Logistics

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Discussion

audi321

Original Poster:

5,448 posts

219 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
Might be a simple answer but how do F1 teams get from A to B?

I mean for example Baku to Canada in 4 days! Ok the personnel can just fly easy enough but what about the cars, equipment and these massive motorhome things they have for meetings/hospitality etc.

Logistical nightmare!

davidd

6,521 posts

290 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
audi321 said:
Might be a simple answer but how do F1 teams get from A to B?

I mean for example Baku to Canada in 4 days! Ok the personnel can just fly easy enough but what about the cars, equipment and these massive motorhome things they have for meetings/hospitality etc.

Logistical nightmare!
Air freight for a lot of it, they also don't take the massive hospitality units to every event, and use local facilities. I also think some teams have two of a lot of stuff..

Muzzer79

10,859 posts

193 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
For European races, the freight is moved by truck - these are the teams' own motorhomes, kit, etc.

For fly-away races, F1 charters planes to move all the gear from one venue to another. For those races, the teams use the infrastructure set up on site in terms of paddock accommodation and/or, IINM, they have 'fly-away' hospitality equipment, which is more portable.

fbc

183 posts

142 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
There's several sets of the pitlane equipment, garage fit-outs etc that are shipped around by sea-freight in advance of the races - multiple sets are used to allow one set to be actively in-use, while the other sets (there's more than two) are simultaneously in-transit to different places around the world.

For fly-away events, local facilities (either temporary or permanent) are used for team facilities (ie meeting rooms, catering, hosting, social spaces etc).

The cars themselves are air-freighted from event to event for fly-aways.

European events see the use of a fleet of lorries to transport all of the above.

Edited by fbc on Monday 13th June 12:10

BoRED S2upid

20,204 posts

246 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
Not really a logistical nightmare at all. They aren’t booking the cars onto domestic flights and when you have the money to hire the best there is I’m sure it’s all very stress free.

I’ve seen the trucks moving round Europe when I’ve driven to F1 races. Very impressive rigs.

Sandpit Steve

11,230 posts

80 months

Monday 13th June 2022
quotequote all
F1 Logistics partner DHL did a video on it a few years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MH6Loko0BOA

As did an independent transport media production company: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OLVFa8YRfM

The basics:

There will be 5 or 6 chartered 747 cargo planes taking the teams’ and F1’s kit directly from Baku to Montreal.

There is also sea freight for bulky and non-critical items, several lots of which are shipped out at the start of the season to the first few fly-away races, and they move these around during the season. The Montreal kit likely came from Miami, and the Baku kit will go to maybe Singapore, by container ship.

Moving the people around is more tricky, as there’s no direct flights. Will be a combination of chartered and scheduled flights taking a couple of days, perhaps with a day or two in the factory. There were a couple of chartered 787s and a couple of bizjets that went from Baku to the UK overnight last night, probably for the drivers, engineers and mechanics.

The teams will have rotated a lot of staff where possible too, so the team tearing down kit in Baku today will be different to those building up in Montreal tomorrow