Under pressure

I expected to see the enormous 3D-printing machines and the carefully guarded clean room where carbon fibre parts are laid up, plus the serried ranks of computer screens upstairs in the design office. But a man knocking away on a metal tube with a hammer? Given this is the cutting-edge, big-money world of Formula 1, I’d not been expecting anything quite as twee as that.

Yet there he is, bending over a bench with a planishing hammer in hand, gently tap-tap-tapping away at a piece of metal piping like he’s resuscitating a small bird. Apparently it’s unusual for an F1 team to still produce metal components in-house by hand, but this team has been doing it that way for decades – the trophy cabinets packed with silverware suggest there ain’t much wrong with its methods.