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Bulls’ Guide To: Team RadioCommunication in Formula One needs to be done really well and a team that doesn’t communicate well, doesn’t win.

What’stheonethingaFormulaOneteamneedstodoreally,reallywell?It’satrickquestion,ofcourse,becauseateamneedstodoeverythingreallywell.Ifyouaskthequestion,you’llgetplentyofdifferentanswers,rangingfromcardesignandmanufacturingexcellencetotracksideperformanceanddataanalysis.

The one thing that should probably be at the top of the list, but often gets left off is ‘communication’. This is a team sport, and the team that doesn’t communicate well, doesn’t win. Whatever else it does, the team needs a radio system that operates without any issues

The F1 garage is often described as noisy, busy and intense but when a session is live, only two of those things are really true, at least from the observable point of view of the people on the ground. Everyone’s wearing a headset to block out extraneous noise allowing them to focus on what they need to hear – but what that will be varies from person to person. You might be sharing a channel with the person standing next to you – or a group of people thousands of miles away back at the factory. It doesn’t particularly matter, the team radio network renders the distance irrelevant.

Listening To The Action On The Track© Getty Images

Channels

At any given time, there might be dozens of people talking on the radio and the way to avoid chaos is to have each conversation taking place within its own group: a race engineer talking to his car’s number one mechanic isn’t a conversation that needs to be overheard by the team’s strategists, while their discussion isn’t something that needs to be shared with bodywork technicians.

On the other hand, there are times when the whole team needs to hear something – for which there are general channels – and plenty of people who need to have access to a whole range of channels.

A great example of how this works can be heard in the many videos of our repair job on the grid at the 2020 Hungarian Grand Prix. When Max goes into the wall, 23 minutes before the start of the race, the board lights up as the team kick into overdrive to diagnose the damage, come up with a coherent plan to fix it, and then get into the repair. That simply doesn’t happen if people are talking over each other, struggling to be heard or if instructions are not absolutely clear – and so it’s a discussion going on across six different channels, all at the same time.

The first and most obvious channel here is the Car 33 Radio channel, on which Max Verstappen is in contact with his race engineer, GianPiero Lambiase. GP in turn is plugged into the Car33Pit channel to speak with Max’s mechanics, and the Car33Eng channel which is shared by the engineers working on Max’s car. In the wider group there’s the Garage channel informing everyone on both sides of the garage (or neither) what needs to be done, the Race Radio Channel which covers both car groups on the track, and the Pit Wall channel where the senior staff can discuss what they’re planning to do.

Keep Those Channels Open© Getty Images

While the people on 33Eng are discussing what needs to be inspected and the protocols for affecting a repair, the mechanics on 33Pit are talking to the garage asking for various parts to be delivered to the grid slot. Very few people – though sporting director Jonathan Wheatley would be one – are hearing the all the conversations, everyone is just hearing the things they need to complete their part of the puzzle with the minimum distraction.

NormalOperation

While that represents a quite extreme example of the compartmentalisation team radio affords, the tone, cadence and delivery of those conversations wasn’t particularly different to what you would hear on a normal weekend (the odd naughty word notwithstanding) because, delivering good communication is always important, and thus imparting information clearly and quickly over team radio is simply part of the job.

In reality, a repair on the grid places stress on team radio no greater than that which happens during a normal qualifying session. There’s a lot happening on Saturday afternoons, with the race engineers typically being in the eye of the storm. As well as talking to the driver, they will be in constant contact with their number one mechanic regarding the preparation and turnaround time status of the car; they will also be on a channel with their tyre technician, calling for a specific set of tyres; fuel tech, detailing how many laps of fuel should go in – or be pumped out.

The Race Team Ready For Action© Getty Images

They may be talking to a composites tech, doing minor repair work between runs to minimise the effect of the inevitable bumps and scrapes, and they’ll be talking to strategists about what constitutes a ‘safe’ time.

Beyond that, they will be talking to PU engineers, controls engineers, the car’s aerodynamicist and vehicle dynamics specialists, who will be scattered through the garage, the treehouse and back in Milton Keynes. Quite possibly they’ll also to talking to the pit wall to glean information from the other car. These conversations may all take place over different channels, and conceivably the race engineer may want to have all of them in the 45-60 seconds it takes to refuel the car and fit fresh rubber.

TheKit

Team radio is one of the dark arts in F1: everyone is happy to use it but very few people understand how it all works. It’s administered by our trackside infrastructure group who arrive ahead of the main team and set-up our IT services, including communications kit.

For all the talk of multiple-diversity, RF anti-reflection technology and Advanced DECT Receivers, at the user level it comes down to two basic systems: The Bolero radios that clip to a belt and the comms panels into which engineers plug their headsets. The division is reasonably straightforward: if you’re standing, or seated in front of a bank of monitors, then the comms panel offers a greater range of options, allowing you to push a button to speak on a particular channel or range of channels; for people running around the garage, the mobile option is better. Your radio can be programmed to receive however many of the channels are necessary, but two-way comms are more limited, with perhaps just a couple of buttons on the headset to speak on different channels.

Relaying Vital Information To The Team© Getty Images

Some people, of course, use both: the race engineers will be on the grid, using the Bolero, and then once the formation lap begins, they’ll dash back to their seat on the pit wall and plug into a comms panel.

Everyone has their own headset and/or moulded, bespoke earpieces, and their own radio, pre-set to the channels they need, stored in a charging rack. Despite everyone having their name on their radio, it’s not uncommon to find yourself wearing the wrong one, which is one of the many good reasons to do a systems test in advance of every session.

In general, people don’t wear their headsets for extended periods beyond the live sessions. While they are quite comfortable, taking them off is also pleasant.

WhatOfTheDriver?

The one guy we haven’t talked about in all of this is the driver. His communications tend to be quite important too! He communicates via a microphone in his helmet which plugs into the car. From there his comms are handled like other data coming off the car.

When he’s on track the Standard Communications System (SCS) sends packets of data to the On-Car Communications Unit (OCU), which is the t-bar shape on top of the air inlet, also housing the main on-car camera position. This, in-turn, transmits data to one of the access points around the circuit and – in theory – allows for seamless pits-to-car communication all the way around the track. It would work in the garage, but communications via the OCS are open for every other team to listen in on, so when the car comes back into the garage, the driver generally waits until an umbilical cable is plugged into the car. The primary task of that is offloading telemetry stored during the last run, not considered sufficiently critical to take up our limited bandwidth – but it also plugs the driver into the private garage comms network.

Driver Communication Is Important Too!© Getty Images

Radio comms between the team and the driver is kept as simple as possible, he generally has a lot to do in the car and focus is important. When the car is on track, in the normal course of events, the only person he’ll hear from is his race engineer – though many other people are listening in to their conversation. When he’s in the garage, he’ll also be talking to his performance engineer, figuring out how to get the most out of the car’s electronic set-up.

WhenCommsGoBad

When the first team radio systems began appearing in the 1980s, the coverage was… patchy. They’ve evolved over the last four decades into something highly robust, so much so, the occasional failures tend to be memorable.

The links across the garage and back to the Operations Room in Milton Keynes are very sturdy and the weak point tends to be between the pit lane and the car. There are various reasons for this, and the first is that, for a microphone, the driver’s helmet is difficult space in which to function. There is considerable vibration and movement, and thus it is not uncommon for the microphone to slip out of place and become muffled.

Then, even when the team can hear the driver, the driver can’t always hear the team. In the course of a normal race, the race engineers will typically wait until the driver is on a straight – and thus less encumbered – to communicate, but at some circuits, when it’s particularly difficult to hear, the driver will request his race engineer only pass messages in the slow corners, where the revs are low and thus the environment is quieter.

Team Radio Technology Has Evolved© Getty Images

The second reason pits-to-car comms sometimes fail is the environment in which the car operates. F1 races in some difficult locations for radio transmissions: concrete jungles for city races, dense wooded hillsides at some of the more bucolic venues – either of which used to make comms very difficult. They’re less of a problem in the modern era – but that problem has simply been swapped for the new issue of a noisy environment.

Between F1’s TV compound and a hundred thousand fans all eager to livestream the action on their phones, there’s a great deal of potential for interference. That said, technical failures in comms tend to be at the infrastructure level in the modern era: Earlier this year, the entire telemetry network – driver comms included – went down for much of first practice at Imola, then in Turkey, the teams lost comms with the drivers on a specific section of track. That’s when the team falls back to its old-school staple. Pit boards might not be able to convey much information but they don’t break. Good communication is something the team has to do really, really well – but it doesn’t always have to be complicated.