Pre Season Activities

With just under a month before the race season starts again, it seems that our plan to not have a plan for 2012 have progressed very smoothly, formulating itself into something closely resembling a plan without actually being one!

We have checked, refurbished and purchased some new equipment, ready for another year. Trucks have been serviced, and are waiting for the truckies to jump back in them and head off for another year of racing.
Contact with many of the teams has found that testing of new cars and drivers has been going on at various tracks around the warmer parts of Europe. These include Estoril, Valencia, Guadix, Vallelunga and even Donnington in the UK. Winter testing can be a massive expense and gamble. Imagine sending a truck, many kilometres to a track, hopeing for good, dry conditions, and arriving there to find that the weather will be changeable, with the chance of rain. Obviously, a wet track is not what you want to be greeted with. These tests are very rarely undertaken at short notice and you cannot plan the weather. As well as making sure that the chosen track is available for your use, all of the attending engineers, mechanics, etc have to be booked on planes or driven to the track. Hotels and catering for many hungry mouths has to be arranged. Bad weather is EXPENSIVE. And it,s no good for topping up your t-shirt tan either!!!

winter test at valencia

The trucks that are sent on tests are  loaded with enough spares to enable any breakages, modifications, or crash damage to be sorted out, so that the testing time is not wasted. As well as nuts, bolts, tables, chairs, drivers kit, food, drinks, oil and other fluids, set-up equipment and specialised tools for the car, mechanics tools, electrical equipment, tyres, trolleys, car jacks, corner weight scales, etc,etc. The logistics behind all this can be a headache for everyone concerned.


We are not afforded the luxury of having dedicated test trucks. Whilst the trucks are away testing, how do we find time to have new graphic designs or paint jobs applied? How do we check and update any of the car spares that the trucks will need? How do we schedule any repairs or servicing  for the trucks? It,s never ending. And you can guarantee that whilst your race truck is being serviced at a garage, on its way to a test, sat in a paint shop. SOMEONE will need something that has been left on the truck!
DO YOU FEEL SORRY FOR US YET???
The windows of free time available,  that appear in any teams winter calendars, are rapidly used up due to sorting out these things. Winter time is probably more difficult to cope with than when the race season starts.

This just about sums up the teams pre season activities. Next stop for us is Italy, via Germany.

Stick it in a box and open after Christmas.

Hugh Dennis

Dover docks, 1pm. Huge queues greet us. Sea France has gone bust, so there are less ferries to take all of the trucks, vans and cars across to France. Whilst buying a very overpriced coffee latte, I spot comedian, Hugh Dennis, sat in a corner with his friends. For a man who is very funny on tv,s  MOCK THE WEEK, I can,t help but wonder why I haven,t heard his friends laugh!!  When he gets up to leave, I,m giving him that "you,re famous" look. He surprises me when he says "hello". Maybe he,s a petrol head and he,s seen us on television?

Time spent waiting for an available ferry is a good time to ponder how seagulls get to be so big, when all they do for food is eat our leftovers and a few fish.
Compared to some car ferries, the cross channel ones are a pleasure to use. Drive on one end, straight off at the other end. No nasty, steep ramps for you to navigate with your minimal ground clearance race transporter. More on this subject at a later date.

Ibis Calais hotel, 7.00am the next day. Time to head up to Antwerp. A quick check around the truck for immigrant stowaways reveals nothing. I,m sure that sometimes, they have ended up going back the way they came. No tolls are necessary on the French autoroute as this short stretch is known as "the corridor" But as a foreign registered truck entering Belgium, we have to purchase Benelux road tax, to keep within the law. This seems to be harder to buy each year as they switch from selling it in petrol stations to selling it online.
Perhaps we should do that in future.

containers at midnight

You can spend alot of time in a working day, slowing down to turn into a service station, find a space for the truck, park up, walk to the shop, buy something, walk back, and continue your journey. Couple that with toilet breaks and over the course of a day, it all adds up.. And you can,t just go faster, to try and make up for, it due to the 90 kmh limiter fitted to your truck.

containers being loaded

It has been well over a month since the last race of the season and it,s time to collect the cars,spares,pit gear,etc,etc.from Antwerp. All of this was packed up in containers in a highly co-ordinated, careful and efficient manner by all the team members, in 25 degree heat. Even hotter inside the huge 40ft ovens. With a fair amount of humidity thrown into the mix as well. Just enough to make you sweat in places that make your life massively uncomfortable. Time to reach for the talcum powder and the baby wipes.

After watching your containers craned through the air by an army of locals and swiftly driven away, it is hard to believe that you can forget about them over Christmas. Until now.....

keep your car warm

The pick-up point is a shipping warehouse that would accommodate quite a few jumbo jets  and still have room to hold a fork lift truck race. It,s huge inside......and rather chilly. Lucky we have all the equipment loading to keep us warm.

All of this logistical headache is controlled by the efforts of a couple of Germans, who are there to help us with all aspects of shipping, throughout the season. With teams being based around Europe, everyone has their own governments rules for shipping stuff globally. If the European Union fails in its efforts to stay together, we will go back to the dark ages of long border waits and enough paperwork to decimate another rain forest. I,m sure that you have heard about German efficiency. These guys definitely don,t let the side down. Teams are allocated a time slot to arrive and collect their stuff. Articulated race trucks smarten up the warehouse with their paint schemes while Belgium forklift drivers, weave and pirouette around them, speeding up the loading process.
The warehouse is full of thousands of brown boxes, which all seem to have "made in china" printed on them. Is there anything that the Chinese don't make? Or do they only make the boxes? Contrast that to some of the cars which should have "wrecked in china" on them.
 
The long sea journey, heat and humidity can cause rust at an alarming rate, Hence the smell of WD40 in the air(other water repellents are available). It,s the only way to slow down the corrosion brought on by the containers being at sea. But watch out for those little mofo,s, lurking somewhere in a corner of a box or in the car, That spider or other sub tropical critter has made it all the way back to Europe. Albeit with a mild  case of hypothermia.
It always seems strange, but quite warming, when you start seeing familiar faces of other team members in Antwerp. These faces, that last year, were dirty, sweaty and tired when you saw them last. We could stand and talk in our best Eurish,Spanglish, or whatever we communicate in. But work takes over, hands are shaken and farewells said.

too much kit for their trucks!!

Leaving Antwerp at a reasonable time. We decide to try to get back to England. The queue that we saw when we arrived at Calais was soul destroying. Bigger than the one in Dover. A long day is about to get longer. Rather than do the sensible thing and check into a hotel, we waited, and waited, and waited.  Not the best decision in the world to make. If anyone has a spare car ferry, I know where you can put it to use and make some good money!!

The docks at Calais are slow at the best of times due to the British Customs and Immigration. Most trucks entering the port have to go through a rigorous checking system for stowaway immigrants. Not a bad thing. But no matter how many times you do this trip, the waiting time gets to you. And you will nearly always be asked if you have a race cap going spare. They must have cupboards stuffed with caps at home. The irony of the cap is that it really doesn't speed up the process of the so called "checking sheds". The electric roller door opens, and we are free! Only for the orderly lines that we were in, turn into a big truck bottleneck as we jostle and squeeze our way towards the 4 ticketing booths. Creeping forward as the trucks filter through takes up even more time. One more check at some other booths after that for passport purposes and finally into one of the holding lanes. The ferry ticket says 7.30pm loading time. One and a half hours for the crossing and then we gain an hour back due to the British time zone.

Another hotel in the evening, and some rather tight parking in their car park follows. If you drove a normal freight truck into a hotel car park, they would tell you to bugger off. Amazingly, we are normally welcomed. It must be all that shiny paintwork and the graphics on the truck that helps. BLING,BLING.  The following day, we drive back to our base. Get unloaded, and start checking everything before reloading the trucks at a later date.

What will this year bring?

Happy days.

For those who are interested in motor sport, you may well have heard of the delightful, colourful and darn right hardworking, group of people called  truckies.
I cannot give you an overall description of what tasks are undertaken by these people, as there are too many to list. But over the course of the year, I will try to enlighten, educate and hopefully amuse you in this blog.
I will attempt to give an interesting look into their lives, their work, their travel and the places visited. Drawing on my own experiences, and those who I work with, I will take you on a journey, around the world, from the comfort of your chair, bed, or wherever else you sit and read this.

This is dedicated to the people in WTCC, There are plenty of things to read on Twitter and Facebook regarding F1, WRC, etc. Please bear with me as I undertake this task as a beginner, in the world of blogging. Enjoy..........

We all started somewhere