In Formula 1, senior staff are constantly walking a tightrope, making the key decisions that could make the difference between success on track and failure. Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance at Williams, reveals his pressure points…
A Formula 1 team is always under pressure to extract the maximum performance from the tools to hand – but for the individuals within the team, the times at which they feel the heaviest load varies from job to job: an engine kitter isn’t busy at the same time as a fuel technician, who doesn’t work to the same tempo as a front-end mechanic and so on.
Venture up the chain of command and the pressure points become a little more abstract, less hands-on activity and off-the-cuff decision making, more strategic management and goal-orientation. Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance at Williams, argues the biggest pressure points he faces often involve deciding not to get involved.
A head of vehicle performance has two key roles: Robson’s job at the track is to ensure the team get the maximum value out of every lap. On a race weekend, that mainly involves scoring the most points on Sunday; at a test (or perhaps during Friday practice sessions), it’s about using those laps to prioritise the most important test items and experiments to learn everything that needs to be learnt.
Away from the track, the head of vehicle performance is responsible for ensuring feedback gets into the correct channels, delivering information into the correct technical departments, ensuring the development effort is focused in the right areas. That focus might be on the next race, or six races hence, or on a design for the following season. “It varies across the year,” says Robson. “It can be anything from ‘what are we doing today at the track?’ all the way to ‘what are the key decisions we need to make to start defining next year’s car?’”
Dave Robson joined Williams in 2015 as race engineer to Felipe Massa. He was promoted to principal engineer in 2018 and into his present position in 2019. Before moving to Williams, he spent 14 years with McLaren, starting as stress engineer before moving into testing and then onto the race team as performance engineer for Heikki Kovalainen and later Jenson Button.
Between 2010 and 2014, he was Button’s race engineer during a period that brought regular victories to the Woking-based team. Migrating from a race engineer role that demands a detailed focus on a single car to the exclusion of all else, into a position of overwatch across a whole team, requires a degree of mental recalibration…
“It’s completely different – and, at first, when you suddenly have to worry about what both cars are doing, it’s incredibly difficult,” says Robson. “When it’s your car and your own little team, you’re working in your own zone, with your own objectives for the weekend. Making that transition to sitting on the pit wall, trying to keep an eye on both cars is a big, big change, with considerably more than twice the information to keep track of.”
Part of the remit for the head of vehicle dynamics is building a realistic understanding of what can be achieved on any given race weekend. The team functions best with clear goals and if aims are either unrealistically high or if they underdeliver on their potential then they suffer. Making those judgement calls early in the weekend or when the situation changes – for example because of weather or an unexpected qualifying position – is a key part of the job.
Those judgement calls tend to be more straightforward for a front-running team that is focused on winning than it is for a midfield or backmarking team prone to significant track-specific swings in performance from weekend to weekend. Williams had this last year – although having a car improved in performance throughout the season served to further complicate matters.
“For me personally, there are beats to the weekend,” says Robson. “The pressure points are mostly in the build-up, trying to set the objectives and the tone of what we want to achieve at that particular race. If I do that bit right, then during the weekend itself I tend to sit back a little bit and let the experts get on with it. I’ve got to the point where I’m not expert enough in any of the things I used to be expert in to get too heavily involved with them now.
“My job’s much more about setting our objectives and then keeping a watching brief to make sure it goes as intended. There may be the occasional big decision to make in qualifying where I have to call on some of my past experience – but typically the pressure points for me are making sure we’re ready and that everyone knows what we’re trying to achieve, and then afterwards, when we come to review it all, make sure we did what we said we would do – and if we didn’t, why not?”
A good example of how quickly plans can change came during the apocalyptic rains at last year’s Belgian Grand Prix. In qualifying, George Russell showed exceptional pace and eventually qualified P2 which, with the cancellation of Sunday’s Grand Prix, turned into Williams’ first podium in four years. It was one of those rare sessions where, the longer it went on, the more Williams were prepared to push.
“Once we’d got into Q3 with George, we already felt that we’d punched above our weight, and that we could afford to reassess what we were prepared to risk. We would have been happy with qualifying P10, and P6-P7 would have been good – but there was an opportunity to go for a bit more, and I was involved in giving people the freedom to make that decision and alter the risk/reward profile.”
It’s days like Saturday at Spa where experience really comes to the fore but, for Robson as with every senior member of a trackside team, the pressure inherent in the situation comes from gauging whether the team would benefit from advice or if the operation will run more smoothly without intervention.
“When I first moved from being a race engineer to looking over the two cars, I didn’t like it and I struggled to have the confidence to shut up and leave the experts to do their jobs. Now it’s a key part of what I do: not to get overly involved. That requires a bit of discipline because it can be tough.
“There’s a fine line to walk, particularly when you watch someone make a different decision to the choice you would have made. You may watch without comment because they could be absolutely right or because over-riding them would deprive them of a valuable learning experience, and you really need people to learn and grow into their roles – but at the same time, you can’t afford to let it go too wrong. Judging that requires a different sort of mindset.”
Robson lists Williams’s performance at Spa last year as one of the highlights of his career, sitting alongside Button’s victories in 2011 at Spa and Suzuka. These, interestingly, were among Button’s less dramatic wins, very different to races like the final-lap pass for the lead that year in Canada after a dramatic six-stop race in which Button was running last at the halfway point.
“I was really proud of what we achieved in Canada but it wasn’t through a brilliant build-up to the race,” says Robson, “we made some good decisions, got a little lucky and Jenson was outstanding – but I genuinely get more satisfaction from races that were relatively boring to watch, but I know we did everything right and got the result we deserved. The weekends where you turn up, and run one, and everything just works in harmony – those weekends are amazing.”
