Alex Chan, Alfa Romeo race engineer on Valtteri Bottas’ car, takes us through the team’s setup in the middle of the garage at every grand prix
INTERVIEW OLEG KARPOV PICTURE ALFA ROMEO
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1 “This is what we call ‘Isola’, it’s an Italian word for ‘island’ – because it’s a standing desk for the engineers in the middle of the garage.”
2 “On the right-hand side you see here Jörn Becker, Zhou Guanyu’s race engineer. My desk is on the opposite side of the garage, and we’re always in these positions during practice sessions and qualifying. From here we have a direct line of sight to the driver in the car. Then, obviously – depending on setup, since every pit complex is a bit different – we might also be able to see out into the pitlane and the pitstop position. It’s simply the best view of seeing what’s happening in the garage and on the car.”
3 “Each of us here has a screen up there that’s connected to a PC behind. Then we’ll set our laptops underneath, and basically connect the two together.
“For me, in my role, I mainly use ATLAS [Advanced Telemetry Linked Acquisition System] – a software package which is used to capture, distribute, display and analyse data – for the live telemetry, timing screens, and also the GPS map because I need to let the driver know about traffic, what’s going on in the race and so on. Also, I have lots of alerts for track status: if there’s a Safety Car or red flag or anything like this, we have some big flashing warnings. Same for, let’s say, a tyre puncture – we have something that detects this and I immediately get a warning.
“On my laptop, I also have the run sheet. It’s a combination of different data sources: we have the timing and the setup data, so we can keep track of what we change on the car. It’s also where I record the driver’s comments. When we’re debriefing after a run, I’ll be typing the main points of what Valtteri’s saying into the run sheet.” “Next to the race engineer is the performance engineer – that’s the same on both sides. It’s Chris Pirro on this side of the garage, and I work with Andrea Benisi on the other. They typically are much less focused on what’s happening in terms of on-track action – GPS, or where we are in the race – and mostly look at the data coming from the car.”
5 “On the left-hand side is our tyre engineer, Domenico Desiante, the only asymmetrical position compared with the other side of the garage. On the opposite side is the desk of Yuriy de Zwart, our aero track engineer. Domenico is monitoring live tyre data
