The students at the heart of the Mercedes F1 factory

Your tributes may be heard over and over, but they are meaningful and from the heart. While there is an upper limit on the number of operating staff physically on the track on race weekends, base staff in Brackley retain a crucial role.

A lot of important off-track work is done in the Mercedes Race Support Room (RSR). From here, the data is processed and the analysis completed to inform strategy calls that can run or end.

Motorsport.com had the rare opportunity to look behind the scenes of the Mercedes factory at the United States Grand Prix race on Saturday and join the men and women of the RSR for final practice and qualifying.

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One of the largest and perhaps more surprising contingents within the RSR are university students who volunteer to work on race weekends as part of their internships in the Mercedes F1 team. You are in either the second and third or third and fourth years of the university and come from a range of subjects such as computer science, physics, aerodynamics, and mathematics.

It gives students the opportunity to gain live experience as part of the racing team, tasks such as transcribing publicly available radio from other teams or analyzing videos from the world feed, screenshots of interesting information or things they noticed, perform.

For Mercedes, it makes sure all bases are covered and uses the extra resource to hear and see everything.

“When you literally hear 20 car feeds talking, you only need ears to monitor all the TV feeds, you need to look at the ground,” said Dom Riefstahl, team leader and test engineer at Mercedes.

“It’s just this manpower. You can listen to the meetings, the debriefings, and any car-related discussions.

“They basically just sacrifice their free time for it. On a Friday they have to have the OK from their manager to come and help. On Saturdays and Sundays they really only sacrifice their free time and free time. “

Thanks to the openness of the Mercedes approach, interns can make points or suggestions and often help with inquiries from the team.

“If you have an opinion on something, you are welcome to express it,” says Riefstahl. “It’s been very, very rare, but on occasion we would have a question or a line or someone would say, ‘Did anyone notice?’ And then someone might say, ‘Yes, I have the video and I’ll send it around.’ “

Photo by: Mercedes

It also helps nurture the next generation of F1 strategists and engineers. Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff has regularly found that the Brackley factory feels more and more like a university campus, and that’s part of it.

Riefstahl holds a “Racing 101” session with the students on the Sunday morning before the race, where nothing is viewed as a stupid question and they can ask any questions they have.

“It only feeds their passion for it,” said Riefstahl. “It’s very informal, but they can ask all the things they really want to know about and you can really see that that’s getting the juices flowing.

“Yes, working in the RSR is hard work, I can’t lie. You are very busy during the sessions. But I think this page and being able to be present at all of the meetings is really a thank you for the work they have done and they really feel involved. “

Their commitment also leads to a real sense of community on successful weekends for Mercedes, especially when analyzing a large amount of information can help make crucial strategic decisions.

“If it’s a weekend where strategy was critical and we know strategy was dominated by what we heard from other teams and we responded and responded correctly, then you know, yes what I did was really important, ”said Riefstahl.

“A race like Sochi, where at a certain time the rain comes up and suddenly getting all the information about what people think about tires is really crucial, and that’s where they really realize, ‘Yes, it does it!’ a difference and I have an impact on a race weekend.

“I could imagine that for someone who is just an internship in a company, it would be quite unusual to say that I was actually involved in winning this race.”