Cadillac’s real-time F1 race rehearsals

Cadillac didn’t have a car last year, but it did have use of General Motors’ simulator in Charlotte, North Carolina. From mid-season on, this allowed the team to hone its procedures by following grand prix weekends in real time – from bases on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

“We had an operations room running in Silverstone, and one in Charlotte,” explains team manager Peter Crolla of what came to be known as ‘rehearsals’. “Each rehearsal project grew – every time we did one, processes were more advanced, communication protocols were more advanced, the technology we had at our disposal was more advanced, and it was a fantastic rate of progression. From the first ones being rough and ready, we looked at and analysed what we were missing, so when the next one came round we were plugging the holes.

“We went from a fairly basic intercom system in the early rehearsals to what I would see as a communication network capable of supporting a full race team. From my side the biggest thing was understanding names, roles, voices, how they speak, and we were quite early in how we defined what our protocols would be in communication over radio and intercom.”

Mostly, it was Crolla’s ex-Haas F1 colleague Pietro Fittipaldi or former IndyCar champion Simon Pagenaud on the sim. But the virtual track time was only a small part of the process – just like in real life.

“Every race weekend we’d carry out all our meetings, we’d have a full schedule, we’d allocate the right activities at the right time, so everybody started getting into a routine,” says Crolla. “Race teams are institutionalised in how they operate, and we like that level of continuity, so we started full race weekends from the start of the programme. We had a simulator operating for every session, but then we also adopted a real team that we followed throughout the sessions. So when it came to races, the team that we’d adopted, we were making calls on when we thought they should make a pitstop, looking at their lap times, tyre degradation, where they were in traffic.”

There were even ‘virtual’ scrutineering documents and parc fermé requests submitted to a phantom FIA, adds Crolla: “To make our lives as hard as possible so we could be best prepared for the real thing.”