The Night Shift
The part of Formula One nobody thinks about at 3am
Most people who watch Formula One on a Sunday afternoon have no idea what a Formula One factory looks like at three o’clock in the morning.
I do.
I’m writing this now, in a meeting room, on a night shift. Somewhere nearby is the constant hum of machinery and air con that you stop noticing after about twenty minutes, and only notice again when it stops. The air con is usually set to a temperature that will upset at least one person. Down the corridor, the coffee machine has been making mediocre coffee relentlessly since it was installed in 2019. Day shift get barista coffee, we just get the dodgy machine.
Outside, the car park is quiet. Mostly.
Night shifts exist in Formula One for the same reason they exist everywhere - because the work doesn’t stop when the people who work in offices go home. Deadlines don’t observe the human body’s circadian rhythm. Race calendars don’t move to accommodate normal working hours. When something needs to be finished, it needs to be finished, and the night shift is how that happens.
There is a particular kind of person who ends up on nights permanently. Not the ones who are there because they have to be, temporarily, while something critical gets finished. The permanent night worker is a specific type - self-sufficient, slightly removed from the daytime politics that consume a lot of energy in most workplaces, and usually very good at their job in a way the day shift doesn’t sometimes fully appreciate. Usually to work an obscure shift in F1 you need to be trusted to do a good job with minimal support.
The night shift has its own culture. Its own slightly odd sense of humor that develops naturally when you spend enough time with the same small group of people in the early hours with nothing but machinery noise and bad coffee for company.
There are things that happen on night shifts that would never happen during the day.
Conversations that wouldn’t be appropriate at 10am somehow make total sense at 3am. Problems get solved in ways that wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of a full management team. Decisions get made by the people actually doing the work rather than the people overseeing it, because those people are at home asleep.
There is a freedom to nights that I have always appreciated. The same can be said for weekends, which is another favourite shift pattern of mine. The factory is yours in a way that it never could be on any given week day. The hierarchy flattens slightly. The performance of being seen to be busy becomes less necessary when there are fewer senior people around to perform for.
You are either doing the work, or you aren't. The results speak for themselves and it would soon become obvious if you didn’t do enough.
The strange thing about working nights in a Formula One factory is the disconnect it creates with the rest of the world.
While most people are asleep, you’re working. While you’re asleep, most people are getting on with their day. The sport you’re helping to build exists in a completely different timezone to the one you’re actually living in. Race weekends happen on Sundays, but night shifts don’t particularly care that it’s a Sunday.
I’ve watched more than one Grand Prix from a factory floor on a screen in the corner of a workshop, surrounded by parts of the car that’s currently going round the circuit. It’s one of the stranger feelings this job produces, although not unpleasant - just a bit strange.
The world is watching something you helped make, from somewhere that couldn’t be further from the glamour of it, at a time when most people would expect you to be on a sofa watching it properly.
Instead you’re here. The machines are humming, the coffee is rubbish, and someone’s turned the bloody aircon up again.
It occurs to me, sitting here writing this at 2.47am, that Ghost Lap itself is a product of the night shift.
Most of these posts have been written in this room, at this sort of hour, in this building. The quiet that descends on a factory between around 1am and 5am is unlike anything else. It’s conducive to thinking, if not always coherent sentences.
The irony of writing anonymously about a world I'm currently sitting inside is not lost on me.
Somewhere in this building, parts of a Formula One car are being made right now. I should probably go and check on them. I might have another coffee first.
Previously I’ve mentioned the ‘Carbon Curse’. I’ll go in to that in the next post.
— David Whitmore