John Howett guides us throughWatch a Formula 1 Grand Prix and the hard work of the driver and race team is obvious – but behind the scenes at Panasonic Toyota Racing's headquarters in Cologne, Germany, that dedication continues all year round.
Panasonic Toyota Racing
is one of the few teams in Formula 1 to build an entire car - chassis and engine - under one roof, with around 650 specialist staff working tirelessly to give
Ralf Schumacher and
Jarno Trulli a competitive car when they hit the track.
But what goes on inside the team's headquarters? President John Howett opened up the factory doors to give an exclusive glimpse behind the scenes.
The first stop on his guided tour was the carbon composites department. Without carbon fibre, a Formula 1 car would be a very different beast so the carbon composites department plays a crucial role in translating design to reality.
"We use so much carbon in Formula 1 because it is light, it's strong, it's extremely stiff and it adds to driver safety," John explains.
"This is one of the most important departments in any Formula 1 team, where the main body and structural parts are made. It doesn't look exciting from the outside but inside it is much more. It is one of the busiest assembly shops in the whole factory," he continues.
"We translate the designs into real components.
Carbon fibres are cut very precisely from large sheets and transferred to the lay-out area. From here the carbon fibre is placed in moulds in a specific direction to optimise the strength of the component."
But that's not the end of the story for the carbon fibre parts, which must go through another process before becoming race ready, and John opened the door to a normally private area.
"It looks a bit like a bank vault but it is actually an autoclave," John says. "After the parts are completed in the lay-out room they are placed in a bag, the bag is placed under vacuum and they are then baked under high pressure and temperature in an oven. These ovens work 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Of course, all the clever carbon fibre designs need something with real grunt to get them moving and that is found in the engine workshop. Before entering the engine workshop, team members get the chance to cast their eyes over a piece of Toyota history - the engine which powered Mika Salo to a point on the team's Formula 1 debut in the 2002 Australian Grand Prix.
Engine building is a specialised job as John revealed on his access-all-areas tour: "We have highly skilled technicians, probably more skilled than Swiss watch assemblers, working on our engines. We pre-assemble the cylinder heads then we have teams of two people assembling the final engine itself."
The factory in Cologne is not just about building a Formula 1 car - that is only part of the job. Testing and optimising parts of the car are also keys to a successful operation. That will be explained in the second part of this feature.
Source Panasonic Toyota Racing
