The Toyota-organised test at the Nürburgring last month saw a ‘first’ for the DSC Editor, an invitation to take a look behind the scenes of the Audi team garage.
Together with a select few others our guide was none other than André Lotterer and, after a quick coffee courtesy of Audi Sport PR (and skilled Barista!) Martyn Pass, it was down to the paddock and into Audi’s Mission Control.
Now I’ve seen the Audi set-up several times, in snatched glances though open doors, on TV etc, but this was a little different.
The single Audi R18 e-tron quattro at the test was being run from one garage, with most of the required working areas for the mechanics (Audi Sport for this test rather than Team Joest) at the rear of both that, and the immediately adjacent garage.
The whole of the area to the front of the second garage though was taken up by two long rows of workstations for the technicians and engineers, some 30 in all with enough monitors to run a reasonably-sized Stock Exchange.
To the right, nearest the car, were those responsible for the car out on track: Justin Taylor, the man usually responsible for the #8 car this season was in charge for the test with Leena Gade at the far end of the facing row, certainly not available for a quick chat, with the car on track and pouring data back to an impressive-looking team.
Between them were engineers responsible for all of the key aspects of the car, each looking after, and in real time looking at, an individual system: suspension, braking, engine, ERS systems, with data then fed back to Justin Taylor.
“It’s amazing what the team can observe and manage,” said Lotterer, “the systems on the car are enormously complex and every moment we can get on track there are improvements to be made.”
The left hand group of workstations belonged to the technicians gathering data for Audi’s Simulators.
“That’s a very important part of the test too, the better the data we can put into the Sim, the more accurate the results we get from any work we do there and the more time we save in setting up the car on track. Progress there has been amazing in recent years with huge time savings gained in taking lessons we learn in simulation back to the car.”
The sheer technical brain power being exercised in developing the cars is perhaps the part of the effort that most of us understand the least about.
It’s all too often the hidden part.
We see the mechanics toiling in (in Audi’s case) an astonishingly well-drilled way to deal with an emerging problem or in reaction to an on-track incident.
We see the drivers of course, at 100%, 100% of the time they are on track.
With the ‘Truth in 24’ films we got some insight into the strategic role of the Race Engineers, Howden ‘H’ Haynes and Leena Gade but for good, solid competitive reasons there’s usually precious little coverage of the role of the technicians as they grind out the solutions to some fiercely complex problems. Squeezing the best out of their post-Space Age systems, finding the best available compromise for the prevailing environment and conditions and doing as much as anyone, and more than many, to bring the cars home.
These ladies and gentlemen, are the most competitive geeks on the planet, and I doff my DSC cap to them!
GG
