Several people have asked what my daily routine is, and what it is like to work in a Formula One team.
Well, I get up at 6 am, assuming that Lucas hasn't got me up during the night. Normally he will briefly wake me but I will straight back to sleep (thanks dear wife who gets up and feeds/settles as required) but occasionally he will really crack the sh*ts and scream his head off and I'll have to get up as well.
I have breafast in front of BBC One Morning show with the lovely Kate Silverton.
Kate's bioI usually try to leave the house just after 7 am and get to work just after 7:30 am.
The morning shift guys are already there... the wind tunnel runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week in three 8 hour shifts. Luckily I don't have to do any of that because I'm doing arty-farty research and development.. looks like being an egg-head pays off ;)
Lunch is taken between 12:30 - 1:00 at the canteen.. which is fairly good most of the time. Soup, bread and some side vegetables will set me back about one pound fifty, a full meal is about 2-3 pounds. The canteen is also open for breakfast (ie 10:30 am), where you can get pastries, toast, cereals and bacon/eggs twice a week. I haven't normally partaken in breakfast, but it may help get me through the cold winter months... at the possible expense of my waistline.
I go cycling with a bunch of guys from the main design office 2-3 times a week. We go riding amongst the rolling green hills and paddocks of Great and Little Tew, Duns Tew and occasionally we head south to Glympton and Wootton. It is quite something to spend your lunchbreak riding in the beautiful English countryside along small lanes and country roads. Some of these guys are semi-professional (one was even ranked in the UK top 15 for the 15 and 25 mile time trial) and they all have fancy-dan carbon/aluminium bikes. Needless to say I struggle to keep up on my 12 year old steel bike, but they always wait for me at the top of a hill.
There is also a very flash gym at work. I've been on the rowing machine a few times, I have no doubt I will be going to the gym more often as the weather closes in over winter. The gym costs 12 pounds a month which is taken out of my salary.
Most of my work is spend doing software development and coding in Fortran 90, writing computational fluid dynamic code. Last week I managed to derive the 3-D Inviscid Flux Jacobian for the Euler equations. Some of my work is still spend meshing various parts of the racing car.
For most of the time at work, you are actually unaware that you are part of a Formula One racing team.. I could be at any university/aerospace company. Occasionally, though you get reminded.. such as when you go to the stationary store to pick up a ring binder and walk past the race bay, which may be littered with carbon fibre body work, gearboxes or indeed whole cars. Test drivers sometimes drop by the factory as well.
We get a race debrief after every race from either the technical director or the chief of race strategy/tactics. If we win the whole factory gets free champagne and strawberries. This hasn't happened since the Canadian GP at the end of June.. so attendences at debriefs have been down to about 50% lately.
I usually head home at about 6:30 pm and I try to be home by 7:00 pm.
After giving Lucas his bath, putting him to bed, and having dinner and washing up.. I usually have about one hour to myself before I go to bed.. usually at about 10:00 pm.
So..is it a dream come true? Yes. I feel very fortunate, as many of the sorts of jobs in the aero department are quite repetitive. There are many jobs that involve the subtle variation of several parameters on a tiny piece of body work on the car. Getting to do leading-edge aerospace R&D for a formula one team is a very different kettle of fish.
