Formula 1 teams may find themselves racing against the clock off track as well as on it due to the impact of coronavirus measures.
In recent weeks, several teams have been conducting test or filming days to adapt to the new social distancing guidelines, reduced team sizes and use of personal protective equipment all of which is aimed at limiting the potential for an outbreak of Covid-19.
But for a sport that deals very much in precision timing in every aspect, Racing Point technical director Andrew Green admits managing time and ensuring each task is completed efficiently but to the same standard as normal will be tricky.
“It’s very different and it’s going to be a real challenge going forward,” he said after the team conducted a filming day at Silverstone last week.
“[It] effectively changes the time it takes to do jobs on the car. Jobs now take a lot longer, and we have to try and manage that. We only have a certain amount of time trackside to work on the car.
“When we’re in a race environment, we have curfews in place, so we have to now look at how long it takes to change and modify parts on the car that we would normally do, but reschedule them to make sure we are doing what we need to do during a race weekend and not contravene the curfew regulations. That’s a big part of what we were trying to learn [in the test].”
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Despite that, Green would admit certain scenarios will remain an unknown until the races themselves.
“It was a very limited exposure to this way of working,” he added.
“You could attempt to do a lot of this work in the factory if you wanted to. We were trying to put it in a live environment. By no means have we got all our protocols in place.
“It was definitely a steep learning curve, and we’ll make modifications over the next few events to suit. We’re still learning, but it did give us a real heads up on how challenging race weekends are going to be, while you’re trying to run the car.”
Perhaps the biggest and most complicated job on a current F1 car is swapping a power unit, something that can take several hours even without the strict measures now in place.
And the Racing Point chief believes in this ‘new normal’ that could be one task that is impacted the most.
“I suspect changing an engine now will take quite some time,” he said. “We can only have certain members of the crew working on the car at any one time, and that does limit the speed in which you can do a power unit change.
“When we get into the real meat of the car, and centre around the power unit, we’re probably looking at, in some cases, it taking twice as long [as before].”
Throw into the mix some questions over spare parts, due to the limited production time since the factory shutdowns were lifted, and Green thinks some emphasis will be on the drivers to look after their car more.
“Once you get a big reliability issue, it will start putting strain on the team to get parts repaired and modified on time, so there are going to be times when it will be a real challenge,” he explained.
“We’ll do what we can pre-event, but during the event, we hope we maintain the reliability we always strive for and have two drivers who should be aware if they do go off during a practice session and do a lot of damage, it potentially could take a lot longer to repair. I think they will be well aware of that.”