapped to the back, to meet his parents who were staying in one of the local hotels. As he pedalled off, weaving up the steep hill leading out from the La Source hairpin, the road was still bustling with people making their way home. Michael gradually disappeared out of sight, ringing his bell, gently turning left and right, avoiding the small groups that were slowly plodding up the road. What a marvellous sight. Here was Michael Schumacher, the winner of the Spa Grand Prix, cycling among the dispersing crowds, off to show his mother and father his new trophy. The people, most with their backs towards him, had no idea who this bloke on the bicycle was, or why he was making off with what they must have assumed to be a cheap replica of the winner’s trophy.

  How times have changed! These days, Michael can’t move without being recognized and if he ever decided to try to cycle off in Monza with the winner’s cup, I imagine he’d need to be surrounded by at least half the Italian police force.

  1993 – Chapter Six

  A note for future historians – Moving into the new

  factory – Formula One’s geographical relocation – Patrese

  arrives – Mansell bows out – Active suspension –

  Semi-automatic transmissions – A world record is set

  in Spa – Nuñes wins in Estoril

  The long hours, the all-nighters and the hectic workloads that we are sometimes forced to endure are terrible facets of work in Formula One, and at times it felt as if we were little more than slave labour. However, I’ve always thought that the pay I received in return for all my hard work was fair, but if my gross annual salary was divided by all the hours worked and expressed as an hourly rate, it begins to look like pretty poor remuneration. I’ve been jotting down a record of my earnings, from that first pay packet as an indentured apprentice onward, and I’ve continued to do this, year by year. I have always kept letters which refer to my wages and have included them to add a little further colour. However, one thing is certain, times are changing. It won’t be long before the need for mechanics will evaporate. I strongly suspect that within the space of another fifty or sixty years our skills will have become redundant, and just like the longbow maker, the knight’s page, the roof thatcher and the barrel cooper, the mechanic will become near extinct, part of history.

  I don’t think I’m overstating the situation either. Take this book for example: I’m writing it on a notebook computer (I still want to call it a laptop), powered by a 200MHz Pentium processor with MMX (apparently the MMX bit makes it much more fun), it’s just over twelve months old and it cost me nearly £2000 – an awful lot of money, but a necessary investment which, hopefully, I can recoup with my advance from Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (I just hope Marilyn, my editor, likes what she reads or I’m sunk.) In 2001, the start of the next century which is only a couple of years away, this machine will seem like a fossilized artefact, nothing short of a whimsical curiosity. Compared with what will then be the latest machine, this one will be akin to scrawling on slate with a wedge of chalk. Within three weeks of buying my machine, ‘voice recognition’ software was on the market, and shortly after that I noticed that a 266MHz model was available. The other day a 333MHz machine was advertised in The Times for less than half what I paid nearly a year before! If that trend continues, sometime in the next century you’ll be able to buy a 1,000,000MHz (should that be 1000GHz?) machine for less than the price of a cup of tea; that can’t be right, can it?

  Here we are in the very closing stages of the second millennium, with major, almost daily, advancements in microchip electronics screaming past us. I don’t think I’m being techno-phobic but I’m sure that some current traditional trades such as working as a Navy jet-fighter pilot or a NASA shuttle-craft astronaut, or a Formula One Grand Prix mechanic, will soon be memories of a bygone era. Hopefully the need to blast each other with air-to-air missiles will soon become rather passé anyway, and all cargo aircraft will be flown by remote, as will the vast majority of spacecraft, with much of the colonization of other planets achieved by embryo transportation and genetic engineering.

  And as for race cars, they will quite probably be subject to a total world-wide ban; either that or they will be constructed from a single piece of composite material, with an in-built magnetic repulsion system which allows them to hover precisely 10mm above an electronic track (though, I suppose, the engineers would still want to lower the front float-height by half a millimetre to improve that niggling bit of mid-corner under-steer). Many hundreds of technically skilled professions will simply no longer be required. In fact, I reckon the only safe job to be specializing in at the moment is head chef of a good tan-doori restaurant. Both now and in another two hundred years’ time, people are always going to want a well prepared chicken tikka.

  I once tried converting my salary into an hourly rate while enduring a long session of Terminal Boredom. We were in Heathrow waiting for the flight which would eventually take us to Japan for the penultimate round of the 1992 Championship. I fished out my ancient calculator, held together with several strips of ageing Sellotape, and added up the total number of hours we had worked, both preparing the cars at the factory and servicing them at the circuits throughout the course of the year (one chap always kept a meticulous log of all hour
s worked). Armed with this information I then divided the sum into my annual salary in order to break it down to an hourly rate. I was expecting to see a figure smaller than the legal minimum wage, and was all ready to start complaining that we would be financially better off working the same number of hours for McGrizzler’s or Cheeseburger Yourself Solid.

  In fact, I was getting quite excited at the prospect of unveiling the injustice of it all, already imagining a series of organized protest marches breaking out as hordes of mechanics from every team in the pit-lane banded together, walking arm-in-arm, placards held aloft, singing loud and rousing choruses (one or two chaps just slightly out of tune with the rest), the air thick with the scent of rebel spirit. A little fanciful, but there must have been a possibility that a scenario similar to that – even if somewhat tamer – might have occurred as a result of my calculations, but when I pressed the ‘equals’ button I was more than a little mystified to see the figure 71077345 faintly flickering from the little screen. What was I supposed to make of that? Was that a low hourly rate, or a good one? The thing about calculators is that they never bother to give an explanation for their findings, they merely publish, wait a few minutes, and then quickly switch themselves off. I looked at the calculator wondering what I should conclude from its results and noticed that if you held the thing upside down the numbers spelt out the words SHELL OIL. However, that in itself didn’t throw any real light on the hourly rate issue. I tried to work the sum again but, sadly, the calculator’s days were over, the yellowing Sellotape finally gave way and several bits of it fell to the airport floor. A shame really, I’d had it for years and my tentative plans for any Great March had to be quickly suppressed. Nevertheless, the day wasn’t a complete disaster by any means, and I think the exercise was worth doing just to see the Shell Oil thing.