Williams Blog: Week 24

Posted on Wednesday 10 Jun 2009 and tagged with blog, team.

Meet Rod Nelson. For those of you that don’t know him already, Rod is our Chief Operations Engineer and has overall responsibility for the pitwall and our team of engineers at the race. With the Turkish GP on the schedule last week, we caught up with him to see what a week in the life of a senior engineer is like before a Grand Prix.

The week leading up to each Grand Prix follows a familiar pattern. We have a string of meetings early in the week to ensure that we arrive at the racetrack on Thursday morning knowing exactly what we’re going to do with the FW31.

Having said that, last week had a slightly unfamiliar feel to it as I was in Spain on Monday, just north of Grenada, attending my niece’s first communion. But I was back in the office on Tuesday morning to ensure that our preparations for Istanbul Park were completed on time.

Tuesday’s first meeting was about production, during which we discussed the manufacture of new parts over the next three months. We looked at the development schedule for the car and told the production teams at the factory which parts they should focus on, be it floors, wings or whatever.

Next up was an operations meeting, focusing on Istanbul. I came to the meeting with a plan of action and a group of us discussed it and ironed out any questions. One of the discussion points to come out of this meeting was the expected weather for Istanbul. The wind was forecast to be quite blustery and that could have a big impact on car performance.

We flew to Turkey on Wednesday morning, arriving at our hotel at about 6pm. The first track day was Thursday, which turned out to be a long one for various reasons. The cars didn’t return home between Monaco and Turkey, but we had several new parts – including a new front wing on both cars – coming out from England and they took a while to get through customs. That meant we were at the track until about 0100 on Friday morning, just getting things sorted.

There were several meetings – we have a lot of them! – during the course of the day as well. The first of these was a condensed version of the operations meeting that we’d had at the factory on Tuesday, and we also met with our Bridgestone engineer to discuss the tyre allocation for the weekend.

The on-track action started on Friday with two 1.5-hour practice sessions. The first of these went okay, but we struggled to get the option tyre to work in the afternoon, so we had a meeting with Bridgestone’s technical guys to learn why that was the case and what we could do to improve the situation.

We had to nominate our gear ratios for the remainder of the weekend on Friday and, as predicted, the wind was having a big influence on performance. There was a headwind along the long back straight during P1 and P2, but my predictions were that it would switch to a tailwind for the race, so we put in slightly longer ratios to ensure that we wouldn’t be sitting on the limiter for too long when it mattered.

With the Parc Ferme rules after qualifying, Friday night was the last opportunity that we had to make big changes to the car, so we had a lot of meetings to ensure that we left no stone unturned, either for qualifying or the race. That kept us at the racetrack until after midnight.

The final practice session on Saturday morning was all about fine-tuning the set-up of both cars and getting in some low-fuel runs to prepare for qualifying. As things turned out, we had a pretty good weekend. Our predictions about the wind direction turned out to be right, so Nico and Kazuki were able to make up a lot of places in the race from their ninth and 12th grid slots. Nico drove a great race to fifth and Kazuki would have finished seventh, had it not been for a wheel nut problem at his second pitstop.

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