For Christmas Andy bought me a ticket (and himself obviously) to tour the Team Lotus Formula 1 Factory in Norwich. We chose to attend the final day of tours before the season kicks in, and that happened to be last Friday. Hard to believe the F1 season has come around again so soon, well testing at least, but even so. Barely seems like any time has passed since the final race of 2011.
Anyway, the whole trip was a big adventure. Norfolk is a) a long way away, and b) surprisingly hard to get to. We decided to drive as it gave us a bit more flexibility - since we were going all that way south it seemed silly to head in and straight back out, so we’d arranged some other stops on the way, in Cambridge, Derby and Manchester. There’s far too much to talk about however, so this entry is mainly focussed on the Factory Tour.
The drive down was about five hours in total, with some extra time being taken up queueing in a traffic jam on the A1. We eventually discovered this was because a boat had fallen off someone’s trailer; driving past a speedboat sat in the next lane over was somewhat surreal. Other than that the drive down was pretty much uneventful, apart from a massive rock hitting the windscreen on some section of the A1(M). Unfortunately we were moving rather quickly, and so was the rock. There didn’t seem to be any immediate damage, but 3 days it’s turned into a 7” long crack. New windscreen time :-( The hotel was very nice and we ate in the pub next door. Sausage and mash in a giant Yorkshire pudding. Giant wasn’t a lie.
Next morning we set off to find Hingham, it was about 30 minutes drive away from the centre of Norwich, but the trip was amusing. The countryside in that area is quite beautiful, very flat, and agricultural, but quite green and rural. The further away from Norwich we got, the more unbelievable it was that anyone would have set up a Formula 1 team there. The factory itself was hidden in a small industrial park, marked only by a small Team Lotus sign. We parked up and saw some Air Asia people hanging around outside a nearby building - Perhaps the new Air Asia GP2 team’s base?
Upon arriving in the factory foyer we were given visitor’s passes and left to amuse ourselves while the single secretary answered and redirected about 1000 phone calls. The foyer was interesting though, they had a full size (replica) F1 car parked in the window that we could nosey around, and a cupboard full of memorabilia. Multiple helmets, one signed by Alonso for some reason, some gloves, and a pair of Heikki’s racing shoes. I should imagine that cabinet is intended to hold trophies eventually..
When everyone had arrived (10 of us) we set off, firstly upstairs into a medium sized conference room full of LG televisions and their old reserve driver’s racing overalls. We watched a short video about the making of Team Lotus (and it was branded as such too, must have been recently changed..) which was fairly interesting, mostly as it showed the state of the factory and facilities when they had taken it over the previous year. This was fun to compare against when we were actually wandering around downstairs. Our tour guide introduced herself, she’d been working in F1 for 6 years and had come to Lotus from Toyota, something we soon discovered many employees had in common. Even the factory had previously been owned by Toyota, but that did rather beg the question why they, a company not associated with Norfolk historically at all, would choose to place their factory out in the middle of nowhere near Norwich, but it seemed to have worked out for Lotus.
Our first real stop was in the design office. This, as you could imagine, was a room with many desks and computers, and with geeky looking people (I say this from the perspective of a geeky looking person, no offence intended) completely absorbed in moving around whichever car part they were working on on the screen. Their CAD was all focussed on improving the aerodynamics of the car, and everyone was working to a very tight schedule. The tourguide said that new employees were most often taken on in that department, and almost every time she visited there were new faces she didn’t recognise. Anyone aspiring to work in F1 take note; get good at CAD.
Next stop was downstairs in the actual factory. We had to put on white coats, and ventured into the area where they make everything out of carbon fibre. The carbon fibre comes on massive rolls, covered in plastic sheeting - they looked like giant rolls of linoleum. She said that they kept the rolls in giant freezers to ensure it remains fresh and doesn’t begin to take shape or harden. We saw the beginnings of the cockpit of the 2011 car, still very much under construction, and got to inspect some pieces off the 2010 car to understand how the carbon fibre is used. Most aerodynamic parts of the car are not 100% carbon fibre, but instead are pieces of shaped foam, or honeycomb sheeting, layered with carbon fibre over the top. This is cheaper, and keeps the weight down. Also the honeycombing absorbs some crash damage.
Next the carbon fibre items are placed in giant ovens called Autoclaves. The factory had already been fitted with two - one of the main reasons it was purchased for Lotus. The first one was fairly small, for making body work and wings. The second was very big, apparently installed for the creation of Le Mans cars originally, and was large enough to drive one inside. Something had finished ‘baking’ so we watched them opening the door. It was like a cross between a James Bond villain’s hideout, and a giant bank safe, complete with moving floor.
Then we watched some painting, or rather some masking off. They said they paint almost everything themselves, and the paint is mixed specially for Lotus, unsurprisingly. It is possible to race with a car completely decked out in stickers rather than painted, which is cheaper (you don’t have to pay painters or buy paint!) and lighter (every layer counts..) but it wasn’t yet at the point where the benefits outweighed the drawbacks so they hadn’t considered it. It was funny seeing people working on painting F1 car parts, doing stuff I’d watched my Dad do all the time when I was younger (he used to spray cars for a living).
After that we visited the machine shop, where the team crafts all the metal items that are required, nuts and bolts, pedals, etc. It was a weird mix of the ridiculously modern, and the ancient, with metal lathes that looked like something from my high school DT lab, and computer systems running configurations made using CAD. The team hires a member of staff whose full time job is making sure that there are enough parts in stock. Each race the team takes their two running cars, and enough parts to build a third should the need arise. They aren’t allowed to take enough for a fourth car, but making sure there’s the correct amount of nuts, bolts, screws, brackets.. for even one extra car must be quite a task. Particularly since the majority seemed to be made by hand.
Next came the part of the tour everyone had been waiting for, visiting the actual workshop you see on all the factory photographs. Sadly the 2011 cars weren’t around, they were away being painted and not due back until Monday, but Jarno Trulli’s car was there, the same car we’d seen in Turkey, and more specifically seen missing some body work and a wheel in the pitlane. It looked somewhat less sorry for itself, having just come back from the Autosport show in Birmingham. Since we hadn’t been able to bring in any cameras the tourguide had us all pose individually sat on the sidepod, and we should be receiving photos via email :-)
We saw a mock up of the 2011 chassis, made of wood, with engine parts made to specification but out of hard plastic. The aim was to make sure everything fit together properly before the actual engine and gearbox arrived. We also got to handle some of the pieces of metal they use for ballast, damn they are heavy, and have a look at the kind of seat that would be used. The mock up chassis is where the drivers sit to have their seats fitted, but the seat we saw was generic. In some ways the most interesting part of the 2011 car we saw was the fuel tank, and I use tank very loosely. It was actually a fuel bag, made of kevlar. It’s created externally to their specifications, and was sitting to one side waiting to be fitted into a car. The tourguide said that in order to fit it, they tie it tightly with string, to compress it and make it as small as possible. They then put it into the space within the car through a small hole and cut the string so it expands to fill the space. I don’t think I am going to be able to hear commentators talk about fuel tanks without imagining it sloshing around inside a bag in the car. Interestingly the inside of the ‘tank’ is filled with many compartments, baffles, to stop the car being affected by fuel moving from side to side in the corners. We peered inside and the compartments seemed to include zips!
Down on the factory floor there were loads of little interesting things, of which I’m sure I shan’t remember everything, but a few things come to mind. There was a Simpsons pinball machine, and an old arcade stand up cabinet with a game called Apex. Apparently these were donations from Mike Gascoyne’s private collection for the engineers to play with. There were pieces of car everywhere, bits hanging from the walls from specific races, and parts gathered together. On the wall were yet more LG televisions, one showing CNN and the other BBC One. I’m not sure you’d be able to hear much over the sound of loud machinery though.
Our last proper stop was in the trimming room, where the ‘baked’ carbon fibre items are cut down, polished, and essentially turned into the finished product. It was fairly quiet, but the tourguide got shouted at for implying that not much important was going on. One engineer was working on the front wing for the Valencia test, combining a 2011 middle section with 2010 endplates. He expected that before Bahrain he’d have created two entirely different, new specification wings. A lot can change in a couple of months.
Outside that room an electrician was working on part of the pit lane garage interior - this had surprised me from my time on the grid in Turkey, when the teams turn up at the track their garages are completely empty. Just a shell. Anything you see the teams using, from the obvious computer equipment and toolboxes, to the light fittings and overhead gantries is all transported there and installed by them. The piece we saw was one of the overhead sections, described as a giant extension reel. Inside it had breakout sections to provide electricity, power the tyre warmers, and provide data and video for the info screens the drivers check while sitting in the car. Most interestingly for me, that aspect was controlled by a standard Acer Revo, attached upside down in the roof, exactly the same as the one I have in my bedroom. I suppose if it does the job…
Sadly that was the end of the main tour, and we went back upstairs. She’d nicely arranged a Q&A session with Jarno Trulli’s race engineer in the conference room, and this amused me as I’d started following him on twitter only the previous week. He was very interesting, another Toyota import, and he’d been working with Jarno for six years. He explained how difficult it had been to man manage Jarno in 2010, where every single hydraulic failure seemed to happen on his car. How he’d had to explain about the parts which were breaking, and how it was pure chance and not mistakes by his mechanics. Apparently the parts which were failing were bought in from an external company - I think they came with the gearbox. So when they broke it was something of a black box, all they could do was complain about them being rubbish, get some more and suffer the same problems.
We asked him about the challenges for 2011 and he talked about the new tyres and how that would open things up, everyone could work with the Bridgestones in their sleep, so it was nice to have something new. He did say that from the initial impressions, they appeared to give the car a more stable front end, which sounds promising but unfortunately would not be good for Jarno. He was already considering how best to set the rest of the car up to bring it in line with what Jarno would most appreciate, and said that man management was one of the biggest aspects of his job. Keeping everyone happy, and working at their best.
And that was the end. We went back to the foyer and were given a goody pack, a little unusual because they hadn’t had time to make any proper bags up. We were given a framed photo of Heikki in his car each, a Team Lotus cap, a team notes magazine, and the best bit, an actual piece that had raced on the car in 2010 - an aluminium wheel nut each, still covered in grease. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but just the fact I own a bit of an F1 car makes me grin.
I’d highly recommend the tour to anyone, if you’re interested in F1 that is.. but it was well worth the money, and effort of getting there. I learned a lot about how the cars are made, and how difficult a job it actually is, even after however many years of watching ‘behind the scenes’ segments in the F1 coverage. I’ll be watching Team Lotus in 2011 with a whole new respect.
