Renault F1: summer holiday at last!

The relentless pace of a Formula 1 season can often feel like a bit like being on a treadmill. With nineteen races squeezed into just 35 weeks, it’s a hectic schedule for the engineers, mechanics and truckies who travel the globe every other weekend to put on the F1 show. But August brings a much needed rest for the cast of Formula 1, with all the teams agreeing to shut up shop for a couple of weeks and take a well-earned summer break.

So how did the idea come about? Well it’s basically a FOTA initiative, whereby all the teams have agreed to stop working for two weeks out of a four-week period between the Hungarian and Belgian Grands Prix. Teams can decide when they take their two-week break, but the important thing is that everybody has agreed to it, so it’s a level playing field and nobody is losing out or gaining an advantage.

Enstone will therefore close its doors from Monday 9 August until Sunday 22 August. During that time no work relating to the performance of the cars will be carried out, although a skeleton crew will continue to operate to keep the factory ticking over. The reality is that with a factory of this scale you still need to maintain the infrastructure; you can’t simply turn everything off. There will also be some site maintenance work carried out, which sits outside of the FOTA regulation. In terms of personnel, though, nearly everybody will be able to take two weeks holiday.

For the travelling race team, the chance to spend a fortnight at home with their families and recharge their batteries has gone down very well. For many of the guys it will be the first proper rest they have had since Christmas. We no longer have a dedicated test team, so most of the race team did all the tests and then launched straight into the season proper.

And with the entire team taking vacation en masse, everybody gets the chance to really switch off. There are no pesky phone calls, no emails, and no meetings to catch up on. Instead of getting the usual 80 to 100 emails per day, you’ll probably only get five or six. It’s the chance to totally switch off and get refreshed.

Of course, there’s no gain without some pain, and the factory closure still presents certain challenges because the team will be racing in Spa the week the factory reopens. That means there will be some intense pressure across all departments to make sure everything is in place before the shutdown begins. There’s the same amount of work to be done, but it has to be condensed into a shorter amount of time.

In terms of preparing the cars, most of the pre-Spa car build took place this week, ahead of the break, and the finishing touches will be made to the cars on the Monday before Spa. Fortunately with Spa being a relatively ‘local’ race, it’s quite an easy race for the trucks to get to so time is on our side.