Panasonic Toyota Racing Fast Facts
The Brazilian Grand Prix is the 17th of the season and the
105th Grand Prix weekend for Panasonic Toyota Racing, but
there are even more numbers which tell the story of life behind
the scenes at the team.
The goal of Panasonic Toyota Racing is to succeed on track
and around 650 team members from 32 different nations come
together at the factory in Cologne, Germany to turn the Formula
1 dream into reality.
A Formula 1 car is made up of around 9,000 individual components,
with the engine the most complex in this sense – with
4,500 parts combining to provide the power to go Grand Prix
racing.
Such a complicated piece of high-tech machinery needs to
be painstakingly assembled and two technicians spend five
days assembling each RVX-07 engine, a total of 80 hours work
to create the beating heart of the TF107 car.
But Panasonic Toyota Racing has an added edge when it comes
to production, courtesy of the world-renowned Toyota Way principles.
By putting these principles into action and aspiring to kaizen
– continuous improvement – the manufacture of
a cylinder head has been reduced from 10 weeks to just 14
days.
Once the car has progressed from the drawing board to the
race track, via the team’s highly-skilled technicians,
the kaizen process continues and the team on track have 20
different settings for the rear wing alone to help in the
quest for ever-improving performance.
And don’t forget the role of the tyres in setting up
the car. The Bridgestone Potenza tyres are inflated to 1.1
bar and a change of just 0.05 bar can make a radical difference
to handling. Depending on track conditions, tyres work at
80-100°C in the dry, or 55-70°C in wet conditions
but little in Formula 1 stays static, even the weight of the
tyres, which is around 10kg, including the rim, but drops
around half a kilo in a race as rubber is worn away.
With many different settings available on virtually every
part of the car, the engineers and drivers would have a hard
time finding the perfect set-up were it not for electronic
sensors which monitor most aspects of car behaviour. On the
TF107, 250 sensors supply up to 1,300 different statistics.
Waldemar Klemm, Senior Manager IT Systems, says: “Once
we have the data from the car, for example, we will send it
to Cologne, we will modify different aspects of it and then
the results are sent directly back so they can be used immediately
at the track.”
That in itself is no small task and around 350 gigabytes
of telemetry data is transferred from the systems at the track
to the computers at the factory each year, at an impressive
average rate of 400 kilobytes a second.
That is considerably faster than the time it takes race team
members to jet from Cologne to race tracks on five continents,
with those attending all 17 races this season clocking up
230 hours in the air while the team has booked 7,000 beds
in 60 hotels around the world for them to rest.
But people are just one part of the Panasonic Toyota Racing
travelling team, with between 37 and 41 tons of equipment
also going to each race, including a ton of cables - to transport
this, the team sends four trucks and one motorhome carried
by two trucks around Europe.
As well as the cars and spare parts, day-to-day basics are
also required at the track and the catering crew use around
80kg of meat, 100kg of fruit and vegetables and 20kg of pasta
keeping around 80 team members well fed all race weekend.
Team Manager Richard Cregan says: “You have very, very
long days and people working late into the evening, so it
is a very important challenge to make sure those people have
the right environment to work in.”
All that hard work does not go unnoticed by the outside world,
but to show off the team, in 2007 the PR department distributed
18 video news releases (VNRs), 43 written features, 112 press
releases and over 1,500 photographs to the worldwide media.
After all, Panasonic Toyota Racing is one team, with one
aim.
|
