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It's a veritable Mission Control which comes to life on Grand Prix weekends when Enstone's engineers receive, process and exploit the data sent from far-flung locations by their Renault colleagues in the garage. In his fifth and final installment of our feature dedicated to what goes on behind Enstone's closed doors, F1i's Nicolas Carpentiers takes a guided tour of the team's nerve center: the Operations Room.
After walking through Renault's clinically immaculate race bays, where the team's chassis are taken apart, inspected and maintained, we head upstairs to be welcomed by our Ops Room guide, who also happens to be a familiar face.
Chris Dyer previously worked at Ferrari as race engineer to Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen, and he now heads Renault's Vehicle Performance group.
Chris gives us the lowdown on how the Ops Room is an important tool for his specific department.
"Part of the responsibilities we have in the vehicle performance group is that we work very closely with the race team to develop the set-up of the car," explains the 50-year-old engineer.
"This works starts for us many weeks before the Grand Prix with simulation modelling work, and leading up to the Grand Prix we work together with the race team at the factory to make the decisions in terms of what set up we start with on the cars, what things we test during the weekend…
"That work doesn’t stop once the race team goes away to the track, we continue to support them through the weekend. And one of the most important tools we have to provide that support is the operations room or ‘ops room’."
