Williams Blog: Week 21

Posted on Monday 18 May 2009 and tagged with blog, team.

Our Car Build Co-ordinator, Mattie Whyte, has worked at Williams for 19 years this year. Having joined the team as a mechanic on the test team, he progressed through the ranks to a race team mechanic traveling to all of the Grands Prix before changing to a factory-based role in 2006. Mattie is currently responsible for making sure all of the required new parts are ready for when the cars return back from a GP in order to send them back out to the next. Here, he recounts his last week in the office.

"When it comes to each car build during the year, I’m the link between the race team, the test team and the factory. It’s my job to ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently, which means I’m very busy the week after each race because the cars are physically in the factory only for a very short amount of time.

On the Monday after the Spanish Grand Prix, the trucks were still travelling back from Barcelona so I spent the day reading through all the notes from the weekend. I read the race engineers’ reports and I looked through the damage reports to see what parts on each FW31 needed repairing. I also examined the consumed items list to ensure that we had enough spares in production to re-stock the trucks ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix.

I also caught up with the test team on Monday to ensure they had everything they needed ahead of their aerodynamic test at Kemble airfield on Wednesday. With the in-season testing ban this year, we take these straight-line tests very seriously because we need to maximise every kilometre that the car completes, whether it’s on an airfield or a proper racetrack.

The race trucks arrived back at Grove early on Tuesday morning and the mechanics were in at 0600 to begin stripping the cars. Both FW31s needed modifications to their side impact vanes ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, so I caught up with the guys in composites first thing to ensure they were ready to makes the changes.

I then joined an engineering meeting, known as the ‘TES Meeting’, in which we looked ahead at the next three months to discuss what upgrades are planned for the car and how those changes will affect production schedules in the factory. We dealt with the Monaco GP several weeks ago, so this meeting focused on the races at Istanbul, Silverstone, the Nurburgring and the Hungaroring.

Meanwhile, once the changes to the side impact vanes had been made to both FW31s, we sent them to the paint shop that we use in Oxfordshire called Brick Kiln. One chassis was back from there by Wednesday evening, and the other by Thursday morning, at which point both cars went into build. The race team mechanics had pretty much everything they needed to complete the job, except the wings, and the cars were ready to be started up by 1000 on Friday, prior to being shipped to Monaco on Friday evening.

One of the guys in the build shop was off last week, so I stepped in to help out. I like to catch up with the guys on the race team after each Grand Prix to find out what they’re thinking about the car, and I speak regularly to our Chief Mechanic Carl Gaden on the days that he’s in the factory. We both believe that one face-to-face conversation saves time because it cuts out the need to send hundreds of emails.

After next weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, the cars will travel straight to Istanbul for the Turkish Grand Prix and won’t return to the factory until Saturday 13 June. That gave me a few logistical issues to sort out last week. For instance, we are sending one container of equipment by air to Turkey, so I had to book that with DHL. They work on a first-come, first-served basis, which meant I needed to book early to get the slot that suited us. Formula One’s a competitive business, both on and off the racetrack!"