If Suzuka was tough on the drivers, it was tougher still on the crews who have the job of keeping the cars fighting fit. Toro Rosso team manager Gianfranco Fantuzzi talks us through the method that brings order from chaos...
Gianfranco, with both Toro Rosso cars suffering damage on Saturday, and another big crash happening on Sunday, was that as tough a weekend as the Toro Rosso garage have ever faced?
Suzuka was quite tough, yes. Obviously, all the damage you can repair, in many ways that’s the easy part. Broken suspension can be repaired; even a broken gearbox. We have all the parts ready, usually assembled in groups. It’s hard work, but at the same time it’s also routine.
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But it’s a different story when you have a broken chassis as we had in Japan. Getting that car [Alguersuari’s, damaged in the latter stages of the race] ready for Brazil was challenging. We had to ship it back to Faenza. It left with us on Sunday night, flown home by DHL, who look after most of the F1 freight. It arrived at the factory on Tuesday afternoon, where it was repaired, rebuilt, painted and put back in it’s box and shipped out to Brazil. It arrived here on Thursday morning. Without having really good logistics support it would have been impossible.
Is it your responsibility to arrange that or is it a job for chief engineering Laurent Mekies?
The first thing is for the engineers to determine whether yes, we can fix it in the garage, or no, we cannot and it has to go back to the factory. They decide what has to be done – in this case with the monocoque but it would apply for any part of the car. Then from the logistics side, our job is to make it happen: in this case to get it back to the factory and bring it out here to Brazil as quickly as we can. So really, it’s their decision and we facilitate that as quickly as possible.
Is it tougher working at a fly-away race than in Europe?
No, not really. At the fly-aways we don’t take all the equipment we have in Europe – it’s a little bit too expensive to work in that way – but we do take all the usual spare parts. So in terms of spares, it’s no different. Though it would probably have been easier to fix in Europe, but only because the shipment times would have been shorter and we would have been a little more relaxed about the timescales involved.
Obviously any team with two rookie drivers it likely to require more spare pieces of bodywork than one without. Do you factor that in to the shipping manifest?
Not at all! The number of spare parts we carry isn’t based on how much experience the driver has. We have six noses, five sets of rear suspension, X number of gearboxes. We’d take the same regardless of who was driving the cars.
With the STR4 going through so many evolutions during the season, are the mechanics constantly having to re-learn what they need to know?
Not really. It’s pretty much the same when you’re building it. I would say, though, that the cars have become more complex over the years. The development is something that never stops, and while the exterior of the cars have become cleaner this year, internally they are much more complicated, so it takes a little longer now to work with than it did even four or five years ago. Perhaps complicated isn’t the right word – there are simply more parts…
Everybody was very impressed with the speed you turned around Buemi’s damaged car during the qualifying session in Japan. Do you practice scenarios like that?
We hope not to get too much practice! There isn’t specific training for it but the secret – which isn’t very secret – is to have the parts ready as groups. For instance, if you have a broken rear suspension it’s sometimes quicker to change the complete rear-end including the gearbox – and so we have a complete rear end ready.
What the boys did during qualifying at Suzuka was a bit amazing. The car was quite badly damaged, and they were able to turn it around and get it back out on to the track very, very quickly. When it went out it wasn’t exactly in pristine condition, but it was good enough to do the job.
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