When a driver arrives at the circuit on the Thursday before a race, he first sits down with his engineer. The expert duo talk about all of the relevant points for the car’s set-up – primarily, therefore, about the circuit, any new parts that have been developed for the car and their impact on lap times, about the tyres that will probably be best for this track and, of course, about their race strategy. During the practice sessions on Friday and Saturday, the drivers come into the pits again and again, giving the engineers, with whom they’re linked by an acoustic umbilical cord, their impressions of the car, how it is behaving, in which corners it is understeering and where it is oversteering – the more precise their description, the better. The skill that a good engineer needs to master above all others is the art of interpretation. Only if he draws the correct conclusions from the impressions the driver relays, will the chances of success for his team be increased.

From the engineer’s point of view, the best driver is one who has a good feel for where he’s losing time. “Any driver can tell you all the things that should be done to the car to make it faster,” says Frank Dernie, who has over 30 years of experience in Formula 1. “However, because you can only ever solve one problem at a time, it’s important that he tells you, for example, to take a look first at the understeering in the chicane, because he actually knows that here he can make up the most time.” Not all drivers are equally good at this. Sam Michael, Technical Director of WilliamsF1 says, “There are drivers who will tell you endless stories about everything the car’s doing. But on a race weekend, everything has to be very quick. If you concentrate on the wrong thing, you lose too much time.”

One of the drivers who makes his engineer’s work easier with very precise comments is Nick Heidfeld. The BMW WilliamsF1 driver is well known in the business for analysing every corner and for being able to convey to his engineer how the car is behaving in any situation. What Mario Theissen, Motorsport Director for BMW, also likes about the German is his calm, level-headed manner and the fact that he doesn’t seek to be the centre of attention. “He’s a great help, including during testing and developing,” says Theissen, full of praise. “And he appreciates that he’s a racing driver and not an amateur engineer, who’s constantly giving their piece of mind.” Sam Michael can only reinforce the sentiment. “For an engineer, Nick is the perfect driver,” he says.

Setting up a Formula 1 racing car is technical chess of the highest level. The question around which everything revolves each year is, what happens to one parameter if I change something in respect to another? Before computers found their way into Formula 1, the key factors in determining a car’s set-up were the driver’s feel and the imagination of the engineers and mechanics. Those days have now gone. Today, it is largely laptops and high-performance computers that record the car’s every impulse. Nevertheless, the driver’s observations are still indispensable. “The most important information for the engineer is the lap time,” says Frank Dernie. “And the second most important is the driver’s commentary, even ahead of telemetry and data print-outs. And that’s not going to change anytime soon, either.”

The relationship between driver and engineer is a matter of trust. And the best way to build up trust, especially in Formula 1, is through success.

And did you know...

…that the division of labour between drivers and engineers in Formula 1 was not always such a clear-cut matter as it is today? The best-known example of this is Jack Brabham. The Australian was not only one of the most successful drivers of his era, but in a combined role was also his own engineer, constructor and team boss! A formula for success that would be unthinkable today, but that worked marvellously back then, with Jack Brabham, in his Brabham-Repco, becoming World Champion for the third time in 1966.