Failure; Fuelling Success
Since Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix much has been made of Lewis Hamilton’s stunning performance for Mercedes and the fury of Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo whose Red Bull Racing team has been royally blamed for robbing him of victory by way of a botched pit stop.
It was a critical win for Hamilton and it came as a result of out-right pace combined with clever strategy. The triple World Champion opted for just a single pit stop, staying on his full wet tyres longer than his rivals before switching to full slicks, thus putting Ricciardo’s race strategists at Red Bull Racing under pressure.
This was the key to the race because, for pole position man and race leader Ricciardo, the realisation that Hamilton was going for a one-stopper meant that when the Australian pitted for a second time on lap 32 he really needed the team to execute a perfect stop. This is the team, remember, which holds the pit stop World Record in Formula; a remarkable 1.923s set at the 2013 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas.
Ricciardo, however, was to find himself stationary for 13.9s, by which time Hamilton assumed a lead he was never to relinquish. After the race Ricciardo made his feelings very clear, and publicly so. For the second race in a row he had been ‘screwed’ and he told the team over the radio to ‘save it’ when it came to the usual post race platitudes.
“There’s nothing you guys can say that will make it any better,” he said.
So what happens next? Fans and media like have pilloried the team, describing them as ‘chaotic’, even ‘the keystone cops’ of Formula One. Some have even said that, coming on the back of a strategy call in the Spanish Grand Prix which also robbed Ricciardo of a win, he should quit the team and put a call into Ferrari.
For the team, the reality will be rather different. In competitive Formula One teams a disastrous outcome such as occurred in Monte Carlo will be used to carry out a thorough review and, rather than blaming people or claiming it ‘was just one of those things’, lead to improvements likely to be implemented in time for next week’s Canadian Grand Prix.
Continuous improvement is what drives Formula One, and whether it is a driver trying to find a tenth of a second improvement from one lap to the next, or a team revising a procedure to avoid repeating the same mistake twice, it all boils down to having an open culture which thrives on learning. As I often say, in F1 we use failure to fuel future performance.
When we make mistakes the outcome can be disastrous in sporting terms, catastrophic when you consider that lives could be lost. Our mistakes are very public, open to detailed scrutiny from media, fans, and across social media platforms. Errors can damage hard-won reputations; this is not an arena for fragile egos or the faint hearted.
Sunday’s problem for Red Bull Racing was that a very fast decision had to be made, in this instance whether to use the soft or super-soft compound tyres when Ricciardo came in for that fateful stop. Red Bull’s original plan was to use a set of soft compound tyres but when they saw Hamilton opt for ultra-softs the teams strategists decided to split the difference and make a last minute change to super softs.
What happened next is subject to the team’s own investigations, but team boss Christian Horner has already admitted that the set of super-soft compound tyres was at the very back of the garage, less accessible than the soft tyres which had been readied at the front. The garages in Monaco are small, with much less room than at other purpose-built race tracks, so this results in teams often using a compromised layout.
In addition, such is the limitation on space that the engineers and strategists sit on the first floor, above the garage. Unlike other races, where everyone is on the ground floor, there are no visible lines of communication between engineers and mechanics in Monaco. Everything is being done over two-way radio, and Horner confirmed that a miscommunication over tyre choice ensued.
By the time the change in tyre choice had been communicated correctly Ricciardo was already committed to the pit stop. He drove a very fast ‘in’ lap at which point he arrived to find, well, no one ready for him. Or at least no tyres, and the team flailing around trying to get the super-soft set from the back of the garage out into the pit lane. In Formula One terms a 13.9 second pit stop is an experience more akin to a McDonald’s drive thru. It will have felt like an eternity to Ricciardo; five times longer than usual.
Pit stops are often described as being the ultimate example of speed, process and team work. The driver is the internal customer, the 20-man crew working simultaneously to undertake a range of tasks within 2 seconds. Ordinary technicians doing an extraordinary job, and one that the driver depends upon if he is to stand a chance of winning the race.
Sunday’s failure will make Red Bull Racing stronger, however, because although many observers have been critical of the team, you can be absolutely certain that no one will be harder on the personnel involved that themselves. They will learn a great deal from analysing what went wrong, and figuring out what steps to take to ensure that it is never repeated. Not by this crew, nor by any Red Bull Racing crew in the future.
No one working in a high performance environment sets out to make a basic mistake of this kind, so when it happens each person will have been absolutely gutted – for him or herself, but most of all for the team. ‘Trust’ is a key word in high performance team work, and the team will know that if a driver cannot trust his crew to deliver then the overall performance will start to suffer.
The team will look at a number of key areas;
Process; there is a well established process for planning and executing pit stops, including having the agility to change tactics. A decision to change from one tyre choice to another mid-race is nothing new, so all aspects of the existing process will be examined to consider what anomalies occurred in Monaco. The process may have failed in Monaco due to the nature of that circuit’s facilities, and therefore require a race-specific procedure in future.
Communication; the chain of command in a Formula One team is very clear so the team will examine the points at which the engineers and strategists made the initial pit stop call, then subsequently revised it, and how was this communicated. Two way radios can suffer severe interference in a Formula One environment, so it is not unheard of for an instruction to be missed. Military-style radio protocol is usually the order of the day, and instructions have to be not only heard but correctly understood. Clear acknowledgement is required.
People; these teams benefit from relationships forged over a long period of time. However sometimes you can have a new member of the team or, human nature being what it is, have tensions interfere with day to day operations. Any internal conflicts, change of personnel or reallocation of roles will be examined, along with training, experience and line management. One question which may arise was whether anyone within the team could actually see what was unfolding but failed to escalate the matter for fear of upsetting more senior staff. This is the question of ‘pointing out the obvious’ which can often fail to occur due to issues of hierarchy.
Equipment; a team knows precisely where its car is at any given point in time, and as long ago as the 1990’s when Damon Hill drove for my team at Jordan we made sure that, when he cleared the 2nd sector on an ‘in’ lap to the pits, his race engineer would advise us of the number of seconds left until the pit stop. On top of that, experienced drivers such as Jean Alesi used to tell us on the radio ‘I am in the pit lane’, giving us another ten to fifteen second warning. Simple stuff; a check-list mentality. However it relies heavily on radio equipment working properly, and those manning the telemetry systems being able to update the management on vehicle position.
Data; the telemetry system, including vehicle positioning on the track, will provide important evidence about what was happening and when. Combined with the recorded voice communications and video evidence, data will help give the team a forensic insight into what took place. It will be a powerful learning experience.
In his excellent book ‘Black Box Thinking’ the journalist Mathew Syed explains how the aviation industry used the lessons learned from previous disasters to ensure constant improvements to safety, a trajectory of continuous improvement from which we all benefit each time we fly. In his book he spent time with a Formula One team, ironically Hamilton’s Mercedes Benz outfit, where he witnessed first hand the data-driven culture of continuous improvement and error correction.
Red Bull Racing will be a more formidable team in Canada because of the lessons learned from the disappointment of Monaco and, once Ricciardo has had time to reflect on Sunday’s events, there is no doubt that he will recognise the inherent truth of the phrase that ‘We win as a team, and we lose as a team’. Second place is the first of the losers and if Ricciardo didn’t feel happy at losing then it will be a feeling shared by all seven hundred of his colleagues in the Milton Keynes team. They will come back more determined, and better prepared, than ever.