Under pressure

In north Oxfordshire, firmly inside the UK’s world-beating motorsport engineering district and within an hour of countless other race teams and specialist suppliers, you’ll find Whiteways Technical Centre, home to the Alpine Formula 1 team. Built into a former quarry, the facility sits largely below ground level, giving the impression it’s a fraction of its true size. It’s been here since the end of 1991 when the Benetton team moved in from its old base at Witney, 10 miles away. The name above the door has changed several times in the years since, which is probably why the team is known far and wide as Team Enstone, after the pretty Cotswolds village a short drive away.

Owners have come and gone, but Team Enstone has remained the same legal entity since 1984. A quick peek at the company’s listing on Companies House (01806337, if you’re interested) will reveal that before it was renamed Alpine Racing Limited in January last year, the organisation was known as Renault Sport Racing Limited. Parent company Groupe Renault chose to rebrand its F1 squad to shine motorsport’s brightest spotlight onto its Alpine division, confirming, if there were any doubt, that Renault intends for Alpine to do rather more in the coming years than knock out a few thousand A110 road cars every 12 months.

Other former names include Lotus F1 Team Limited and Benetton Formula Limited, the legal designation changing each time a new backer or owner has settled in at the head of the boardroom table. For many of the engineers, designers and technicians who have worked at Whiteways for years – including Alan Permane, Alpine’s sporting director who’s been here since the beginning – corporate colour schemes have been slapped up and pulled down time and again, but the team has stayed fundamentally the same.

I arrive for my tour of the factory just as recently installed Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer is pulling up outside the factory’s shimmering glass façade. He’s so fresh out of his last job at Aston Martin he’s still driving a 21-plate Vantage. Can’t someone get that man an A110? Half the cylinder count and nothing like the prestige, but Otmar – well known for having a thing for fast road cars – will have been well aware of that when he took the gig. I mean, can we really be sure his allegiances have changed if his personal wheels haven’t…?

The tour begins in the entrance lobby, where a mock-up of Alpine’s 2022 F1 car, the A522, sits alongside Fernando Alonso’s 2005 World Championship-winning R25. I can hardly believe the difference in size, the vast, bright blue Alpine making the dainty yellow Renault look like a junior category machine. The rear wheels on the new car, up to 18 inches for this season, and their Pirelli tyres are so broad and plump it’s a wonder you don’t need three burly mechanics and some specialist equipment just to move them. F1 cars have been this size for a few years, in fact, but until you see one up close in the immediate vicinity of an older car, you won’t truly understand how enormous they’ve become.

From the back of the lobby we drop down a flight of stairs into the production department. This is where those skilled metalworkers do their thing, teasing lengths of titanium and inconel pipework into elaborate serpentine forms to make exhaust systems – very lightweight, fearsomely expensive exhaust systems. They also manufacture radiators here from scratch, wincing, you suspect, every time one of the team’s drivers, two-time World Champion Alonso or Esteban Ocon, smashes a car into a barrier.

Talking of impacts, two very different worlds collide in the production department. While those men wielding small hammers bend, twist and tap-tap-tap at valuable metals, over their shoulders two dozen 3D-printers and automated CNC machines whirr away around the clock to produce the components that are needed to keep two Formula 1 cars running over the course of a season. That’s 50,000 parts per year, not including anything to do with the powerunits, which are produced by Renault’s dedicated factory in Viry, just south of Paris.

Beyond the production department we see the paint shop and the clean room, where carbon fibre components are laid up before being sent to the autoclave to be baked. Keeping dust particles and hair well away from a wishbone, for instance, is vital, so the 100 or so people who work in the composites department wear hair nets, long overcoats and rather fetching blue plastic covers over their shoes. The air within the pharmaceutical-standard clean room is filtered and replenished in full every few minutes to remove particulates.

The race bays are just next door, home to the two racing cars any time they’re not at a circuit, on the back of a truck or flying around the world in a cargo plane. The inspection department is nearby so that parts can be removed from the cars and comprehensively checked using laser scanners and x-ray machines for cracks or signs of fatigue that might lead to a failure. A car can be dismantled and fully reassembled in just eight hours.

We aren’t shown the multi-million pound simulator where the drivers spend a good deal of their time – often those same eight hours in a single sitting – or the wind tunnel. Subject to strict running time restrictions in this budget cap era, the 60 per cent scale wind tunnel with its rolling floor is arguably the team’s prize asset. Aerodynamic performance has become so fundamental to the competitiveness of an F1 car in the last three or four decades that designers will gladly compromise the layout of a car’s front suspension architecture, for instance, if it means they can manipulate the flow of air a little more precisely.

Indeed, you only need to peer at the rear of a F1 car and see the driveshaft lurking within the lower wishbone itself to realise how much these machines are optimised for aero performance above all else. The wind tunnel, which blows air at an FIA-regulated 50 metres per second, or 112mph, is just one of the tools the team will use to perfect a car’s aerodynamic efficiency; CFD, or computational fluid dynamics, is another. Only when the computer modelling and wind tunnel results are singing in harmony can the designers wring more downforce from a car.

The design work is done upstairs in the Engineering Office, where up to 200 engineers gradually produce the 22,000 CAD drawings it takes to manufacture the 14,500 components that make up an F1 car. But that’s only enough to get a car to the first winter test. During the year, the car is developed so relentlessly that another 15,000 CAD drawings might be produced before attention in the Engineering Office switches to the following year’s car.

Just off the Engineering Office is the Operations Room. Looking like NASA Mission Control with its rows of desks pointing at a huge bank of 75-inch screens, this is where the engineers who don’t travel to the Grands Prix keep an eye on proceedings. From here they can communicate with the pit wall and a similar ops room at Viry to advise on strategy, monitor components in real-time and so on. With all these pairs of eyes and so much data streaming back and forth, it’s incredible that race strategies are bungled and opportunities missed, but it happens.

All this just so two cars can drive around in circles every other weekend. The effort it takes to manufacture and run a pair of Formula 1 racing cars is mind-boggling. What’s more amazing still is that this is very much a midfield outfit at the moment – Alpine’s average finishing position last season was ninth, only enough for fifth in the constructors’ championship. It seems like so much work for so little reward.

Is Alpine in a better position this season at the dawn of a new regulatory era? I’m told by one of the team’s performance engineers that they think they are, based on how well-correlated are the wind tunnel and CFD numbers they’re seeing. There does seem to be front-running qualifying pace in the A522, but a best result so far of sixth, three races into the season, suggests whatever progress the team has made for 2022 could be marginal.

It wasn’t always that way at Whiteways, of course. At times this has been F1’s dominant force, not least in 1994 and 1995 when Michael Schumacher won the first of his two world titles in Benetton colours, nor in 2005 and 2006 when Alonso won back-to-back championships for Renault. Since it landed in the old Enstone quarry in time for the start of the 1992 season, this team has won 44 Grands Prix – most recently in Hungary last year – plus four drivers’ and three constructors’ titles.

The lasting impression, though, has nothing to do with trophies or championships, but pressure. Can you possibly imagine what it’s like to be a mechanic, a race strategist or, most obviously, a driver, knowing that if you make even the most fractional mistake all that careful tap-tap-tapping away at metal tubes, all those 3D printers and CNCs machines buzzing away sleeplessly, all that air that was sucked out of the clean room or blasted through a tunnel, all those inspections searching for hairline cracks, all those CAD drawings, all those terabytes of data streamed back and forth, all that computer modelling and all those hours in the simulator were for nothing?