Jonathan Eddolls, AlphaTauri’s head of trackside engineering, explains the critical functions of the pitwall and its personnel
INTERVIEW OLEG KARPOV PICTURE RED BULL CONTENT POOL
1 “This is what a lot of the teams call ‘the prat perch’. It’s a sort of slang used by the mechanics to describe the setup on the pitwall – in the sense that this is, basically, where all the prats sit. In my previous team, Williams, it was known the prat perch but here, at AlphaTauri, nobody had heard of that! We just call it the pitwall.
“Ours is unique because it’s got eight positions. Most of the teams have much smaller setups, but we think it’s important to have the people out there, just to get situational awareness – of the weather, to see what’s going on in the garage or in the pitlane, especially in qualifying, trying to find the good gaps to send the cars out.”
2 “The position on the left is often vacant. In the past, it was occupied by someone from Honda, for example, and now it’s available for a guest if needed. Each position has its own intercom panel and two monitors. The top row is used to show the standard pages, with no technical information that we wouldn’t be happy to share, because it’s obviously easier to photograph. Up there are things like official timing pages, weather, GPS maps – the sort of things everyone’s got. And then on our own screens at the bottom, we personalise it a little bit more, depending on what our roles are and what we want to look at.”
3 “The next position is for Franz Tost, our team principal. During a race he tries to be nonoperational. He leaves the decision-making to us, and the most likely scenario when he’d be involved is when we want to do a driver swap. These situations are always tricky, and potentially even controversial, so we’ll always run it by him, and he’s the one to make the final call. But other than that it’s just important for him to see the overall picture. He likes to follow the timing screens, he looks at some data, particularly tyre temperatures and pressures, he listens to all of the important channels: strategy, drivers – so, he’s well aware of what’s going on. But ultimately he lets us do our own jobs.”
4 “It’s more or less the same for Jody Egginton, our technical director, who’s next to him. He doesn’t come to all the races, and we don’t want to operate in a different way depending on whether he’s there or not. He would be involved if we have to manage some issues on the car, but he’s mostly monitoring. He’s mainly looking at telemetry, and if he’s the
