The History of the Pit Stop – Extended interview with Gordon Murray

Well pit

stop

s in the late 70's W had never really been considered, pit

stop

s were what they were during the 60's and 70's, they were a bad thing, you only pitted if you really had a problem with the car and you tried to fix it. car um um strategic pit stops was what I started in the early 80's now I'm always looking for the next advantage so in the 70's there weren't any strategic pit stops so if you had to do it go in and change tires or try to fix the car you had very slow, there were no air guns, there were no quick lift jacks, so you had torque wrenches and wrenches on the wheels and it just took a long time, so strategic stops just didn't exist, that was a completely new thing in the early 80's, well I'm always looking for the next advantage.

I'm a bit like that. I think my hero growing up was myself and Colin Chapman. I saw myself as a Colin Chapman type guy who was always looking for the next kind of Advantage. He used to read the rule book to death and try to find a loophole or a way around the RS for that kind of Unfair Advantage. if you want and um I was chatting with David or who he was in those days, believe it or not, just two of us in the design office now have hundreds of just the two of us and we were chatting and I was thinking about me.

I was thinking about the weight. I was always interested in saving weight and a pound of weight equaled exactly one hundredth of a second per lap and that was pretty constant, so it didn't take me long to just do the math and think hard. Wait a minute, you know fuel is a big percentage of the car's weight, so if you could have that weight and go X many seconds per lap faster, you could, if you had a really fast and efficient pit stop, you could stop at half of the race. and then win the race only at the reduced weight, but there were other advantages too.

I thought one was half a tank of fuel, the center of gravity is lower of course so the cars are also a little faster each lap, but the other one is big. one was the tires because we knew we put them on at the beginning of the race and they were slowly degrading during the race so you were going faster because of the lower weight but actually not as fast as you could have gone because the tires were going bad and We knew that when you put a new set of tires on, they were one, two, 2 and a half seconds faster per lap for the first five or 10 laps, so what I did was a pretty complex equation which was weight reduction and center serious. height reduction and the new tire advantage and we got a bogey time of about 26 seconds that we had to beat to win the race with strategic pit stops.

Okay, having these theories and strategic plans is all well and good, but of course in practice there are enormous problems to overcome and particularly in this case because trying to get up to 30 gallons of fuel into the car in pit stop time was practically impossible because we were still filling the cars with drums, aluminum milk cans as we used to call them in those days. So you put a funnel in the filler and put the churn in the car and started the race. So that obviously wasn't going to work at the pit stop and the other problem was that the tires only work when they're put on.

You accelerate and you know that you need two or three laps for the tire temperature to enter the tire and in those two or three laps you go several seconds per lap slower. So obviously that wasn't going to work and then of course Another big problem was changing the wheels in a very short time and getting the car up very quickly and getting it down safely. Also, since we had the BMW turbocharged engine, we had a problem when the engine got hot. and it would stop, the turbocharger bearing would get stuck because it had no oil flow around the outside of the housing and of course if it stopped for more than 5 seconds the turbo would get stuck, so we had to try to overcome all those problems The strategy behind the stop was done by myself and David North, who is the only other designer in the office, and then of course once we started working with the team, we had a very good team of people.

I started taking videos of the stops very early. days for video, on those days we took video footage and then we sat down as a team and watched the video and analyzed each operation of a wheel change for example to see where we could do it faster, so what did we come up with? wheel change was that we had air guns, we redesigned the hub and nut on the car so that the new wheel nut was already on the gun, we had spare air guns on the side and we involved the whole team in Those kind of details, um, and then to get the car up and down quickly, we designed very light air jacks for you, so we had one of the guys in the back of the car with a probe, so that when the car stopped, put the probe in. the back of the car opened up the air Jack, the car went up instantly and then of course went down instantly at the end and we had the idea to cool the turbo bearing because it was obviously an airline that blew up the air jacks that we took. a little line on that and it had a jet of air in the turbo bearing housing, so as soon as the car stopped and the guy lifted the car, there would be air cooling the turbo bearing and that's how we got over it, like this that the car raise and lower the jack and the Turbo bearing was a solution and then of course all the paraphernalia to change the wheel quickly and the guys worked very closely as a team to determine how many people we needed to carry the wheel and the wheel . and that kind of stuff well, of course, the guys, I mean, Bron was a fantastic little team, we were Giant Killers.

I loved it, you know, we had a small proportion of the budget of, say, McLaren, Ferrari or Williams, um, but we won the Grand Prix. and we won the World Championship, so the whole team loved the giant-killing aspect. Bernie also Bernie Eckleson was always up for something that was like an advantage to me and something that pissed off other people too, we both like that so the whole team was absolutely up for it and of course when I sat them down and I explained to them this bogey time of 26 seconds, we had to include it in the deceleration when entering the pits, the stop time, the exit time and getting the tires and the driver back to the maximum speed it had to be if that was less of 26 seconds, we were going to win all the races basically and if it was more than 26 seconds it was a matter of being ready, if it was much more than 26 seconds, they were lost, so all the effort of the design strategy and the team was in getting that phantom time, if you will, down to less than 26 seconds and we achieved it quite easily with all these ideas, well, the first time we arrived with all the paraphernalia was for the Bran Hatch British Grand Prix in '82 because what we did was convert BT50, which was the current BMW car.

This was ahead of doing the 52 that won the championship and we started mid-season or two-thirds of the way through the season, um with pit stops and of course the other trappings are the two things, the other two things we had to accomplish were warming the tires and getting fuel quickly and tire warmers, in those days there were no tire warmers. There were never tire warmers in Formula One. I was the first to bring tire warming, but we didn't have the nice little electric blankets they have now to wrap around the tyre, so we built a huge blue plywood tower. that could hold two rears and two fronts stacked and we had a gas heater on the bottom and a chimney on top and a couple of little windows around each tire so we could puncture them and make sure we hadn't overcooked them. and we overcooked them several times the compound exploded so you had to throw that game away so we came to the br hatch with these blue Tardis like they saw things lined up and people were wondering what the hell they were and the other one.

What we haven't talked about, of course, is pressure, uh, refueling and it was two kegs of beer, you know, the aluminum beer kegs and we found that we could refuel at two bars and we could get 30 gallons in 3 seconds. which was pretty spectacular, but to do that we needed a large diameter hose, so the poor guys had to practice a lot with this hose over their shoulder and there was a filler on one side of the car and a vent on the other side and when you open valve, it was just a bang, almost like an explosion, and the car went through 30 gallons in 3 seconds, so we showed up with these barrels on carts and these blue Tardis boxes and all those kits, air guns, air jacks and people.

I wonder what the hell was going on. You know, well, it was a similar amount of fuel. I mean, um, that would be a really big fuel tank, 30 gallons, right? So you're probably putting in almost twice as much fuel as a normal hatchback. tank um, which takes a couple of minutes at a gas station, so two of them would be, you know, four minutes or something like that and all of this happens in 3 seconds, so it was really quite dramatic and I had to involve a lot to the guys. in that, because we tried all kinds of sophisticated mechanical interlocks, because if the guy put the stuffing in the car before attaching the breather, you would just blow the car to smithereens, I mean, literally, with two pressure bars and a monocarp of aluminum and carbon, so we had to have a safety device and we tried all kinds of fancy mechanical ideas that stopped you from putting the thing on, but they were all complicated and could go wrong and in the end we decided with the team and the guys made eye contact . the car was the best, so the guy with a respirator didn't look up until he had the respirator on and then he looked out because they were leaning together, the faces were probably far enough apart that the stuffing guy wouldn't.

He didn't put the padding in until he saw the whites of the Breather guy's eyes and that worked perfectly actually, but except for one case at Paul Rickard where we blew a car to pieces because we had the Breather installed upside down. rather than up, well, this was actually before we started, before we started pit stop racing or certainly in the early days before 1983, anyway, and we had developed, I think David North, he was the development guy on that and developed even more breathing space. on filler to try to get the fuel even faster and the new part arrived at Paul Ricard and had to be installed on the car but of course the guys had never seen it before, it was a new part and the breather was supposed to would start. to the top of the tank to clear the air until it was full of fuel um and they put it upside down they put it down so we dumped the tank full of fuel with two bars of pressure and of course as soon as it arrived into the vent and the fuel had nowhere to go and we had a mechanic sitting in the car and he literally blew it into pieces and we were all standing in shorts and t-shirts and it had spewed out a plume of 30 gallons of fuel. in the air that no one saw, we only heard the explosion, so everyone looked at each other and it went down like steam and we were all completely covered in fuel.

Steam, so it could have been a disaster, really, yeah, yeah, I mean, I look back. There, a famous photographer, the first time we did a race because throughout 1982, the engine was very unreliable in those days, we were still learning with BMW about the engine and we were still blowing up the engine, the turbos and all kinds of things . We never made it to the end of the race, so we revealed our secret for almost half a season, during that, but now I look back at those pictures and I have all the guys dressed in overalls and fire helmets and I'm standing in front of the car in shorts and a short sleeve shirt because I did what they now call the lollipop man in front of the car, you know I did that.

I stood in front of the car and looked the driver in the eye and said, wait until we're ready to go, um, but it was so dubious thinking back, you know, but you don't think about it at the time because you're just looking to get the advantage. to refuel fuel. Well the pressure went away because what was banned after the first year was pressure refueling, which was actually quite correct because you know it was quite a dangerous thing, but then of course the pit stops continued for many years after that, and then refueling. it was banned after some fires and accidents and things um I think you know Formula 1 goes through eras um I think I think the strategic stop for tires and refueling that we started in 82 um really changed has changed Formula Oneforever if you believe about this because now the whole race is based on tire strategy and how many stops and undercuts and all that kind of stuff.

I loved strategy today. You see these photos with 40 guys sitting in front of computers. I had an A4 spreadsheet that we filled out. on the circuit, the lap times, the length of the circuit, the weather conditions, the tires we had available and we did a very simple calculation to see how many laps we would do on tires, we generally covered around 70% of the distance, which people could never understand when other people I started making pit stops, they went half the distance, half the distance, but the reason I did 70% was because if you do the math, you could take the car up to the Ragged Edge with minimal weight because normally in those days we didn't have one.

Sophisticated computers that measured fuel usage, so we had to calculate how much fuel I had, so I always left about four or five kilos of fuel in the car at the end so as not to run out of fuel and not be underweight, but if you ran the 70% of the distance, you could put in just an extra 10 liters of fuel at the stop to ensure the car was overweight, so you'd be running within the weight limit for two-thirds of the race. The only time we changed was when we won the championship. In the end we faced turbo Rena and we went to the last race in Car Army for the South African Grand Prix and Renault made a great effort, it was ours to lose and theirs to win, we really had to win the last race to win the championship and everyone knew it. then we did 2/3 of the race distance on fuel, but what I did with PK was I only put a few gallons of fuel on PK so he would demoralize Prost and the Renault and disappear into the distance and they would basically give up, right?

You know? and I just hope something went wrong and it worked perfectly we just put I think 10 gallons in PK they were in the lead two and a half seconds ahead on the first lap and Renault fell back safely um and then of course PK came in . on lap 10 or something like that and I filled in and then we kind of took advantage of everyone's deception on that. I think at the time it was just to get an advantage that you were looking for, like I said, you know every advantage over your competitors what it has become.

It is now something that has been chosen to make the races more interesting and introduce slowdowns and overtaking, so the races have become much more boring, if you will, from an overtaking point of view, so the organizers now They are putting elements. in Formula One to bring back the excitement, one of them is the drag reduction system so that people can overtake on the straight and the other of course is the strategic pit stops, so I think the reason for doing it It's completely different now. because everyone does it and now it's used simply as a strategic device and a device to make racing more interesting, whereas in those days it was absolutely beating everyone else, you know, on the grid, well, I think you know which is like any sport if once it becomes very commercial and someone introduces psychology or physiotherapy then everyone has to have it, it's a bit unfortunate, it's a bit like that, you know, nowadays we couldn't afford it and we probably didn't need it because I think The team, the way the team used to work together in those days was kind of like a family, like if you wanted it and if everyone had a problem, you would talk to them about it and we had a lot of stress with the guys on the pit stops and me.

I used to go around just before, for example, psychology, if you like. I used to go around just before the car came, on the lap before the car and there were eight of us, I think, waiting for the car to come in and I used to go and look everyone in the eye and give them a little reassuring talk and say, take it calmly, do it like we did in training and I used to do that in every race. So we had it very simple in those days and now. Of course, they have specialists for everything.

I think the first pit stops in the 50's when Grand Prix racing started, they had to refuel because the races were much longer, the races were 300 miles, in some cases I'm sure it's a lot more than 2 . hour, so they had to refuel, but again, I don't think anyone would have stopped. I'm sure, looking back, someone had stopped to see how that could be turned into a strategic advantage. The only thing that could be done perhaps would be to stop. a little before or a little after and in those days they used to drag the driver out of the car, throw another driver if they thought they could win the race, but I really think the pit stops we started at Bren were the first pit stops. real strategies designed to try to win the race, they had to stop for fuel in those days, so all they could do was try to do it as quickly as possible and they probably had a small window in which they could know, maybe stop two. laps before or two laps after, but that was it, so I think the Brahman pit stops were the first really strategic pit stops in Grand Prix racing in the late 70s, they had never really been considered pit stops. pits, they were so they were during the 60s and 70s, they were evil, you only stopped in the pits if you really had a problem with the car and you tried to fix it.

Strategic pit stops were what I started with, in the early aughts I'm always looking for the next advantage so in the 70s there wasn't any strategic pit stops so if you had to go in and change tires or try to fix the car, you were going very slow, there were no air guns. there were no QuickLift jacks so you had torque wrenches and wrenches on the wheels and it took a long time so strategic pit stops just didn't exist, that was a completely new thing in the early 80's, well I'm always looking. For the next advantage I'm a bit like that.

I think my hero growing up was Colin Chapman and in some ways I saw myself as a Colin Chapman type guy who was always looking for the next kind of advantage. I used to read the rule book to death and try to find a loophole or a way around the rules for that kind of Unfair Advantage, if you will, and I was chatting with David North, who in those days, believe it or not. There were two of us in the design office now they have hundreds just from the two of us and we were chatting and I was thinking about the weight.

I was always interested in saving weight and a pound of weight equaled exactly one hundredth of a second per lap and that was pretty constant so it didn't take long to just do the math and think, wait a minute, you know fuel is a percentage huge of the weight of the car, so if you could have done it. that weight and go X many seconds per lap faster. You could, if you had a really fast and efficient pit stop, you could stop mid-race and then win the race just with the reduced weight, but there were also other advantages that I thought about.

It was half a tank of fuel, the center of gravity is lower of course, so the cars were also a little faster each lap, but the other big problem was the tires because we knew we were putting them on at the beginning of the race. and they were slowly degrading during the race, you were going further because of the lower weight, but not really as fast as you could have gone because the tires were wearing out and we knew that when you put on a new set of tires it was one, two, 2 seconds and a half. one lap faster for the first five or 10 laps, so what I did was a pretty complex equation which was weight reduction, center of gravity height reduction and the advantage of the new tires and I got a time of bogey of approximately 26 seconds that I had to overcome to win the race with strategic pit stops.

Okay, it's all very well having these theories and strategic plans, but of course in practice there are huge problems to overcome, and particularly in this case, because it's about getting up to 30 gallons of fuel. Getting into the car at pit stop time was practically impossible because we were still filling the cars with jerry cans, aluminum milk cans as we called them in those days, so you put a funnel on the filler, stick the ch in the car and you start. the race So obviously that wasn't going to work on a pit stop and the other problem was the tires only work when they get up to speed and you know you need two or three laps to get the tire temperature up. and in those two or three laps you were several seconds per lap slower.

So obviously that wasn't going to work and then of course the other big problem was changing the wheels in a very short space of time and lifting the car very quickly. and lower it safely, on top of that, because we had the BMW turbocharged engine, we had a problem when the engine got hot and stopped, the turbocharger bearing would stick because it had no oil flow around the outside of the housing and of course if I stopped for more than 5 seconds the turbo got stuck so we had to try to overcome all those problems. I think the whole strategy behind the stop was done by myself and David North, who is the only other designer in the office, and then of course.

Once we started working with the team, we had a very good team of people. I started taking videos of the stops in the early days to record video in those days and then we would sit down as a team and watch the video. In fact, we analyzed every wheel change operation, for example, to see where we could do it faster, so what we came up with for the wheel change is that we had air guns, we redesigned the hub and the nut on the car to that the nut For the new wheel was already on the gun, we had spare air guns on the sides and we involved the whole team in those kinds of details and then, to get the car up and down quickly, we designed titanium air jacks very light.

So we had one of the guys in the back of the car with a probe, so when the car stopped, he stuck the probe in the back of the car, opened the air connector and the car went up instantly and then, for Of course, it went down instantly at the end and I had the idea to cool the turbo bearing because it was obviously an airline that blew up the air cats. We took a little line of that and put a jet of air into the turbo bearing housing, so as soon as the car stopped and I jacked up the car, there would be air cooling the turbo bearing and that's how it was done. we overcame, so raising and lowering the car with the jack and turbo bearing was a solution and then of course all the paraphernalia to change the wheel quickly and The guys worked very closely as a team to determine how many people we needed to put and taking off the steering wheel and that kind of stuff, well of course the guys, I mean Bron was a fantastic team, we were giant killers.

I loved. You know, we had a small proportion of the budget of, say, McLaren, Ferrari or Williams, but we won the Grand Prix and we won the World Championship, so the whole team loved the giant aspect of killing Bernie and Bernie Eckl was always there. willing to do something. That was like an advantage for me and something that pissed off other people too, we both like that, so the whole team was absolutely up for it and of course when I sat them down and explained this ghost time of 26. The seconds that We had to include in the deceleration when entering the pits, the stop time, the exit time and getting the tires and the driver back to maximum speed had to be if it was less than 26 seconds, we were going to win every race.

Basically, if it was longer than 26 seconds, it was a matter of time. If it was more than 26 seconds, we were lost, so all the effort of the design strategy and the team was in getting that phantom time, if you will, to the end. 26 seconds and we did it pretty easily with all these ideas. Well, the first time we came with all the paraphernalia was for the British grpr bran hatch in '82 because what we did was convert the bt50, which was the current BMW car, uh, this one was ahead. of doing the 52 that won the championship and we started in the middle of the season or the second third of the season with pit stops and of course the other paraphernalia are the two things, the other two things we had to achieve were to warm up the tires and getting the fuel came quickly and the tire warmers and those days there were no tire warmers, there were never tire warmers in Formula 1.

I was the first to bring tire warming, but we didn't have the nice electric blankets that they had . Now that you wrap the tire, we built a huge blue plywood tower that could hold two rears and two fronts in a stack and we had a gas heater at the bottom and a fireplace at the top.top and a couple of little windows around each tire so we could puncture them and make sure we hadn't overcooked them and we overcooked them several times the compound shot up so we had to throw that set away so we hit the hatch of br with these blue Tardis. like looking at things in a row and people were wondering what the hell they were and the other thing we haven't talked about, of course, is the pressure, the refueling and those were two kegs of beer, you know, the kegs of beer from aluminum and us.

We found that we could refuel at two bars and we could fill 30 gallons in 3 seconds, which was pretty spectacular, but to do that we needed a very large diamond of a hose, so the poor guys had to practice a lot with this hose over their shoulder. and you had a vent on one side of the car and a vent on the other side and when you opened the valve it was just a roar almost like an explosion and the car went through 30 gallons in 3 seconds, so we showed up with those kegs. on cars and these blue boxes of tardus and all those kits and air guns and air jacks and people wondering what the hell was going on, you know, well, it was a similar amount of fuel, I mean, um, it would be a tank very large fuel 30 gallons, isn't it?

You're probably putting in almost twice the normal hatchback tank of fuel, which takes a couple of minutes at a gas station, so two of those would be, you know, four minutes or something, and all this happens. in 3 seconds, so it was really quite dramatic and I had to involve the guys a lot in that because we tried all kinds of fancy mechanical interlocks because if the guy put the stuffing in the car before connecting the breather, he would do it. just blow the car to pieces, I mean literally, with two pressure bars and an aluminum carbon monocarp, so we had to have a safety device and we tried all kinds of fancy mechanical ideas that prevented you from putting the thing, but all, all. complicated and could go wrong and in the end we decided that the team with the guys eye contact over the car was best, so the guy with the Breather didn't look up until he had the Breather connected and then he would.

Be careful because they were leaning together, the faces were probably so far apart that the stuffing guy didn't put the stuffing in until he saw the whites of the Respirator guy's eyes and that worked out perfectly actually, but except for A Case at Paul Ricard Where We Fly a car in pieces because we had the vent placed down instead of up and well, this was actually before we started, before we started pit stop racing or certainly in the early days before 1983. of all ways and uh we had developed I think David North was in charge of the development of that and he developed an even larger vent in the filler to try to get the fuel in even faster and the new piece came to Paul Ricard and it had to be installed in the car, but the boys, of course, had never done it.

We had seen it before, it was a new part and the breeder was supposed to swing to the top of the tank to clear the air until it was full of fuel, um, and they put it upside down, they put it down, so we we throw on the full tank of fuel with two B pressures and of course as soon as it hit the player the fuel had nowhere to go and we had a mechanic sitting in the car and he literally blew the car to pieces and we were all standing in our pants shorts and t-shirts and had released a 30 gallon column of fuel into the air that no one saw, we just heard the explosion, so everyone looked at each other and it went down like steam and we were all completely covered in fuel. so it could have been a disaster really to be attentive, yeah, yeah, I mean, I look back, there, a famous photographer, the first time we went through a race because throughout 1982, the engine was very unreliable in those days , we were still learning. with BMW on the engine and we kept blowing up engines and turbos and all kinds of things, so we never made it to the end of the race, so we revealed our secret for almost half a season, uh, during that, but I remember those photographs. now I have all the kids dressed in overalls and fire helmets and I'm standing in front of the car in shorts and a short sleeve shirt because I did what they now call the lollipop man in front of the car, you know, I did that, I stood in front to the car and I looked the driver in the eye and told him to wait until we were ready to go, um, but it was so dubious thinking back, you know, but you don't think about it at the time, because you're just looking to get the advantage and pressure, what was banned after the first year was pressure refueling, which was actually quite correct because you know it was something quite dangerous for the technology, um, but then of course the pit stops continued for many years after that and then refueling was banned after some fires and accidents and stuff.

I think you know that Formula 1 goes through times. I think I think the strategic stops for tires and uh. The refueling that we started at 82 um really changed, it's changed Formula One forever if you think about it, because the whole race is based on tire strategy and how many stops and undercuts and all that kind of stuff. I loved strategy today. photos with 40 boys sitting in front of computers. I had an A4 spreadsheet where we filled in the circuit lap times, the length of the circuit, the weather conditions, the tires we had available and we did a very simple calculation to see how many laps we would do on the tires which usually ran around 70%. of the distance, which people could never understand when other people started making pit stops, they went half the distance, half the distance, but the reason I went 70% was because, if you do the calculations, you could run the car down. to the Ragged Edge with minimal weight because normally in those days we didn't have sophisticated computers that measured fuel use, so we had to calculate how much fuel you had, so you always left about four or five kilos of fuel in the car at the end. end so you wouldn't run out of fuel and be underweight, but if you ran 70% of the distance you could put in just an extra 10 liters of fuel at the stop to make sure the car was overweight.

You would be running within the weight limit for two-thirds of the race. The only time we changed was when we won the championship. In the end we faced the turbo Rena and went to the last race in Car Army. For the South African Grand Prix and Renault made a great effort, it was ours to lose and theirs to win. We really had to win the last race to win the championship and by then everyone knew we had covered 2/3 of the race distance on fuel, but what? What I did with PK was I just put a few gallons of fuel into PK so that he would demoralize Prost and Rena and disappear into the distance and they would basically give up, you know, and just hope that something would go wrong and it would work perfectly.

Pongo I think 10 gallons on PK came into the lead with two and a half seconds lead on the first lap and Renault dropped back safely um and then of course PK came in on lap 10 or something and filled in and that's how we fixed it . I think at the time it was simply to get an advantage that you were looking for, like I said you know every advantage over your competitors what has become now is something that has been taken as something to make the racing more interesting and introduce undercuts and overtaking, so the races have become much less exciting, if you will, from an overtaking point of view, so the organizers are now putting elements into Formula One to bring back the excitement, one of One One of them is the drag reduction system so that people can overtake on the straight and the other of course is the strategic pit stops so I think the reason for doing it is completely different now because everyone does it. and now it is only used as a strategy. device and a device to make racing more interesting, whereas in those days it was absolutely beating everyone else, you know, on the grid, well, I think you know it's like any sport, if you like, once you get down to it becomes very commercial and someone introduces psychology or physiotherapy, then everyone has to have it, it's a bit unfortunate, it's a bit like that, you know, nowadays we couldn't afford it and we probably didn't need it because I think the team used to work together in the same way as the team.

In those days it was kind of like a family, like you wanted it and if everyone had a problem you talked to them about it and we had a lot of stress with the guys at the pit stops and I used to ride right before for a psychology example. If you like, I used to turn around right before the car came on the turn before the car and I think there were eight of us waiting for the car to come in and I used to turn around and look everyone in the eye and just give them a little chat. reassuringly and tell them "take it easy", do it like we did in training and I used to do that in every race.

So we had it very simple in those days and now, of course, they have specialists for everything, I think the first pit stops in the 50s, when the Grand Prix races started, um, they had to refuel because the races were a lot longer, the races were 300 miles, in some cases, I'm sure it was much longer than two hours, so they had to refuel, um, but Again, I don't think anyone would have stopped. I'm sure actually looking back, someone had stopped to see how that could be turned into a Strategic Advantage. The only thing that could be done perhaps would be to stop a little earlier or a little later. and in those days they used to drag the driver out of the car, throw another driver if they thought they could win the race, but I really think the pit stops we started at Bren were the first really strategic pit stops designed to try and win. the race, they had to stop for fuel on those days, so all they could do was try to do it as fast as possible and they probably had a small window in which they could know, maybe stop two laps before or two laps after, but that was In this regard, I think Bren's pit stops were the first truly strategic pit stops in Grand Prix racing.