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Endurance Q&A

Q&A with Bart Hayden, team manager for Speedy Racing Team Sebah

by Bunny Richards

Q: How accurately can you simulate a 24-hour race beforehand, either on the track or in a virtual environment?

I would say only to about 80%. We tend not to focus on simulating the whole race; rather we focus more on simulating a setup for the car before we arrive at the track.

Q: How do you keep your pit crew and engineers sharp during such a long race?

The drivers usually do that for us, they always seem to find us some sort of drama! I wouldn’t say there is anything special that we do. We think that if the guys can have 40 winks between stints, let them do it. On the pit wall it’s harder as they have to be awake 24 hours. But we always have enough people there that if one is finding it difficult someone can step in and cover. We try and make sure that the folks that are on the wall can do more than one job. So there is no magic to it.

Q: What is your favorite, or most essential, piece of equipment during a race?

The timing computer I think. It gives you all the information about what’s happening not only to your own car, but also to every other car in the field. So we can find out the gap between us and the other competitors, and we also use it for feeding into our planning and strategy software during the race itself. If we didn’t have that, we would have to do a lot more thinking and manual taking of notes, so it’s a pretty useful bit of kit.
 

Q: What did you learn from this year's Le Mans 24 Hours that will affect how you prepare for next time?

No matter how many times you go, you always learn. I would actually say the biggest thing we learned was to try as far as possible to have our race suspension and race components assembled and almost locked away in the garage, and then telling the guys not to use them if you have a problem to the build-up to the race. When it comes to the Thursday, and changing to the race engine and race suspension and race gearbox and everything else, you just bolt them all on without having to assemble it all. That way you are saving the crew a lot of time to keep them fresher for when you actually go to the race itself in a couple of days’ time.

Q: What’s the best piece of endurance-racing advice anyone’s ever given you?

I guess the best piece is it’s not all in the first corner, and it’s true that for the driver it’s probably the most important thing. For a team manager, the best piece of advice is that the preparation for the next event starts as soon as the last race finishes.

Q: A team wants to enter a 24-hour race for the first time. What one piece of advice would you give them?

Take someone along who’s been there before, because they will have a lot of knowledge and experience about the way the event runs. You can get carried away thinking you have a lot of time and it’s easy to allow time to creep up on you, but then suddenly you don’t have enough time to do what you need to do!