Williams F1

Toby Brown is our blogger this week. As Nico Rosberg's number one mechanic, he had a busy week in Monza last week...

I live in Bournemouth, about 1.5 hours from the AT&T Williams factory in Grove, so the week leading up to a Grand Prix starts with a couple of precious days at home. We loaded the cars onto the trucks for Monza on Friday 4 September, so there was nothing more to do until we got to Monza the following week.

The race team met at the factory at 12pm last Wednesday in order to catch the coach to London Heathrow for our 3pm flight. We touched down at Milan Linate at about 5pm and went straight to the hotel, although we didn’t arrive until quite late because the traffic was awful. We then went out for a pizza and a few beers before hitting the sack.

The first couple of days of any Grand Prix weekend are the busiest, so we left the hotel at 8am on Thursday. The first job was to take the floor off Nico’s FW31 and get the heaters on it, and we then waited for the FIA to come round and unseal the engine. That done, we could fit the exhausts and give the car a box run to check the systems.

We then fitted the aero bits that had been developed specifically for Monza. They were tested at a straightline test at Kemble Airfield in Gloucestershire on Tuesday, before being shipped to Monza in a van, which arrived in the paddock on Thursday morning.

The last job for Thursday was pitstop practice. We do this on the Thursday evening of every Grand Prix, and again on Friday and Saturday mornings, to ensure that it’s second nature by the time we come to do it in the race. I’m on the right front wheel gun, which is a pressure job but one that I enjoy.

The most on-track running takes place on Fridays, so we ensured that we were in a position to start the cars at 8.30am. The first 1.5-hour session started at 10am and at Monza this session ran very smoothly on Nico’s car. When it ended, we took off the floor, drained the gearbox of oil and changed the gear ratios.

Session two began at 2pm and ran smoothly, except for a problem with the throttle pedal activator. It was sending the wrong messages to the engine, so we changed the activator; it wasn’t a major job and we only lost a couple of laps.

After that session we checked the car over and then put on the race engine and gearbox. We had all of this done by 8pm, which was when we headed down to the FIA scrutineering bay to check the car’s legality. There was a queue of four cars, so we had something like a one-hour wait and we were back at the hotel by 10pm.

The final practice session began at 11am on Saturday. We had a slight problem with the rear brake ducts during this session and we lost a bit of time while we changed them, but we still managed to complete our homework for the race.

Prior to qualifying, Nico’s race engineer Tony Ross gave me his run plan for the session and it was my job to ensure that we got the right tyres onto the car and that it was ready to leave the pit garage at the pre-agreed times.

We didn’t make it through to Q2 for the first time this year, which was frustrating, but it meant we were able to begin prepping the car for the race ahead of time. Due to the Parc Ferme rules, there was only a limited amount of work that we could do, but we took off the floor, drained the oil in the gearbox and gave it a safety check before taking it to the Parc Ferme garage at 6.30pm. We then had a beer with a few of the Force India guys in the hotel and pizza, before bed.

The cars were released from Parc Ferme at 8am on race morning, at which point we took them back to the garage and took off the bodywork, attached the heaters, bled the brakes and checked that nothing had been broken overnight. The car had to be complete with its starting fuel load by 12.30pm because that was when the FIA’s technical delegate Jo Bauer did his usual walk down the pitlane to select six cars to be weighed. We weren’t on his list on this occasion, but we had to be prepared nonetheless.

At 1pm I changed into my race suit, at which point I was ready for the action to start. Unfortunately, we had our least competitive race of the year and Nico came home in 16th place. I’m confident that we’ll be much faster in Singapore due to the twisty nature of the track; bring it on!