Lucia Conconi spent over 20 years in Formula 1 and high-performance motorsport, most recently as Head of Vehicle Performance at Sauber Motorsport, contributing to a strong period of competitiveness for the team. She held senior roles at Renault F1, Mercedes-AMG F1, Brawn GP, and Audi Sport.
The days on a race weekend have always started early. Walking to the paddock at that hour, you find mainly people from other teams – sometimes former colleagues who have changed team gear. Despite the competition, the greetings are always warm. For a few minutes, before the day tightens, the paddock feels like a familiar place.
In reality, by the time anyone walks through the gate, the race weekend has already been running for days at the factory. But as the cars hit the track, the rhythm sharpens everywhere.
What I have always found special – and what is perhaps least visible from the outside – is how the whole organisation gears up around those few days. Whether you are at the track or back at base, you feel the presence of a much bigger operation behind the two cars. Systems engineers monitoring deployments through the night. Simulator sessions running in parallel with track activity. Data analysts preparing the ground for decisions that will be made in minutes. Most of these people will never appear on a broadcast. But without them, the cars don’t run the way they do.
You feel the energy shift. There is something unspoken that takes hold during a race weekend – a kind of collective focus that reaches through the factory even to the people not directly involved in race support. I have seen it in the way unrelated conversations pause, in the way people with no operational reason to check the session times still do. The whole place leans in.
When you are part of that orchestration, you feel the effort it takes to keep everything connected and the discipline required to make it faster and smoother each weekend.
As the car evolves, certain races carry extra weight. New parts arrive after months of development, bringing a quiet focus. Seeing the car respond and lap times confirm simulations pays back weeks of invisible work.
Once the sessions begin, time is marked by the meetings. Analyses shared, scenarios evaluated, programmes rehearsed and adjusted. Between sessions, engineers stay deep in the data, making decisions that will play out in the next hour or the next day. The rhythm is intense, at the track and at the factory. And when the factory is following a race on the other side of the world, the time zones add their own layer of pressure.
One memory stands out, though, and it was another very early alarm clock, but somehow much lighter and different. It was early in my Formula 1 career, when we brought the Brawn GP car to the first race of the season in Melbourne. The time difference meant a brutal alarm for anyone following from Europe – Friday practice fell in the small hours of the morning. But I think most of us in race support that year woke up before our alarms. There was a lot of anticipation after the intense winter months. The first voices on the intercom, the engineers checking in, the session about to go live – and then it did, and the car was fast, and the season that followed wrote itself into the history of the sport. I don’t think any of us who were part of it will forget that morning.
