Inside the Panasonic Toyota Racing factory with John Howett
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a Formula 1 Grand Prix and the hard work of the driver and
race team is obvious – but behind the scenes at Panasonic
Toyota Racing’s headquarters in Cologne, Germany, that
dedication continues all year round.
Panasonic Toyota Racing is one of the few teams in Formula
1 to build an entire car – chassis and engine –
under one roof, with around 650 specialist staff working tirelessly
to give Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli a competitive car
when they hit the track.
But what goes on inside the team’s headquarters? President
John Howett opened up the factory doors to give an exclusive
glimpse behind the scenes. The first stop on his guided tour
was the carbon composites department.
Without carbon fibre, a Formula 1 car would be a very different
beast so the carbon composites department plays a crucial
role in translating design to reality. “We use so much
carbon in Formula 1 because it is light, it’s strong,
it’s extremely stiff and it adds to driver safety,”
John explains.
“This is one of the most important departments in any
Formula 1 team, where the main body and structural parts are
made. It doesn’t look exciting from the outside but
inside it is much more. It is one of the busiest assembly
shops in the whole factory.
“We translate the designs into real components. Carbon
fibres are cut very precisely from large sheets and transferred
to the lay-out area. From here the carbon fibre is placed
in moulds in a specific direction to optimise the strength
of the component.”
But that’s not the end of the story for the carbon
fibre parts, which must go through another process before
becoming race ready, and John opened the door to a normally
private area.
“It looks a bit like a bank vault but it is actually
an autoclave,” John says. “After the parts are
completed in the lay-out room they are placed in a bag, the
bag is placed under vacuum and they are then baked under high
pressure and temperature in an oven. These ovens work 24 hours
a day, seven days a week.”
Of course, all the clever carbon fibre designs need something
with real grunt to get them moving and that is found in the
engine workshop.
Before entering the engine workshop, team members get the
chance to cast their eye over a piece of Toyota history –
the engine which powered Mika Salo to a point on the team’s
Formula 1 debut in the 2002 Australian Grand Prix.
Engine building is a specialised job as John revealed on
his access-all-areas tour: “We have highly skilled technicians,
probably more skilled than Swiss watch assemblers, working
on our engines. We pre-assemble the cylinder heads then we
have teams of two people assembling the final engine itself.”
The factory in Cologne is not just about building a Formula
1 car – that is only part of the job. Testing and optimising
parts of the car are also keys to a successful operation.
To get the best out of a Formula 1 engine, technicians must
gain as much data as possible to fine-tune every element of
the power plant and this is where the engine dyno comes in.
With such small margins dictating results in Formula 1, this
area is normally very much off limits. But John revealed:
“The finished engines are installed on to test beds
and we can undertake many different types of test and evaluation,
either power development, mapping for each specific circuit
or durability testing. Basically we can simulate everything
in these facilities.”
More so than engine performance, aerodynamic characteristics
play a determining factor in whether a car can compete with
the best and, to keep Panasonic Toyota Racing at the cutting
edge, the team’s Cologne factory has two wind tunnels.
A 50% scale model of the team’s latest car, identical
in every way but smaller, is subjected to a strong wind –
between 50 to 100 metres per second - which gives engineers
the opportunity to see how it behaves when moving at speed.
“The aerodynamic performance of a Formula 1 car is
one of the largest contributors to its overall performance,”
John adds. “The wind tunnel area is one of the most
secret and restricted-access areas of any Formula 1 factory.
Here new parts are fitted to a model and tested rigorously
and remorselessly to gain additional performance.”
When all the individual components are built and fine-tuned,
the Formula 1 workshop completes the task. The same mechanics
who work in the pits during race weekends and test sessions
painstakingly assemble the cars in dedicated assembly bays,
taking time to be certain everything is in perfect working
order before they are shipped to the next race.
After a rare guided visit by the President himself, he sums
up: “All the parts from all the manufacturing areas
in the factory come together and a race car is built.”
When the car is finished, it is usually taken swiftly to
the next track on the calendar, where many of the same mechanics
join to rebuild the car and get it ready for Ralf or Jarno
to hit the track.
Obviously, with limited space available, the full factory
team cannot travel to races but behind the pit box, there
is space for gearbox and engine assembly areas, as well as
working areas for tyre mechanics, who keep dozens of sets
warm and ready to use at a moment’s notice.
Further behind the scenes, data engineers monitor banks of
data screens, scrutinising the smallest amounts of information
to keep the car in the best possible working order. Elsewhere,
engineers can work from fully-equipped offices – either
in the top of one of the specially-built race trucks or in
permanent circuit offices - continuing the vital work they
started back in Cologne.
Every car which rolls out of Panasonic Toyota Racing’s
high-tech Cologne headquarters and heads to the race track
is more than the sum of its parts – it is a combined
effort from a team united by one aim: to succeed in Formula
1.
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