Williams Blog: Week 14

Posted on Friday 27 Mar 2009 and tagged with blog, team.

In this week's edition of the Williams Blog, we caught up with our Assistant Race Team Manager, Paul Singlehurst, the man responsible for ensuring all freight and team personnel make it to the races in one piece, not an enviable task!

The AT&T Williams race team arrived in Melbourne on Monday morning. We landed at the city’s Tullamarine Airport four hours late, due to a problem with the PA system on our plane at Heathrow, but it didn’t matter because there wasn’t any immediate work to be done at Albert Park.

I went from the airport to the hotel for a shower, before heading to the racetrack at lunchtime. The reason I went in was to check that the freight had arrived safely and that the layout of the garage was as I’d specified. The organisation at Albert Park is excellent – one of the best of the year – so there were no problems.

The biggest job for me on Monday afternoon was to pass a forklift truck driving test. A new law has been passed in Australia since last year’s race that requires everyone to pass an annual forklift truck test and I’m pleased to say that I did! With bells on.

On Tuesday all the boys went to the track and we began the garage installation. It went very smoothly, but we couldn’t complete the job until the following day because we had to wait for the late freight to arrive on Wednesday afternoon to get everything as we wanted it. Still, we were able to start the build of the cars on Wednesday afternoon.

The on-track action is later this year than normal, due to the 5pm start time on Sunday. It means that we get into the track two hours later each morning, but we also work later at night. We didn’t finish until 0200 on Saturday after the opening day of practice.