The logistic challenge of Red Bull Racing
Published on 15 June 2016 by Niels Hendrix
It's only been few days’ and already Montreal has been swapped for F1’s newest venue, Baku, Azerbaijan, home of a new European Grand Prix. But with an eight-hour time loss to contend with, a brand new circuit to plan for and only a couple of days in which to do it, the turnaround is one of the toughest organisational challenges of the season.
Red Bull Racing logistics manager Gerard O'Reilly tells more about this challenge: “The biggest problem is getting the air freight from Montreal to Baku as it's a long flight and also Baku is eight hours' ahead of Montreal, so we're losing a chunk of time. In terms of packing up in Montreal, we wanted to be out of there at about midnight on Sunday to make sure we got the air freight ready for a flight on Monday afternoon. That air freight arrived in Baku on Tuesday.”
“The sea freight element was already in Baku – that came directly from Sochi. That's largely garage build stuff. Two of our guys also flew out from the UK last week Thursday, so they will have stared work in Baku over the weekend. That's now standard practice. On any back-to-back flyaway we'll always send an early crew out to the second event.”
“In terms of people, we've had some going back to England for a couple of days but the rest of us flew on Monday lunchtime on a charter flight direct to Baku. We landed at about 8.30am on Tuesday and went to the hotel, had a shower and headed straight to the track. It wasn't too many of us – maybe six, just to see how things were going, and also because there are infrastructure things that needed doing, such as IT systems.”
“At a standard European race we'd normally have the garage operational by Tuesday afternoon and the guys would then be in around nine o'clock on Wednesday morning. In Baku, I don't think it will be much different. We'll have a crew of about 20 at the track at six in the morning on Wednesday to finalise everything and then the rest of the guys will be in at about nine. After that it should be a normal Wednesday and Thursday car build.”
“I do think it will be hard on people though and jet lag will affect everybody. It's not easy going from minus five hours to plus three in such a short space of time but that's the challenge. In the end it just has to get done and we'll find a way to do it. Hopefully by Thursday morning we'll be wondering what all the fuss was about!”
