While job titles in F1 appear consistent, roles vary from team to team. In the second instalment of An engineer's life, Williams Senior Performance Engineer Andrew Murdoch talks to Kate Walker about his life as an F1 engineer and the ins and outs of the role.
I've got a Bachelor's in Chemical Engineering and an MSC in Automotive Product Engineering -- I did my original degrees in Belfast, and then I did a year at Cranfield University, just outside Milton Keynes, which was more automotive and more vehicle dynamics, really. I was keen on mechanical stuff and on motor-racing, and the reason for doing the MSC was just trying to push more towards getting into motorsport and Formula One.
I used to race motorbikes when I was younger and I enjoyed working on the bikes more than I enjoyed racing. I liked the racing but I preferred maintaining and improving the performance of the bikes -- I used to enjoy doing that quite a bit, and so always sort of had a leaning on that direction.
My job is split between managing the small group I've got around me and actually doing the technical side but it's not terms of getting my hands dirty. Maybe if they've got a problem with the car with a brake disc or a fuel system, I'll be around to have a look, but when it comes to bolting things together, there's people definitely a lot better at doing that than me!
The role I do is very much data-based, viewing the performance car purely from the telemetry. But if we have a problem that we see on data, the real skill is in this job is tying up the data with what's physically happening as well. That way, when you come next time around, if you see something on the data, you know what the issue is. You can say, "Okay, in the data I see we've got certain suspension problem or a brake disc looks slow to react," and then by going down and actually looking at that physical part, you're closing the loop to say, "It's because the disc is glazed," or something like that.
That means the next time you see that problem in the data you diagnose it faster and it makes your response quicker. Even though the job is quite technical and data-biased or data-centric, you still need to be hands-on as well, because funnily enough, that's what makes you a better engineer.
In the role I do, you work with the driver. Within a Formula One team there's the two drivers, two race engineers, and two performance engineers, split into their two teams. Because you work with a driver or drivers over a number of years you get to see their idiosyncrasies. You know the way they drive, how they drive...
You're not talking about numbers, you're not talking about just calculus, it's really how things look so when they say, "I've got a problem with the car," you're able to see it before they can even really say there's a problem. Between myself and Jonathan [Eddolls], the race engineer, we're talking constantly about the balance of the car. Really, we know each other so well as a group nearly to the point where Valtteri [Bottas] comes in and says, "Look at this problem," we have the fix of what we're planning to do already lined up.
The other part you need is [what the data lacks]. With the data you can say this much understeer, this much oversteer on this corner, but what you don't have is how the driver feels, the perception of the car at that time. You could say, "You've got oversteer or understeer on this corner," and he can say to you the bit that's maybe missing, "Well that's because I pushed the tyres too hard", or the tyres didn't feel quite there on the out lap. It's those little details which they'll never discuss with another driver but they're able to discuss with an engineer because for them it's obviously directly linked to performance.
If you're looking at one driver, if say I spent all year with Valtteri and then for the last race I swapped over to Felipe's car, I couldn't look at the data in the same way and say, "We need to do this," because it's just the way he drives. You'll pick out characteristics of how they drive, what they're happy with and what they're not happy with. Some drivers are able to live with a lot more oversteer or understeer than others. [Even with] completely identical setups, they still are able to have a different car balance just by the way the driver uses the throttle, brake, and steering.
At the start of a race weekend, normally our team would fly out and be there on Thursday. My normal approach is never to plan anything for a Thursday because something will always crop up or, "Can you just do this? Can you just look at that?" It's always better to go fully prepped and it just gives yourself a bit more breathing space on that day.
The more you prepare, the easier it becomes because sometimes if you leave things to the last minute, you're always maybe flying by the seat of your pants a little bit. Whereas if you prepare, it becomes second nature or you know already in your head. You say, "Well okay, if the driver comes in and he complains of this, I can do that. If he complains of this, I can do that. If it rains, I know what adjustments to do on my front wings."
During a race weekend your day's a bit more structured [than in the factory] because it all starts at certain times. In a normal two-week turnaround we'd finish the race and fly back on Monday so we'll be back in the factory on Tuesday, when we do simulator work. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday we'll be doing our post-race analysis, which we review at the end of the week. Come the start of the following week, we'll be doing preparation for the next race.