What’s it like to work for an F1 team?

Ever wondered what it’s like to work for a Formula 1 team? F1 Fanatic reader Paul Darby has been there and done that with McLaren in the 1990s. Read about his experience in this guest post.

I was working at PC World in Southampton, selling fantastically over priced PCs with even more ludicrously stupid insurance.

I was also working on an HNC in business and IT. Well, I saw an advert for a ‘Design Support Administrator’ at TAG Electronics Systems – part of the TAG/McLaren group and I thought “what the hell, I’ll give it a go.”

To sort out any misunderstanding: TAG Electronics is now known as McLaren Electronc Systems I believe. They used to create the electronics systems, telemetry software and System Monitor (the software sat on the laptop that they plug into the car) sensors, injectors and various other stuff for various racing teams, not just McLaren.

At the time the teams they were supplying included Sauber, TWR (who ran Arrows), Jordan and of course McLaren. But on top of this they supplied other formulae such as GT1 cars. Todays fans of F1 will probably be aware of them because they are supplying the single ECU to all the cars on the grid.

Anyway, I got the job somehow and took on the job of managing all faults, change requests, licence requests and other rather dull administration roles such as these. It was interesting at times: I was privy to seeing and tracking the fault reports that were coming back from F1 tests etc.

One particularly good one occured at a Jordan test with Damon Hill in the car. If I remember rightly he was hurtling along at about 150mph when his ECU dropped him into first gear. Of course that one needed fixing…

Eventually my role took on a more interesting twist as I got into loading the embedded software onto the HUD above the steering wheels. Remember the little ‘T’ shapped display piece that was sat above the steering wheel of Hakkinen and Couthards MP4/12 & 13? Well I might have put the software on them.

I also was the person who sent out things like PCMCIA cards which would allow the team to plug the laptop into the car, plus the licences. One of the funniest things I did was to deny a licence string to Porsche whilst they were at the track – I single-handedly stopped Porsche testing prior to a GT race because they’ed already used up all their licences. Sorry Porsche!

The telemetry software at the time was a piece called ‘Atlas’. It ran on Sun boxes and was a seriously impressive bit of kit with some astonishing mapping of car roll and various other things that produced intricate graphs that you needed a cool degree to fully understand.

The stuff on the laptops was an application called System Monitor that was used to essentially program the ECU’s and collect data from the car. This was not such a great piece of software and quite often it amazed me how such a cutting edge environment could get away with such rubbish software when so much was dependend on it getting things right…

Have you worked in Formula 1? We’re always interested to hear stories from people who’ve worked in F1. You can get in touch with F1 Fanatic editor Keith Collantine via the contact form here.