How We Operate as a Team

Part 2: How We Operate as a Team

Part 3: The driver, the car, the circuits and the races

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Racing the Basis McLaren in Europe; How we operate as a team

The entire operation is overseen by our Team Manager, but my main interaction and focus on test and race days is with my race engineer, and my vehicle set-up engineer. Any set-up changes necessary are then communicated to the Chief Mechanic and his team of mechanics, and our data is also shared with the McLaren race engineers who are there to add their support. Testing and race days have their own different, though not unconnected, challenges. Test days give us the chance to experiment with new set-ups, sometimes quite radical, whereas race days are all about fine tuning the set-ups that we know are working for the particular circuit that we're racing at. Data acquisition and analysis is therefore crucial to giving us the optimal performance for the car.

This isn't the whole story however, as the world governing body of GT Racing gives all the cars on the grid a 'Balance of Performance' handicap (BOP), in an attempt to equalise any one manufacturer's potential advantage over another. This is in the form of enforcing minimum ride height limits, restricting engine power, adding ballast weights etc, and is based on previous race results and huge swathes of vehicle data and calculations. This generally works well, as illustrated by the extremely close racing at all rounds, but it means that our car set-up has to be constantly fine-tuned at every race meeting, to take account of the revised BOP, tyre wear, fuel load, ambient conditions etc. And it's no good having a quick car for one lap, if it works the tyres too hard over a one hour race, the pace will fall away, so there also has to be a certain amount of compromise when deciding on race settings.

Every test session is followed by a team debrief, where I not only share my views on the car's handling performance, but we download, study, and analyse the full array of data from our on-board loggers, as well as our on-board video footage. Based on such data as speed, rpm, braking points, brake pressure, steering angle, throttle position, tyre pressures, tyre temperatures and of course driver feel, we then decide on changes to the car set-up for the next test session or upcoming race. The effects of these changes can be shared with my Race Engineer when I'm out on track via our two-way car to pits radio. The car will never be perfect; there are always compromises to make, so after every single session on the track, we go back and repeat the entire process. But the satisfaction of getting it right on race day is well worth all the effort; see photo below!

In Part 3, I'll look at my career path and how I came to be part of the Basis Technologies team racing the Basis McLaren, and I'll talk about the car, the circuits we race at, test and race days, interacting with the media and guests, and some of the best moments from the season.

If you have any questions, please send me an email: fred.martindye@mclaren.com

Fred

Part 1: Insight

Part 2: How We Operate as a Team

Part 3: The driver, the car, the circuits and the races

Part 4: Onboard with Fast Freddie

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