Like NASA: This is Red Bull’s chamber of secrets

Red Bull once again prevailed in the Mexican F1 GP for better racing strategy. That tipped things in Max Verstappen’s favor against Hamilton. The visible face of this kind of success is its main strategy engineer, Hannah Schmitz, but behind her is a whole team that should not be forgotten.

In the paddock area, on each team’s truck there are engineers working throughout the weekend. It’s common to walk out of the press room at night and see lights on the first floors of motorhomes, with engineers working without taking their eyes off their computers until it’s too late. But not only that, there are also hundreds of people in the factory of each range working at maximum capacity to optimize every detail in a Grand Prix. Here it should be highlighted not only the simulator, but also the secret room of Red Bull, located in Milton Keynes.

Every great team has an operations room in their factory. For example, Mercedes has a so-called Race Support Room (RSR) at its headquarters in Brackley, while Ferrari has one at Gestione Sportiva in Maranello. Along these lines we focus on the so-called Red Bull Operations Room, the chamber of secrets of the champions.

It is a control center that works in the purest NASA style, an operations room that can perfectly serve for special CIA missions. The people who gather in that space are the eyes and ears of the team on the track and those in charge of carrying out important tests that will have a direct impact on what happens on the asphalt.

This room is located at the energy drink group’s headquarters, in Milton Keynes, where only a few have access. It has the shape of a small amphitheater, with ascending rows of seats, each with its own computers so that everyone can work with the best view of what is happening in the race. In addition to the data from their two personal monitors in real time, the specialists have a giant 4K television in front of them. On that screen, according to Red Bull, there are 12 different images where the technicians can control their two drivers and their rivals. This allows this NASA-style room not only to analyze the data coming from the track, but also to give conclusions about their rivals and even alert the team of any danger on the track or anything that overlooked and may be relevant.

room layout

Distribution is done by working groups. Performance engineers sit in the third row. In another, aerodynamic experts and in another two, strategy engineers. In the second row is the person in charge of race strategy. Everyone is in front of their computer, but in reality, everyone is listening to the same thing: the team radio.

The top ranks of each group (those not on the track) were in the same room during all training sessions, working in extreme silence.

All of them, both track and equipment and operations room, are always connected. Throughout the weekend, the silence in that room was sepulchral, ​​though it was occasionally broken by some direct conversation between engineers from both groups. In this sense, it should be noted that each F1 team has different internal communication channels. “Most departments have an internal channel. Then there is a wider channel and another for the operating room. There are four or five tiers and each channel has more people,” said a strategist from the energy drink team on the Red Bull website.

Connected from the rest of the world

In order for nothing to fail, the connection between the track and the operations room must be as fast as possible, something they can achieve even if the races go to the other side of the world, thousands and thousands of kilometers from Milton Keynes (Great Britain) .). This is the case of racing in Australia. According to Red Bull, only 300 thousandths of a second pass from the time the information leaves the Melbourne track and reaches the operations room. And if the race is in Europe, receiving data is instantaneous. For that crucial part to work, F1 teams use a private global VPN network at the circuit, with cables running from the garage to the trucks in the paddock and connecting to the factory remotely.

In career, priority for strategists

The gear works together from the beginning of the first training sessions of the weekend. But when qualifying is over, because you can’t change the set-up of the car for the race, at the Sunday event, only the strategy engineers usually meet in the operations room. Logically, the tension is maximum and the concentration, too. Although the fact that they work in such silence and with maximum concentration for three long days does not mean that sometimes the group allows certain things.

The clear example is the one detailed on the Red Bull website, which ensures that sometimes, in a small corner of the aforementioned giant screen, images of other important events are shown. “In the 2018 World Cup, we watched the England game while the French GP was taking place. That we have to work on the same weekend does not mean that we have to give up everything,” said a member of Red Bull about his room secrets, the eyes and ears of the champion team.