In road racing, crashing is an inevitability. In most cases, the damage is minor enough that “it’ll buff out,” but in some instances, drivers find themselves staring at a tangled mess in their garage back home, scratching their heads on where to begin. It can be overwhelming – but it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to a video that Hagerty (the official insurance partner of the SCCA® since 2019) wrote about on the company’s media section of its website, you can get an inside look at what the Williams F1 team did after shipping a pair of wrecked Formula 1 cars back to their homebase in England.
The San Paulo Grand Prix was not kind to the Williams team.
“The Brazilian race was a smorgasbord of conditions, with interesting twists underlying the action,” wrote Hagerty writer Kyle Smith. “Unfortunately, those conditions led to crashes that contributed to a few of the interesting twists, and both of the Williams FW46 machines were brought back to the paddock on a flatbed. Williams’ Argentine driver Franco Colapinto was first to have an off when the back of the car stepped out during qualifying. Englishman Alex Albon unfortunately had a similar experience, and what a sight it was to see both cars being hoisted off the recovery trucks into the pitboxes.”
The Williams Racing video that Smith discovered showcases what the Oxfordshire team did once the freight boxes arrived at the team’s headquarters.
“What remained of the cars arrived by air freight in boxes, carried into the pristine shop by forklifts, where a horde of anxious hands immediately began sorting everything,” wrote Smith. “Even as they picked through splinters of carbon fiber and mangled exhaust pipes, it was interesting to see the team still joking a bit and smiling. They might be tasked with coming in for an overnight shift to put together a race car, but they aren’t going to let it get them down – even as they filled an entire pallet bin with very expensive-looking scrap.”
None of this is to say that you have a racing headquarters staffed with mechanics and engineers who can lay new sheets of carbon fiber in their sleep, but it is eye opening to see how methodical the F1 team was about the process. The crashes led to many people losing hours at home, but that didn’t mean meticulous attention to detail wasn’t given to each component.
Yes, comparing a typical one-person-show SCCA Road Racing effort to a fully-staffed F1 team is like comparing apples to … er … an F1 team, but in every unfortunate incident, there are lessons to be learned, and watching a Formula 1 team sort through debris to build a new car might be somewhat therapeutic (and educational) to those of us who’ve faced a similar (although hopefully less tangled) situation.
Check out the complete story on Hagerty.com/media.
Photo courtesy Williams Racing
