Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

“We have a set programme, and then we have various items that we add in, depending on the race or the weather conditions, such as wing adjustments. We usually have a nose change as part of our practice, plus wing and things like last minute calls when the car is already in the pitlane and we see it has a damaged nose.”

In the spirit of kaizen, it’s an ongoing programme of improvement: “It’s interesting to see how you could improve it by looking at it on video and getting different individuals to look at it, because everybody’s got different ways of interpreting things. It’s a long process, and it might give you incremental improvements, but overall it can give you tenths, and that can get you out in front of another car.”

Even the role of the drivers came in for scrutiny, ensuring that no opportunity to improve stops was missed.

“We examined the in lap and out lap,” explains Cregan. “For example, braking for the pit speed limit line, accelerating out of the pits, the angle of steering used into the pit stop and out of the pit stop, stopping in the correct position so that the guys can work immediately and don’t have to move. So the drivers were part of the process of improvement.”

Having sorted the crew members into the roles to which they were best suited, the team has subsequently taken further steps to ensure that every man is able to give his best.

“Last year we involved the Sports University in Cologne. They came along and filmed pit stop training, and had a look at the various actions necessary for the different jobs. They went back and developed a special fitness programme to suit that particular job. We have an in-house fitness studio in the factory, and each of the guys get an individual programme and they work on that throughout the year. For example, the fuel man needs the upper body strength and the stamina necessary to lift the hose. That again helped to improve efficiency.”

There was another major change during 2005, as new rules meant that drivers had to complete a race distance on one set of tyres. That meant that most of the time the team members usually involved in swapping wheels were not actually called into action. However, they had to keep in practice, because changes were still allowed in wet conditions, while the rules also allowed individual damaged tyres to be changed.

“We took a decision at the beginning of last year that even though tyre changes would not be a regular occurrence, we should continue with the same pit stop programme as we had in previous years. So we still practised tyre changes every time. We modified it a little bit, because for example we may have had to change one tyre, rather than a set, because of a puncture. When we were practising we did that, plus our normal tyre changing.

...continued