The British Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend poses a particularly gnarly challenge for Formula One's technical team: it’s the first time in history that they will have to deal with a “triple-header” – three races on consecutive weekends – and the packed schedule gives very little margin for error.

The F1 team travels around the world with the championship, setting up the technical equipment around the track and running tests to make sure everything is working correctly ahead of each session. There is usually a two-week interlude between fixtures, with a maximum of two Grands Prix back-to-back, but Silverstone comes hot on the heels of races in France and Austria. The tight turnaround makes testing all the more important.

At the Spanish Grand Prix earlier this year, I shadowed some of F1's technicians as they prepared for the race. This is what race day morning looks like for them.


It’s race day at the Spanish Grand Prix and I’m about to set off on my first lap of the track. I’m in pole position. The five red lamps on the starting light gantry illuminate in sequence. Then they go out – and I’m off.

It’s 7:45AM and I’m in the back of a hired Peugeot hatchback.

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The car I’m in is a test vehicle, fitted out with the same camera and telemetry equipment as an F1 car. Cables snake out of a black case on the front passenger seat, leading out of my window to a T-shaped casing on top of the car that houses the onboard cameras (on an F1 car, this is located on top of the roll hoop, behind the driver’s head). A timing transponder is attached to the side of the car.

Next to me on the back seat is Bart Richardson, principal track systems engineer at F1. The track systems department takes care of everything needed to set up a circuit for a Grand Prix; among other things, they are responsible for installing the loops in the track and the transponders on the cars that allow them to be tracked to an accuracy of ten thousandths of a second.


Every morning of a race weekend, the test car is sent out from the broadcast centre to make sure all of the systems are working before the actual racing starts. “It’s ingrained in our philosophy,” says Richardson. “Test, test, test.”

The red, Fly Emirates-branded armco barrier flashes past as we leave the starting grid and cruise through the first few turns. Our driver is track systems technician John Aitken; this is his first race. He takes the corners smoothly, sticking to around 50 km/h, with Rock FM playing quietly on the car radio. Even at this low speed, I can feel how tight the turns are as the force pushes me against the sides of the car.

Christoffer Rudquist

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As we go around the lap, we regularly pass over the timing loops that Richardson and his team have dug into the track. The loops are effectively antennae buried in the tarmac; they consist of two lengths of wire that run across the width of the track and back, 60cm apart from each other. Richardson’s team cuts a series of 10mm deep slots into the circuit and embeds the loops in them, sealing them with industrial silicone – “much like what you use in your bathroom,” he says. Once installed, you wouldn’t notice the loops unless you specifically looked for them; positioned every 150m to 200m in the track, and every 40m in the pit lane, all you can see are pairs of thin black lines.


The loops track the cars as they go round the track. Each time a car drives over one, its transponder transmits a unique ID. The loop is connected to a decoder hidden behind the crash barrier that knows the exact time of day based on GPS. The decoder records the time at which the car passes the loop, and this produces an accurate picture of where each car is at any point. Extra sensors in the starting grid and pit lanes can tell if a car jump starts or how long a pit stop takes.

All of this information is fed back via a fibre ring around the track to the F1 Broadcast Centre, which is located in the centre of the circuit and acts as the technical team’s base. It's also where the live broadcast of the race is put together.

The most important thing is getting the results of a track session, and there are multiple backup systems to make sure that happens. If anything fails – if a car rips through a loop, if the fibre gets sliced, if the broadcast centre sets on fire – they should still be able to say who won the race and by how much.

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There is only one loop on the finish line, but it is connected to two decoders. If the main decoder fails, it can switch immediately to the backup. If the loop itself fails, or a transponder doesn’t work, then the officials in the timing room – an office with a clear view across the start-finish straight – look instead to a light beam at the finish line. Richardson points out a hole drilled into the armco level with the finish line: this is where the light beam shines across the track. When a car drives past and cuts the beam, the time is sent to the timing room, where officials note down the car’s identifying number from sight. “It’s a very manual system, but you don't want to have to rely on automated things,” says Richardson. The light beam system is on a separate network and power supply to the loops, so even if the broadcast centre somehow lost all power, the timing staff would still be able to produce a list of results.

The final backup is a high-speed camera on the finish line. “Say you had a really big crash down the start-finish straight and a little bit of car debris flew into the beam hole, and the car scraped along the finish line and broke the cable – then you'd lose the beam and you'd lose the loop,” Richardson says. “You'd be bloody unlucky! But you've got the camera. Assuming that no bit of wing went up and hit the camera as well.” And if it did? “The race would stop for a while and you'd go down and fix it.”

Nothing quite that catastrophic has occurred yet, but accidents do happen. At Japan's Suzuka Circuit in 2002, Scottish driver Allan McNish smashed his car into the armco barrier at high speed during qualifying, ripping through the fibre ring in the process. The session was stopped for the track to be cleared and the barrier repaired, during which time F1 engineers had their own race to see who could fix the cable first. Some worked to quickly run a new fibre between the affected nodes, while another set out with a splicing kit to reconnect the shredded fibre.

“All our procedures are built around ‘get it running quickly, fix it when we’ve got time,’” Richardson says. (In that instance, the splicer won.)

Christoffer Rudquist

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As we take the Barcelona test car through the final chicane and over the finish line, we have our own problems. We pull back into the first spot on the grid, when Aitken’s radio buzzes into life: “OK John, if you could just make sure your front transponder is over the beacon – we saw it briefly, we're not seeing it now.”

Technicians monitoring the systems from the Broadcast Centre can’t see our car on their screens; the beacon embedded in the starting grid is not registering the signal properly. Their advice comes over the radio: “Can you power down the whole system and then restart it?”

Aitken reboots and tries a different starting spot, pulling the car into the second grid position. Richardson jumps out of the car to help guide the transponder into place over the sensor.

“Can you see it now?”

“We’re seeing it get to us, but part of our software is not seeing it. Can you try another grid position for us?”

After a few minutes of waiting and one more change of grid position, we get the all clear. The starting light sequence plays out and we’re ready for lap two.


Richardson sounds relieved that the problem is resolved. He puts it down to “testing gremlins”. Tests are always different to a real race situation, he explains, and it’s unlikely that whatever the issue was would have actually caused a problem. In testing, things happen slower and in a different order to the real race, which can confuse the software. “But you never just assume that it's morning test gremlins, because the day that you do, there really is a problem to solve,” he adds.

We enter the pit lane and a siren blares, warning everyone that a vehicle is heading in. On our way out, we cross paths with a cyclist on an electric bike. He’s carrying a large backpack containing the same kit as the box on Aitken’s passenger seat, with the cable running over his shoulder to a transponder hooked on the bike frame. On some circuits, Richardson explains, the pit lane in front of the teams’ garages is too narrow to safely drive a regular car up and down for testing – “so we do it with a bicycle.”

Updated 12.07.18, 13:15 BST: This article originally said the timing systems were accurate to four thousandths of a second. They are accurate to ten thousandths of a second (four decimal places).