Last Thursday I was invited out to serve as a translator for some Japanese people who had met a few members of the Ferrari F1 team a few days prior. The Japanese F1 race in Suzuka is the last race of the season and the track is only about 20 minutes from my wife's parents place, where we've been staying the last few months since the baby came. I wasn't sure what to expect but figured it was a chance to get some free food and drinks if nothing else, so I went along for the ride.
I met two Italian mechanics who work on Michael Schumacher's car. I got some interesting info about life on the circuit as well as some of the details about how a team is run. They were really nice guys, handing out Marlboros to everyone (provided by the sponsor) and taking pictures with their new Olympus cameras (also sponsor-provided). It was exciting to be so close to the action in an entirely un-close way. They gave us some recently autographed pictures of Michael as well, which was cool enough.
The two guys I met actually build the cars, taking them apart and putting them together. There are three subdivisions to the team: One for Schumacher, one for Barrichello, and one for the T-for-test car. Each team has a 6 man core that does the mechanicking, as well as an engine man, a gear-box specialist, and a body panelist. During the race, all the mechanics come together as pit crew; the guys I met change the front left and rear right tires. Their job is to put the tire on.
I don't have opportunity to watch many races during the season since most are shown late at night. It's an amazing sport though. They are called drivers but they are more like pilots of precision aircraft. The machines are insanely specialist pieces of art. I got to go to the 1999 race, the last season that Schumacher didn't win. He is set to take his 4th driver's championship in a row. He is awesome. Ferrari is only three points ahead in the constructor's championship though and it will be a tight race to lock that up. They brought two T-cars to Japan instead of the normal single backup, just to insure that they can field two drivers in a worst case scenario at the end of the season.
The team suffered a bit of a setback today though. The race takes place over three days. On Friday there are time trials that set up the schedule for the qualifying lap. Each racer only gets one qualifying lap, so it has to count. The better you race on Friday, the later you get to qualify on Saturday (why this is a good thing, I'm not so sure, but a later qualifying slot is better).
However, it started raining today midway through qualifying runs, so the racers who botched Friday and had to go earlier today ended up with better track conditions. Schumacher ended up 14th in a field of 20, and his brother Ralf, who is racing on the Williams/BMW team that is only 3 points behind in the constructor's race, went off course and got thumped back into 19th place. So the starting positions tomorrow are all topsy-turvy. Barichello, Shumacher's Ferrari teammate, messed up his Friday runs but benefited in the end and snagged the pole.
So it sounds like an interesting race for tomorrow. When I got to go see the races, Mika Hakkinen had already clinched the championship so the race wasn't as much fun as it could have been if more had been riding on it, but this year's should be good. It is expected to rain as well, which adds a lot of uncertainty to the mix. I don't envy the stress of my Italian pitcrew friends though, as this is a real pressure cooker for them.
Maybe next year I'll go to the races and go down and see them in the pits. They invited us this year, but only one of us had tickets. The guy that is going is some weird collector who used to have about 40 classic Ferrari race cars from the 1930s up to the 1970s. I can only imagine what the collection was worth. He's sold a lot of it off and only has about 10 cars now, he says, but he still has enough prestige to be one of the guest drivers who parades the actual race drivers around the track prior to the race start.
Posted by Nutrimentia at October 11, 2003 07:25 PM | TrackBack