Bring Your Sleeping Bags
Inside a Formula One factory when things go wrong
Everyone seems to know someone who works in Formula One. Or knows someone who knows someone. People nearly always have tales of crazy hours, relentless pressure, and absolutely no life outside work.
They’re not wrong exactly. But they’re describing one version of it.
Most days in an F1 factory are surprisingly ordinary. The pressure isn’t constant. It arrives in specific moments, without warning, and when it does, it fills a room completely.
This is about one of those moments.
A critical component of the car failed during FIA homologation.
Expensive doesn’t really cover it. Neither does the amount of work involved. These are the moments people like me dread most - not just because of the lost time or money, but because everyone immediately understands what comes next.
Every manager and supervisor on the shop floor promptly rounded up their staff and headed to the race bays.
As we downed tools and trudged over, we knew this was either something very exciting, or very serious. The atmosphere answered that question before anyone spoke.
When you’ve been in the industry for a while, you develop a psychic ability in these moments. I’d already drafted a text to warn my family I may not be home for dinner.
Then the big boss arrived.
Not many people can pull off a face so completely consumed with rage and purpose. He had worked his way up from the bottom, sweeping floors and making tea at a small supplier, to become the team principal’s right hand man. An extraordinary journey, for an extraordinarily angry man.
His fury was real because he had everything invested in the team. Years of hard graft. He knew exactly how much work sat in front of us, and exactly where responsibility for it would eventually land.
As he paced in front of a room full of people you will never see on television, the message became clear very quickly. We might not make the first race unless everyone worked around the clock.
There was no option. No acceptable excuse.
I didn’t know where to look. Most of my teammates were looking at the floor.
Then came the line that I still remember years later.
”We’ve got work to do. Bring your f***ing sleeping bags.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d made his position on work-life balance clear.
There had been a previous meeting — different crisis, same room — where he’d outlined his views on acceptable reasons not to come to work. Bereavement, apparently, didn’t automatically qualify.
I’ll spare you some of the language. The essence of it was this:
”I don’t care if your cat’s dead, or your Nan’s dead - we need you in.”
The meetings always ended the same way.
”If anyone has a problem with that, come and see me.”
Nobody ever did.
The strange thing is, he wasn’t entirely wrong about the pressure. He was simply more honest about it than most people in Formula One are willing to be.
The weeks that followed were probably the longest of my career. I knew what I had signed up for and complaining about it wouldn’t make things any easier. I wasn’t bothered about the hard work, or the tiredness.
The real cost is what you miss out on at home.
Not every F1 factory operates like this. Some of them are considerably more relaxed. Places where a different kind of philosophy has taken hold. Places where you don’t pre-emptively text your loved ones bad news on a regular basis.
There’s a phrase you hear in those places.
”Slow down. Or they’ll expect all of us to do it that quick.”
More on that next time.
— David Whitmore