Friday, 01 October 2010 08:02
Regular visitors to the BLZEEBUB website will have spotted the gallery above last week, however that's only half the story as we were there to get an interview with the boss of Motorbase Performance, the main man behind the potentially championship winning BTCC team, Airwaves BMW. Besides the BMW's David's team also run a highly successful Porsche Carrera Cup team, all from their HQ in Wrotham, Kent.
We've met David a few times and he's a great bloke to chat to. He tells it like it is and consequently we feel that this gives you a very authentic insight into BTCC that probably you've never seen before.
This interview has appeared in the printed press, but in a very much cut down version as they wouldn't print something this big. So, for a change, here's a chance to see the whole story... Enjoy!
Andy K
Firstly, congratulations on some great results from last weekend at Donington. Did the cars come out relatively unscathed ?
Not bad, Mat's car is fairly good, new front bumper. Both had a bumper at the event and both want bumpers now. Steven's car looks like it fell off a mountain. 4 doors, front wing, front and rear bumpers. That's British Touring cars unfortunately. Thats what its evolved to, a bit of a shame in some respects but then its also part of the spectacle of what goes on. People wouldn't want to see it if it was all boring. It's never boring.
How many engineers work on the cars between races, how many man hours work is there to get ready to race next time?
Full time staff through the season we have a total of eight. Race weekend the whole team grows between the two teams to thirty four. With the hospitality and the Porsche team and the Touring Car team and at the next round it will grow slightly more. Carrera cup if they aren't too badly damaged then about 2 days and half a day set-up per car. Touring cars pretty much all the time you've got spare between rounds, unless its a massive gap you are always working on them there is never enough time to prep them .
I know it sounds strange because if you look at them it looks like a BMW 320 road car but its not. If you take a standard road car and you say you're gonna use the bits on that car for Touring car, all the bits you can use are the headlamps, the rear lamps and the four doors. Nothing else. Wings, bumpers, inside, absolutely nothing. Engine, none of it, gear box looms, nothing. It's all derived from the original car, as it should be, but you couldn't fit it to a standard car. Everything is made by BMW. There's a part number in the BMW catalogue for everything. You just grab yourself a touring car catalogue and everything will be in there. All available from BMW on an email. Its the only touring car in the world with a decent professional system behind it. Its very much like Porsche, that's why we've got Porsche and BMW because they are the best two companies to work with. They provide backup, presentation, everything you want they are they. The prices are quite frightening though!
What does it take to be as good as a Motorbase race engineer? What sort of experience do the team have?
A dedication, there is no way any of them are in it for the money. They get paid well but when you look at the hours they work divided by the amount they are paid, it's not for the money. You gotta love the sport and want to do the sport. A lot of the guys here, some of them have been with me for god knows how many years. Motorbase as race team is only seven years old, but my history goes back a lot. Ants, my bodywork guys, I've known him since he was nine years old. He originally worked for my old company years ago and when I retired from that he then went off to work for someone else but I brought him back. Tim, who's head of the Porsche section, he was with me the day we were painting the floor downstairs, the day we opened it - it was just me and him and he ran me in a TVR. Richard, came from Team Dynamics, he's our head fabricator engineer. Oly our touring car team manager came from Team Dynamics. I've added to my own set of guys, Mark, the number one on Mat Jackson's car, is from McLaren. He was number one on Jensen's car when he left to join us. On the other car, young Alex is a local success story. Young Alex is number one on Steven Kane's car, he's a Dartford boy who came to me four or five years ago and we've just made him number one on Steven's car. It's a mixture of local and what you need to do the job. Mika for instance flies in from Finland every week. Jason is Jason Plato's old number one. I've got a selection of guys that I've gathered up and they are very dedicated. You've got to advance your team quickly and the pace that we've moved at as business and as a race team over the last few years, to get from starting to where we are now, you have make sure that you get some very good determined people to go with our own driving ambitions. We haven't had any big works deals, we have to do it from shear work. I'm not happy with it this year, but I never am at the end of the season. We should have done this and done that, but that's the nature of the beast.
Who makes up the engineering team, where do they come from? Is this their full time jobs or what else do they do?
Most of the guys work for me fulltime, some of them are contract just for 8/9 months, at the end of the season we drop down the numbers but most of the guys you see in the work shop are here for the year and a lot of them have been with me for a long time. Race weekends we have guys who just come in for the weekend, those are guys on contract to turn up Thursday to Monday plus the weekend warriors who come in just Saturday and Sunday. It builds up and the catering arrives and the people doing the guided tours for the guests and sponsors. It builds up to 34 people for both teams. Touring cars have 16 and the Porsches have 14. The Porsche engineers fly in from Holland because you want Super Cup engineers to make your Porsches go fast. So the actual guys that engineer the cars and decide the setup are Dutch. The mechanics are all English. The logistics take a bit of sorting out but once you get the rhythm going for the season it tends to settle down and be ok. We haven't got the money for everyone to be here fulltime, you don't need it fulltime anyway - we haven't got room for them all! We make it so it works, we built our own recipe for how our team works.
Who's the unsung hero of the Airwaves team?
There's quite a few, probably all of them some days. I would have to say its Ants the bodywork man because he gets 6 Porsches at him, 2 BMW's and whatever else needs fixing, he's probably one of them. I think all of them though really, some weekends can be bloody hard. Some of the Porsches can be very hard, there's no one particular hero in the team, but if you had to pick one it, it would have to be the poor sod who is doing the bodywork because if we have a bad weekend and come back with 6-8 damaged cars he aint going home til its all done.
Describe what has to happen between getting back from a race to loading the cars to get to the next race meeting?
If it's Porsche, sometimes there's some testing. You come back on a Sunday night and we're not restricted by testing so on a Monday morning start to get the damage off. We carry quite a bit of stock of painted parts. First bit is to is to assess the damage, that's always the most lengthy bit, the boys will then strip the cars down as you've seen, everything off shields off, steam clean them underneath. Assess what we know we need and then go through a set maintenance programme, shafts off, corners down, engines out, gear boxes out, check clutches, put em all back together put all the new parts on, put the shields on and get the vinyl man in. George, he'll turn up on the Monday, look at everything that's damaged, go make the vinyl for it, luckily he lives in West Kingsdown. Then set-up on the cars, decide the setup we are going to run at the next circuit with the engineers. Fuel cans, do all the fuel, clean the trucks, top their fuel up, all the race cleaning equipment, brake cleaning gear, all the consumables you use, nuts bolts washers etc. They set up a day ahead of the touring car team. They'll turn up at, for instance, Brands Hatch on the Thursday, put up all the awnings, two artics leave for Porsche, awnings up, floors up, cars out, layout the garage, clean everything in situ. Friday they test, two test sessions, same again all through the day and then its actually the race meeting.
Touring cars is slightly different as there is no testing other than in the middle of the season. They'll come back and they'll really strip the cars right back to shells on axle stands. Gearboxes go off to the sub assembly room down the bottom, drive shafts and anything drive chain will be crack tested, checked, serviced, rebuilt, bearings changed, gearbox re-ratioed for next circuit as they are all different, unlike the Porsches which are fixed ratio. Engines will be taken out, cleaned, checked, bleed down, make sure they aren't down on horsepower, no leaks in the cylinders, manifolds and exhausts will be checked and repaired. That's petty much all the mechanical bits but meanwhile Ants will be doing the bodywork - all the doors off, the bumpers off, the wings off, front panels etc George the vinyl man will have checked and he'll be ready to re-vinyl when Ants finished. Then they will assemble the car, everything back together when BMW dump the parts on us, because that's a big part - getting parts orders out to all the suppliers. The car will go back together if its a two week turn around, which is really one week and a bit, they'll go back together on the Tuesday/Wednesday, they'll start assembling them, by Wednesday night they'll be set-up and in the truck again. They won't go straight to circuit, they'll go for shakedown. The reason for shakedown is we are not allowed to use the race circuits, we can't just go down to Brands Hatch and run the car to make sure its ok, we have to nominate our test circuit which in our case is TRL in Bracknell. Go down to Bracknell, take the cars out of the truck, we'll do 15km maximum that's all TOCA allow us, for systems checks. Clutch, gears, dash working, rattles, bangs, misfires, whatever. We'll do a logged 15km, TOCA can turn up at any moment because they exactly when we are there, plug in the car and they can find out the miles we've done. Stick the cars back in the trucks and they'll arrive at the circuit Thursday evening or Friday morning. Friday morning Touring car boys won't be running like the Carrera cup boys do. They'll be doing set-up in the garages, putting up boarding and flooring down, get the cars out and put them in the garage, do the setup adjustments that the engineers have come up with and then they are ready for Saturday morning for free practice. So they take a slightly different root to the Carrera cup cars. So I end up with two teams heading off for a race weekend in two different directions but come Friday evening the drivers arrive and everything is set to go.
The engineering work obviously doesn't stop when you reach the track, can you describe what the team do once they reach the circuit?
Engineers are not the guys physically working on the cars, they are the mechanics, the number ones, twos and threes. The engineers are the boffins who sit in the trucks with their computers and with their knowledge and they work with the drivers very closely to get the set-up and get the best from the car. They analyse the data, there are two data engineers, Jamie and Ewan. They are looking off the back of what the engineers are telling them to look for and what the drivers tell them. They're looking at overlays, how fast they are going through the corners, where we are loosing time, everything.
They'll take that information into the actual car engineer of which there is one for each car and they will work with the driver feedback to determine the car setup. The camber, the ride height, the technique they're going to use to qualify, how they are going to manage their tyres, their tyre runs, that'll be the engineers. They'll come out with set-up sheets to the mechanics on the cars and tell them what they want. The engineer doesn't actually work on the car. We have full telemetry on the car, but not live. The data engineers take the data off of data loggers. There are two loggers, the TOCA championship logger and our logger. TOCA also have access to our data and can just plug in and take it whenever they want too. They always know what's happening with the cars.
What sort of spares do the team take with them? What is allowed under BTCC rules?
Spares - everything for touring car. What you've got in your truck is what you've got - there is no support at the circuit from BMW. If you're not pally with another team in the paddock when you are really short, then your stuffed. So we have to take a full set of body panels, painted, decaled, stickered, 6 bumper fronts and rears, 8 doors, 6 doors, boot lids, bonnets, everything we need to get our cars out of trouble. Then we carry full sets of suspension dampers, propshafts, drive shafts, 2 spare engines and everything relevant - sensors, nuts, bolts washers. If you've not got it then you've got to hope WSR are in a friendly mood and they have to hope we're in a friendly mood sometimes. WSR and us are great rivals on the track but we do tend to help each other occasionally. You'll get the rows still but that's just the governors but the mechanics have got ways of working it out with each other.
How much of your success this year is down to engineering vs how much race strategy and driver skill?
Driver skill questionable! The basic fundamental flaw this year with answers a lot of this question is that we never tested. We never had the budget. We have done one day's testing this year at Snetterton and that's it. When we'd tested we went back Snetterton and qualified really well. The underlying problem has been the lack of funding at the beginning of the season caused by the very last minute nature of our sponsorship deal for this year. Turning up at the press day with Mat Jackson sitting in the car for the first time and that was it. That was our test programme and that was our failing. Lack of data on the current tyre and gearbox changes - we've been winging it and that reflects in our qualifying times. The success has all come from the race day and not the qualifying. There's been a few qualifying days that have been good but we've tended to be on the back foot come race day but if you look at what we've then done on race day, we always had a good racecar. We end up using free practice and qualifying to get our racecar when we need it for Sunday. We started last and 11th last Sunday but ended up fourth and sixth in the first race. Whilst you don't get points for qualifying first, by the time you get to the front the body damage is less. In clear air you get less damage.
What's given you the edge over WSR this time?
Drivers, determination, young fast drivers and a very determined upbeat team. I can't speak for WSR but it doesn't look that its the team that it was. I could tell you all the reasons but I'm not going to. I think we sent them something to sabotage them *laughs*. The luck he's had is unreal. Determination and team atmosphere is what's carried us. We've worked hard for each other. We have two separate teams but Friday night and Saturday night we all get together, sit at the table and throw bits of dinner at each other. The atmosphere is the chief motivator. Because the management chain is me and that's it, there's no chain of command. WSR have three directors and they all have a chat about decisions. Whether its right or wrong I make all the decisions. Don't get me wrong, I make wrong ones as well and they tell me but I listen. They know who is boss but at the same time I know and respect their opinions. Everyone works together, there is no upstairs and downstairs. I load cars, I drive trucks, it doesn't bother me and they know that. I don't ask them to do things I can't do myself. I might be a bit slower, older and fatter but I've been a racer, driven trucks, run my own cars, set my cars up.
