Trackside engineering
Mtech Competition, Porsche Carrera Cup
Two race weeks embedded with Mtech Competition, at the Six Hours of Portimão and the Six Hours of Barcelona in the winter series. The team ran small: mostly mechanics, one engineer, and the engineer was also the team principal. That shape was the value of it. Nothing was hidden inside a department; every decision happened within earshot. Most of my time was spent alongside the engineer, watching how he worked. Much of the rest went to the tyre programme, assisting the man who ran it.
The tyre programme ran to a fixed rhythm. Cold pressures set to target before each run; inner, middle and outer surface temperatures and hot pressures taken as cars returned; bleed-downs tracked against ambient drift through the day; rotations planned across the weekend's allocation.
Between sessions the data work ran in MoTeC i2. Most of it was the engineer's, and I watched; mine was lap overlays against the reference driver, with basic math channels for quick checks on braking points and minimum corner speeds. No telemetry is reproduced here.
One job was mine outright: refuelling during the races. The rest of the time went on getting as close to the work as possible. I sat in driver briefings to watch how an engineer works with his drivers, joined the track walks and the running of the car, and watched the mechanics work: the repair after an incident, drive axles, brake discs, brake bleeds, setup changes. More than anything, the weekends left me with a working picture of how a race team actually operates.
There is little technical media on this page by choice: walking around a team's garage photographing their work did not feel right.
