How to Be an F1 Driver

by Jenson Button

  Lastly, let’s spare a thought for the poor sod leading, because if you’re out in front, a safety car is the worst thing ever. You hate it with a passion, it’s horrible. Not only does the gap close, but the chances are you will have been on a completely different strategy. So you might be on tyres that are much older than the car in second – he’s on a two-stop strategy, you’re on a one-stop strategy – you might even have had a 30-second lead on him, but he’s just pitted, come out with new tyres, he’s 30 seconds behind, and then a safety car comes so the gap closes up and he’s now right behind you on brand-new tyres and you’re screwed, basically.

  8. PIT STOPS, FUEL, ETC.

  Shanghai, 2011. In testing, we at McLaren had performed practice pit stops, as was usual. The only thing was that in practice the crew had been wearing black, but for the race itself they had changed into silver suits.

  I knew that they’d changed, of course. It’s not like they crept off in secret to do it – an amusing trick to play on Jenson. But the fact that they had changed suits had momentarily slipped my mind, what with me being busy driving eight million dollars’ worth of car at over 200mph, leading the race with Sebastian’s Red Bull in second, and then being called in to pit, slowing down to the pit limit of 50mph under considerable G and braking for the line, and… Pulled up short into Sebastian’s box, which was first along the pit lane, because Red Bull had won the Championship the previous year.

  Worse still, Sebastian was trying to pit behind me. All credit to Red Bull, they saw what I’d done, reacted quickly and waved me through into the right pit box.

  Believe me, it is easily done. Like I say, you’re braking, you’re looking up for the pit box, expecting to see a certain colour, and you don’t realise that the reason they’re standing there with a trolley ready and waving at you is not actually for you but for Sebastian behind – and so you pull up.

  But I was mortified, and no doubt very unpopular with Sebastian and Red Bull as a result. To make up for it I shall now provide them with a free advertisement. Red Bull… gives you wings.

  Mind you, any popularity with Sebastian and Red Bull was temporary. Because of what we shall now call the Pit Stop Bollock Drop, he was able to get out of the pits first. Next thing you know, Lewis pitted on the next lap, selected the correct pit box and got out in front of me as well. So I was third.

  All in all, it was a little bit frustrating and embarrassing – more embarrassing than anything else. Some bloke even did a ‘should have gone to Specsavers’ parody on YouTube.

  Why do you pit? Because you need a new wing or new tyres, or a change of tyres because of degradation. That could be because you want to use wet or dry or try a different composition. I should mention the little doohickeys they have to tell whether you’ve got enough tread on the tyre to last the race. They can monitor to see if you’re going to get through to the canvas of the tyre, which is the underpinning of the tyre, before the end of your stint, and be like, Hang on, you’ve got to take it easier on that tyre, because you’re going to destroy it.

  Hopefully, it won’t ever get that far, of course, because when it gets to the canvas, you have no grip whatsoever and as a safety precaution Pirelli will say no, you’ve got to pit.

  For most of my career, you might also be pitting for fuel, which is one of those things that has required various different strategies throughout the years.

  Some people would start with a full tank, 100kg of fuel; some would start with 50kg of fuel, which on the one hand made you much quicker, but on the other meant that you were going to have to pit earlier and maybe more frequently.

  It was one of those great things that you could do to make your race fun or if you found yourself starting in tenth. Like, you could make it more interesting by doing a one-stop race when you knew that other people were doing a two-stop because nobody wanted to start with full tanks, but you risked it because the one-stop works and if you’re starting in tenth then what do you have to lose? Apart from making a fuel of yourself. (See what I did there?)

  There was also a period where you had to use any fuel you had in the car. You filled up, did your qualifying and then afterwards everyone found out how many laps of fuel you had left for the race itself, a bit like pinning test results on the board at school.

  So let’s say if you did qualifying with 40kg left in the tank, that’s what you’d start the race with. So if you qualified on pole with 40kg but the guy behind you had qualified with 60kg, it’d be all, ‘Uh oh,’ because that would be an extra ten laps he could do on his fuel. You’d be quicker to start the race, but he might have to stop less than you.

  That was really good. I really enjoyed that type of racing, it was fun doing qualifying, which was great anyway, and then afterwards you’d be waiting for the results to come in, saying, ‘Oh, bollocks’, because your rival’s got five more laps’ worth of fuel than you. We’d base our strategies around it. We’d have to coincide refuelling with tyre changes, so if we knew that our tyres would be destroyed after ten laps, you only put ten laps of fuel in.

  Now, they don’t stop at all for fuel. Mid-race refuelling was banned for good in 2010 as a safety precaution, which is a bit of shame – Google ‘Kimi Räikkönen pit-stop fire 2009’ for at least part of the reason why. Basically, you just change tyres during a pit stop, which is a bit boring in my book. How many times we stop depends, but normally it’s the same for teammates. So if, for example, Mercedes get off the line in Barcelona, and they’re one–two, the guy in second is probably going to finish second, because he’s not going to be able to overtake his teammate by using a different strategy – he won’t be allowed, which takes away strategy and excitement. And, of course, if the two drivers do end up on different strategies, then there are ructions.

  Case in point: Barcelona, 2009, the Spanish Grand Prix. I went off the line, but was overtaken by Rubens, my teammate. At the beginning of the race we were both on a three-stop strategy because that, according to the strategists, was the best, quickest strategy, but having been overtaken by my teammate, I was in the mood to try something different and got on the radio to the team.

  ‘Okay,’ they said, ‘ditch the three-stop strategy, we’ll let you try two. You’ll be slower, because you’ll be heavier, but you won’t have to stop three times, you’ll just stop twice. The strategists say you’ll still finish second.’

  ‘I want to take the risk,’ I said.

  The idea was that instead of getting 50kg, I’d get 90kg. ‘Look after the tyres,’ they advised, ‘be consistent, keep up your lap times, see what you can do.’

  And I did, and I ended up winning by 13 seconds. Fortune, as they say, favours the brave and it was a risk – a gamble that relied on me being able to keep up fast lap times and on Rubens perhaps slowing down a little.

  Afterwards, however, Rubens was a little miffed. He’d been with Ferrari when Ferrari had unabashedly given Michael Schumacher number one status and was making all sorts of noises about jumping ship if a similar situation arose again. Who could blame him? Any suspicion that there were team orders in play must surely have been put to rest by the fact that he got past me in the first place, though.

  These days you can start with a maximum of 100kg of fuel. But say you run 90kg of fuel, you’re going to be quicker, because 10kg of fuel is worth three-tenths per lap. In other words, if you’re able to run only 90kg in the race instead of 100kg, every lap will be three-tenths quicker.

  So that’s good on the one hand. But then you have to play the percentages. You’ll need to save fuel by braking early and lifting off for some corners, and hope that it adds up to enough that you’ve got sufficient fuel for the end of the race.

  When I won Suzuka in 2011, I had basically run out of fuel. I had two laps to go and they said, ‘You’re not going to make it, you’re not going to make it, you have to lift everywhere.’

  At this stage I had a ten-second lead, but now I was having to go easy on brakes and throttle in order to conserve fuel, being su
per-aware that behind me Fernando in a Ferrari was closing the gap.

  Sweating.

  Arse cheeks clenched as tight as my teeth.

  And I crossed the line in first with a half-second lead and immediately ran out of fuel.

  Mind you, the team don’t come right out and tell you how you’ve got to handle your fuel. We’re well aware that people are listening in, so they use code, so it’s like ‘Fuel One’, ‘Fuel Two’, ‘Fuel Three’, and so on.

  ‘Fuel One’ would be, You have to brake 20 metres later at turn one, turn seven and turn 12.

  ‘Fuel Two’ would be, You have to brake 20 metres later at turn one, five, seven, nine and thirteen, and then ‘Fuel Three’ would be, You’ve got to lift off 50 metres for every corner.

  And because you’re saving fuel, you’re also looking after the tyres and the brakes, so sometimes you don’t actually go much slower. It’s judging what’s better for overall lap time, what’s better for overall race distance.

  Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed that part of it. The problem was that the Honda engine was a bit thirsty, so we would use more fuel than other people. So sometimes we’d fill the tank up completely and still would have to save fuel every lap.

  I remember at Melbourne 2015, the first year we used a Honda engine at McLaren, I was working so hard to conserve fuel that I ended up finishing two laps down. I was braking so far ahead of the 100-metre braking board that I was just floating into corners. It’s a weird feeling.

  Incidentally, if you did a double-take at the thought of other teams listening in to our talkback, then I’ve got news for you: it happens all the time. Of course, the broadcasters are able to listen to all of the teams’ radio chatter all of the time, if they so please, but so can the teams. (Or, I should say, they certainly used to – because I’m sure it doesn’t happen now.)

  It was awesome – you’d hear all the secret stuff. They brought in people who could hack the radios, but nobody seemed to mind because we were all doing it; it was like an open secret in the sport.

  Same with the spies. All the teams would have cameramen walking down the pit lane pretending to be fans and getting pictures in the garage of the new parts of the car and things like that.

  These guys would stand, like, 50 metres away and still be able to get pictures that looked as though they were standing right next to the car. We used to have people looking out for them, who would then stand in their way. They soon worked out who were the genuine fans and who were the spies.

  I remember a time with Brawn when we were debuting a new car, and we’d pull the garage shutters down, put screens up. Some of the photographers were pretty shameless, they’d just dangle their camera over the top of the screens and click away in the (usually vain) hope of catching something useful. At some of the circuits – Barcelona, for example – they have balconies above the garage and so the photographer would station themselves on those, lean over and snap away.

  They’d pretend to be press photographers, of course. After a while the whole practice got a bit out of hand, and so the teams and the media came to an understanding that any pictures would have to include personnel. So what you had then was the driver standing in front of the car, arms folded, doing his driver pose, cameraman clicking away.

  And then you’d see the camera lens move a little as the cameramen tried to get whatever part he’d been asked to focus on. And the driver would see, and he’d subtly alter his position to cover up the interesting part. So the cameraman, under the guise of trying to get a fresh angle or a different shot would crouch and move, and the driver would shift again, and the whole time they’ve both got these fixed grins, going through the motions. It was hilarious.

  Which brings us back to pit stops. In NASCAR they have specific pit-stop guys, whereas in F1 the mechanics who are working night and day on the cars are also doing the pit stops. It’s amazing and it’s become quite a competition between teams. You get the fastest pit-stop award: two seconds to change four tyres.

  Things are different again in Super GT, where we come in, they plug in and the car goes up on its own, raised by internal jacks.

  So in F1 you’ve got the lollipop there, which stops you, or lights, and then the car goes up on the jack thanks to the trolley man, plus the tyres are heavier and difficult to manoeuvre, and they’re still doing two-second pit stops. It’s staggering. It really does put the team in the formula, because it’s the one time that we as drivers are very literally bystanders, or bysitters, if you want to be pedantic about it. These guys have to stand in the pit lane with a car hurtling towards them and then do the job in two seconds flat, running the risk of being lampooned as a bunch of hapless slow-coaches if they take any longer than that.

  Meanwhile, as drivers all we have to do is stop in the right pit box – and like I say, we don’t always get that right.

  9. WEATHER

  I’ve already sung the praises of the garage crew, so let’s hear it for some more of the unsung heroes of Formula One: the strategists. Whatever these guys get paid they’re worth more, because it’s a tough job and all they get is shit for it.

  What do they do? Good question. Dunno. Okay, I do. What they do is run different scenarios and base strategies upon it and from these they’ll form a race strategy that they present to you, the driver, and your race engineer.

  Typically, you’ll have two strategists at the circuit and then a load more back at base, and between them they run the race something like 800 times, conjuring differing race strategies based on each scenario: what would happen if you pitted on Lap 14, if you pitted on Lap 20, if you pitted on Lap 25? What would happen if you had this much more pace compared to the cars around you, or they were this much quicker than you? Where would you finish?

  No kidding, the sheer volume of differing possibilities they run through is unreal. What you’ll do, how you’ll do it, whether or not an escaped giraffe will maraud through the paddock. You’re in awe.

  ‘Right, JB,’ they’ll announce eagerly, as though about to give you the greatest gift in the world, ‘if the race runs smoothly and you have the pace we expect you to have, you’re going to finish… eighth.’

  And you’re like, ‘Great. Eighth. That’s… great.’

  Or else they’ll say, ‘We’ve run the race a zillion times and you should win by ten seconds, easy,’ and you gulp because the pressure’s on but at least you have a chance of winning, before they add, ‘But that’s if everything goes to plan, because if X happens, you won’t win.’ The idea being that they’re ready for anything, every possible scenario.

  This is all ‘in theory’, of course, because as we all know – and in fairness, so do the poor old strategists, whose entire existence is one long procession of thwarted outcomes and unexpected resolutions – life has a pesky way of not sticking to the script. Things never turn out the way you expect, because nothing ever goes to plan. As a strategist you can legislate for your own driver (and even then…) but not for all the other drivers on the grid.

  And what they also find most difficult to predict, of course, is the weather. Like all of us they’re looking at the weather forecast, and like the rest of us they’re wondering if it’s going to do what it’s supposed to do.

  In certain circuits it rains from only one direction, which is quite weird. Fuji, if you see the clouds over the volcano Mount Fuji, and they’re dark clouds, you know it’s going to rain in a certain amount of time, which is quite funny. All the Japanese know that, nobody else does.

  Other races, if it’s cloudy in a certain area, you know it’s going to rain. Spa’s like that, too. The teams station guys at turn five, all the way down the back straight, which is about 2.5kms away from the pit lane and garages, and they stand there just to keep an eye on the weather, because that’s the direction the weather will come from, and if they say it’s starting to rain, then you know it’s going to be coming down properly in ten minutes.

  Tell you this much, though, one way of knowing that you’re
at a Grand Prix, apart from the noise, the stands, the sponsorship, is that a lot of people in branded polo shirts will be looking up at the sky.

  Myth: People think I prefer it in the wet.

  Truth: Even though, I’m probably better in the wet I still prefer it to be dry.

  I think the fact is that I just deal with the wet better than others. Apart from my second-to-last race in 2016, which I’ll come to, I get excited when it starts raining because I know that we can mess around with the strategy and try different things.

  The other extreme is unbelievably hot like, unbelievably hot, melting the tyres almost. Those are tough races, Bahrain is always very hot. But perhaps the hottest I ever recall was one time in Germany. It was 40 degrees. Celsius.

  As drivers we were having freezing cold water poured on the veins of our arms (pro tip: cold water on the veins cools you down); we were wearing cool vests; we were keeping our heads wetter than a baptised baby’s; we were drinking lots and staying hydrated; we had people holding umbrellas over our heads, wafting little handheld fans at us and singing songs of glaciers and polar bears; we had literally the whole team focused on keeping us cool.

  And the poor grid girls were dropping like flies in the heat.

  As for the race, it makes it very different, because you really have to be careful with the tyres. Most of the time your problem is keeping the heat in your tyres but in heat like that the opposite is true because they overheat very quickly, and while you might think that a hot tyre being a sticky tyre equals A Good Thing, it’s not if gets too hot and it blisters, then you get chunks of it flying off, you’re sliding everywhere and you’d have to pit for new tyres. That particular race in Germany ended up being a four-stop race for most of us.

  In the heat you’ll move towards the harder of the tyres that you’re allowed to use, because they blister less and are better in the heat. We test different tyres at different temperature ranges, so we know that such and such a tyre will work in 25 degrees circuit temp, this one’s 40 degrees circuit temp. Even though it may be the same compound, it will work differently with different temperatures.