Renault explains F1 pit stops

How many people are involved in a pit stop?

It’s 20 people. It used to be more when we had refuelling, but without the need to operate a fuel hose it has dropped down to a nice round 20.

What sort of training does the team do to stay sharp?

Our training is limited to the times when we have the car in one piece, which tends to be the beginning or end of the day. We do 20 pit stops on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Do the mechanics stick to the same job or do they move around during the season?

They tend to stay on the same jobs, although we obviously put people where they are best suited. But it’s taken as read that they may need to swap jobs at any moment.

What are the fastest pit stops the team has achieved in training and race conditions?

At Enstone we have a rig for training, which is basically the front half of a car and it slides on a set of rails. Using this rig we’ve done practice stops under two seconds with the current record around 1.8 or 1.9 seconds, but obviously training in those conditions is very different to working on the real car.

In a race our quickest stop is 3.4 seconds – that’s from car coming to a standstill to car being lowered to the ground. We also produce a graph where we track all our practice times so that we can see our progress through the year.

Did you ever imagine pit stops could be this quick?

Last year our wheel changes were taking around 4.5 to 5 seconds. That’s because we still had refuelling and had the time available while the fuel hose was connected to the car. So we did a lot of intensive training over the winter and made big gains, just as all the teams have done. Nowadays pit stops are not so much a weapon you can attack with because being quick is a necessity – you have to do a good pit stop to defend against the other teams who are also doing good pit stops.