Children worldwide dream about being like Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton. Few fall asleep wondering what it is like to be Paul Fowler.
Fowler, 50, now the UK motorsport managing director of US logistics company DHL, has helped move the F1 circus around the globe in a succession of roles since he was 17. He keeps the sport’s high-tech village on the go for 10 months a year.
This takes stamina, resourcefulness, an eye on the clock and a life lived out of a suitcase. Much like a racing driver, in fact. Fowler went into F1 logistics after his aunt, a recruitment agent, recommended him for a job at an airline courier supervising the delivery of Honda engines to racing teams. He joined DHL in March after it bought his own business performing the same role.
This year, the 10 teams had to be moved between 21 races, across more than 100,000 miles by land and sea. Their collective kit of about 20,000-items weighs more than 300 tonnes.
Fowler is divorced with sons aged 20 and 15. He says long hours and constant travel have contributed to his single status. “This job is a vocation,” he says. “We are nomadic. When someone asks you where you are from, you can find yourself stuck for an answer.”
His trackside manager, he notes, is from Towcester, Northamptonshire, in the English east Midlands. “He left in February for the Australian Grand Prix and won’t be home until December.” Others of his crew of 70 across Europe may be only away for several weeks at a time, though, as he says, “we have all signed up for this.”
The F1 circus transports anything from television cameras to generators, to the cars themselves and furniture for the teams’ motorhomes. Thousands of cans of Red Bull soft drinks, to take a further example, also have to arrive chilled at each race. The Austrian energy drinks maker and F1 sponsor provides millions of dollars towards keeping the show on the road.
The pace will soon accelerate, with the Vietnam and Netherlands Grands Prix to be added to the calendar, making the 2020 season the longest in F1 history. Another race is planned for Miami in 2021. Last month, Formula One, the sport’s commercial rights owners, said it would set a ceiling of 25 races for future seasons.
“A 25-race season will mean two sets of teams working in tandem to keep everything moving,” says Fowler. As for the Vietnam Grand Prix, set to takes place in Hanoi in April, his team has already been talking to its promoter “to make sure” things go smoothly.
“We had a team go over there in April and again in September looking at where things will be based and how we get them in and out. From February one of the most experienced members of my team will be in Hanoi full-time. The job will be to advise the promoter to make sure any problems are ironed out.”
Mercedes, which retained the Formula One constructor title this year and is also home to six-times world champion Lewis Hamilton, takes up to 34 trucks to races. The team arrives at a circuit with 42 tons of freight (about double that of the smaller teams).
Karl Fanson, Mercedes head of race-team logistics, says about 60 of his staff travel to races. Scores of sponsors and their guests join them for the most prestigious races, such as the Monaco and Singapore Grands Prix.
Fanson, who has worked in F1 for 13 years, notes that Monaco, while, classed as a blue-ribbon race, is also one of the most difficult logistically. “It’s a tight street circuit and there is no real paddock area.” The team’s trucks have to find space in a multistorey car park near the harbour, with quad bikes hastening equipment to the track. “Once the race is over we pack all our equipment away in five hours to make our flights. It’s relentless.”
With 25-race seasons envisaged, things are unlikely to calm down. And it is with the unsung help of the likes of Fowler and Fanson, that F1 plans to keep its financial future secure.
