The team goes from Thailand to Japan and then to South Korea and then back to Switzerland.

For some drivers, nothing will have prepared them for so much travel and racing in their careers.

“Never in my dreams,” said Jean-Éric Vergne, a rookie driver at the Toro Rosso team. “I trained a lot in the summer and I have a good group of people working behind me with my physio, basically like how you would speak to a kid: ‘Go to sleep, go to eat, eat this, don’t eat this, don’t do this, do this.’ And in the end it will make a big difference, I think, during such a period. So I’m pretty relaxed about it.”

Speaking on the day before the Italian Grand Prix in Monza two weeks ago, Zehnder, the Sauber team manager, outlined his team’s logistical system:

“On Sunday after the race, we pack up here and drive it home from Monza. The car is disassembled Monday and all the spare parts go into the sub-assembly shops and on Tuesday evening we start putting the car back together, and at the same time the truck drivers take care of the infrastructure that we have to unload and load again to the air freight containers — while the mechanics prepare the car for Singapore — and then unload all the equipment spare parts, tools from the trucks and put it in air freight containers that are specially designed. You have lower wing containers, main deck containers, main freight containers, that have special shape to fit perfectly into a 747. We travel with eight air freight containers; we have only one sea freight container per event, and we have five different sets of those, so the first is going to Singapore and then from there to Japan, so they have a special schedule.

“Thursday afternoon at 12:00 our freight goes to Milan, Malpensa airport, where a jumbo airplane is waiting for us. There is roughly 30 tons of air freight material just for our team, and just the two cars. The freight is sent by a transportation company. And after Milan, the next time we see it, it is in Singapore in the pit lane. It goes via Formula One Cargo, a company of Bernie Ecclestone. It is vital for Formula One that we do not have problems at customs, because there are 30 tons for each team, and you have 12 teams, plus the F.I.A., F.O.M., they carry their communications center, which you see at the entrance, and it is vital that it all be perfectly organized. So once the six jumbos arrive in Singapore, you have a lot of trucks bringing it to the circuit and the next time you see it is in Singapore.

“We have five equal sets of sea freight. One has already left in August to Singapore, the second to Japan, the third to Korea, the fourth to Delhi; then the one from Singapore goes straight to Abu Dhabi. So on top of the air freight you have five equal sets and you have to shuffle them around. Every time you arrive on the circuit you have sea freight ready. Sea freight is mainly catering equipment, office installations. So you always have the same kind of tables, the same fridges, the same ovens, the same television screens

“We travel in staggered formation, so the first group of team members leaves Switzerland on Sunday and arrives in Singapore on Monday and they take care of the setting up of the garages, unloading the containers and setting up. And the next group leaves Switzerland on Tuesday and arrives on Wednesday morning, and since it is a night race, we only start working in the afternoon, unlike usually at 7 a.m. In Singapore, we start working at 3 p.m.

“Setting up the garages takes about two days, you lay down many kilometers of cables because all the computers are linked to each other, the pit wall stand is linked to the office, to the garage office, then we have a link back home to the headquarters.