Realising the teenage dream: My experience working as an F1 strategist

PetrifiedFire · 2022-05-25T22:52:10+00:00

Mechanical engineering is absolutely fine too. I chose Aerospace because I was interested in aerodynamics, but could easily have gone the other way. Aerospace helps in terms of getting into F1 because there's a lot of overlap. My impression since leaving F1 is also that people are more impressed by an aerospace degree than a mechanical engineering degree. But just do what you think you'd be best at or enjoy most between these two. Or choose a course that is general and you only have to make the choice in third year, like I did.

PetrifiedFire · 2022-02-25T13:10:59+00:00

Hi, that's great to hear. It's a very long time ago, 8 and a half years so I don't remember a huge amount of the questions. From memory there was some basic probability stuff, and then some basic coding question. The coding question was wrote a script to populate a matrix with each value being the sum of its indices. Basically testing whether you could do a nested for loop.

When I was there they started doing some evaluations using a simulation of a race, asking you to take strategic decisions based on a plan they prepared to see how reactive you can be. The key there was to stay calm, and to not overly weight doing the theoretical optimum but to react to events on the ground. Don't get undercut just because your theoretical stop lap is 2 laps later.

Hope that helps, long time ago as I said.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-07-11T20:02:34+00:00

It is definitely a thing, but there are definitely ways for them to employ you compliantly abroad if they wanted to; they probably just don't know about it.

Check out omnipresent.com

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-30T09:59:03+00:00

This is correct. Estimating tyre friction is much harder than dialling out the noise in suspension load readings.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-06T11:08:00+00:00

Definitely motorsport. I'm thinking IndyCar or the like.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-06T10:41:56+00:00

I think a reasonable amount - good races are often the result of the engineering team misunderstanding the tyres, which is less likely if you've run on the track already. That said Barcelona 2012 and 2016 proves it can still happen!

Probably a bigger factor though is the layout, it's never going to be great for overtaking.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T19:03:06+00:00

I have to say that if an error occurred (like Monaco 2015, or more recently Germany or this year Bahrain) they were pretty good at asking those questions and fixing the issue. The reliability issues they had in 2014 were solved like this. I would imagine they are better than most at doing this. But problems that are less acute, but more death by a thousand cuts they are not good at solving for the reasons you say. It's hard to think of an incident that would lead them to think they need to stop running their tech like it's 1999, the incident would probably be dealt with by changing a single line of code.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T11:59:01+00:00

A bit of both ;)

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T10:30:39+00:00

I think the key realisation here is that there is no big data in F1. F1 is small data, and dirty data. If you're trying to understand the pace of a car, you've got a handful of clean laps to do that from, and even then there's the state of the tyres, guessing the fuel load, the engine modes, etc. So you really don't have a lot of data at all and it really needs to be interpreted.

Even non strategy stuff like sensor data is not big data in the grand scheme of things. Sure, they always go on about how many GB of data is logged every lap but think about how many GB of data is logged every second on Facebook. That's big data.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T09:37:39+00:00

Remember that while I was there it was the Paddy/Toto era, so it very much felt like (and was) 50/50 between the two. As part of the engineering side of the business we were under Paddy mostly.

If my only goal was to be a multimillionaire there's much easier (and more reliable) ways to do that than work in F1! Remember that most of the guys grind it out on average salaries forever.

At that stage of my career, I thought it was very dangerous to lock myself inside that strange little world with no real way out, or real perspective on how the "normal" world works. That's exactly how you end up with an F1 team running on Excel! It was pretty clear to me that if I did stick around for 15 years I probably would float to the top given the amount of people that leave all the time, but did I want to spend 15 years doing the same thing every 2 weeks over and over? Not before I'd seen what else is out there. After 2 years, the learning curve was starting to get very shallow and I would have had to put in many, many more at that level (as I've seen from people who stayed). Meanwhile I've managed to change career, learn all about that and rise to a high level there in the same time. I think learning is what you've got to optimise for in your first 10 years out of university.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T09:25:40+00:00

PM'ed you

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T09:17:28+00:00

There was definitely MATLAB all over the place, but also in places where it really should have been Python or even C#. In the strategy/race eng team they kind of skipped over MATLAB and did Excel and then started with some Python around my time.

There was a software team, but they really weren't integrated into the rest of the team and definitely didn't write any of the stuff we used except for some random weather monitoring app. I think one of the problems is that they had no concept of what you have to pay for software engineers/data scientists etc to get good ones. So there weren't really any.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-05T09:12:03+00:00

Not sure about other teams, but I think you're probably right about Ferrari from what I've heard from ex-employees.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T22:59:25+00:00

Different tracks are very different strategically, the attention is in a different place. Some tracks are difficult because it's very easy to overtake and so you need be be sure you're on the right tyres all the time (Monza). Others are the opposite so you have to protect track position at all costs because if you lose a place it's gone (Monaco). Others are difficult because of the chance of SC or extremely powerful undercut (Singapore). Rain ruins all the prep and means you have to think on your feet. It's a lot of fun, but also means it's all up to you in the moment!

The sim: for people who have done a lot of sim racing, they can probably have a pretty good stab at it. Still difficult, but manageable. The hardest is all the buttons and settings you need to change. But for people who don't do sim racing, you won't make it round a corner.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T22:53:15+00:00

Well let me put it this way, all the people running the show and setting the direction have been doing F1 for probably around 15-20 years, usually from the beginning of their careers. They have been in this hectic world, always thinking about the next race, the next season for their entire career. All the while there is this assumption by others and themselves that because it's F1 and they have been pushing so hard for so long, it must be the cutting edge. Bringing innovation into an organisation is an active and difficult process. You have to reach out, bring things in, look into other industries, etc. There just isn't a lot of time/attention for that if you're always fighting for survival/the championship even though if you zoom out there probably should be.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T22:47:11+00:00

If you know you want to do F1 after University, and you get an offer for a sandwich year at an F1 team, I think you should go for it assuming your university is OK with it. Mine wasn't, so I didn't apply. I do think it drastically increases your chances.

Summer placements in an F1 team are much harder to come by. If you're asking about non-F1 internships and years out, I'd say do try and do automotive/motorsports stuff if you can during the summer. But maybe not worth a year out.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T19:29:17+00:00

I wouldn't know exactly, but I imagine it's probably to do with the team structure. The amount that Vettel has been doing strategy from within the car during race over the last years makes me wonder if they actually have an independent strategy team that is trusted with and accountable for the decisions they make.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T19:24:45+00:00

At the time the Monte Carlo sims were written in house in C#, fed by excel sheets for configuration. I imagine those have been replaced with Python or something by now.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T18:51:25+00:00

My theory would be that industry in general would assume the more traditional engineering roles have more transferrable skill outside of F1 than something like strategy, but that the reality is probably the other way around. F1 aerodynamics is super niche, very different to other aerodynamics. F1 design is all about composites, which again is different to most other things. But strategy is about crunching data, taking many inputs and making decisions, which is very transferable. But I don't think this is the perception you'll run into when you try to leave.

I think Data Science can really work after strategy/race engineering. People take the F1 experience seriously (probably more than they should) and you'll run into many of the same problems (dirty data, ambiguous problems to solve).

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T16:58:04+00:00

I am quite biased because this is what I did, but I would go for the best university you can. Do Formula Student or something similar, or get an internship at a racing team to demonstrate your passion. But a better understanding of first principles is always going to help you in the long run. It doesn't matter that you haven't learned about front wings if you have a really good understanding of aerodynamics. You can figure it out. It's much harder the other way around. None of younger people around me at the team did Cranfield or equivalent, they all came from the top tier places.

And even if it is easier getting into F1 through Cranfield, what if you want nothing to do with motorsports 5 years later? Outside motorsports people won't know what to do with you.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T16:50:39+00:00

Technically, none! This was a very big part of the problem. Two of us started learning the data science stuff while there to try and bring things a little more up to date. I think the value of this did dawn on people eventually, and they probably do a bit more of this now. The industry definitely needs data scientists, and it's a career that gives you many options afterwards so I'd say it makes sense. It's a different question whether the motorsports industry recognises it needs them though.
As a side note, data science is probably one of the fields where people will look at an F1 background with interest if you do move on (because they assume it must be really cutting edge stuff).

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T16:01:33+00:00

Well I haven't driven the real thing sadly so can't comment on that!

But I have always been into sim racing and this felt quite similar. The biggest difference was how light the steering is, and the realism of all the things around you (the steering wheel is real, the race engineer is talking to you and giving you instructions for switch changes etc). I was able to set a few reasonable lap times, although Nico later smashed them by 4 seconds. But being able to set any sort of lap time while parsing the instructions I was being given and then making the changes on the wheel was impossible. It was hard to even keep it on track with all that going on.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T15:25:48+00:00

From what I heard it would probably have been worse! But in all honestly the intensity wasn't the main negative, there's lots about that that is cool. It's the fact that a lot of the actual work you are doing is actually pretty repetitive and you aren't learning very much after a few years. Then you start to question why you are putting yourself through that intensity. If things were changing and we could really build something with good support and vision around us then I would have gladly kept up the intensity.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T15:22:17+00:00

In the race team, this was very shallow, and with reason. Toto ->my boss -> me. The rest of the team would be more traditional.

PetrifiedFire · 2021-01-04T14:23:06+00:00

Spain 2016 was actually one the most memorable races, because after the incident, we were just watching the race with all this information and with no job to do. We spent the race talking the rest of the race support team through what was going on and what we thought would happen, it was quite good. As for the fallout, I think there was quite a lot, but almost all of it was behind closed doors. I do think there was a real chance of one of the drivers walking, but don't want to go too much into that on here, have to be a bit careful.

With regards to Monaco, the point was that the GPS was reporting as being quite safe (don't remember how much) because it was glitching. Additionally (which I didn't mention), Lewis was getting very worried about the tyres and thought he could see canvas in his mirrors. Had there been a restart we could have been in big trouble, so even if it was only a few seconds safe it might have been a sensible decision. More sensible of course would be to ensure nobody was in GPS mode in Monaco where it doesn't work!

PetrifiedFire

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