Pre Monaco

I'm writing this (sitting on a box) from the back of a hot sweaty garage in Monaco. Monaco is an amazing, crazy place to have a race. Working conditions for the teams are difficult. The garages now are much better than a few years ago, but still space is at a premium. It’s still the place to be :-)

Thursday running (another unique feature of Monaco) was a tale of two extremes with one driver near the top of the times and the other at the other end. It’s a circuit we usually do well at, although whatever the problem with our car is may have an impact this year.

From an IT perspective, we always send two people as we have the motorhomes and garage far apart. The main issue on Thursday was overheating. 5 servers shutting down due to heat. Fortunately no impact on the running of the car, but worrying non-the-less.

And so we look forward to Quali today and the race tomorrow. I just made a £5 bet with a fellow team member who thinks we’ll get a podium on Sunday :-)

Pre-Spanish GP

When the going gets tough, you get your head down and work until you’re certain you’re doing the best you can. Our performance on the track has clearly been below the standard we expected. The first three races have been very very tough!

We had some improvements to make on the IT side, and it took until the 3rd race to get things sorted out. Finally a setup day with no errors. The first two races were tough on the IT-side!

At the factory we went live on a £1.5M data centre. I’m really pleased with it. More than a hundred people worked on this project and it is extremely satisfying to see it all come together. It even worked as designed during a power downtime this past weekend.

We’re looking for a new Test team support person next year, a tough but rewarding job! Our other major challenge within IT is our IT Service Management project (based on the ITIL framework).

Here’s hoping the long lay off between Bahrain and Spain sees a marked improvement in our performance. Enjoy the race