Built on Speed, Moved by Sea

Monday in Doha

Eli: Joe Micklewright, a former sous chef, was Aston Martin's race team coordinator in 2024: he handled the Formula 1 team's logistics. On the Monday after the Las Vegas race, with Qatar's race that Sunday, he landed in Doha bleary-eyed after a seventeen-hour flight. He slept a few hours, and on Tuesday morning went to meet the air freight he'd arranged to follow him.

Mara: The cars were on a plane somewhere behind him.

Eli: A listener asked about exactly this. They'd heard the travelling circus is smooth and full of technology, and asked what it carries and how it moves so fast.

Mara: Today's angle is how a sport built on speed gets around the world by going slow. Here's the short version, Eli: the trick is deciding what doesn't need to be fast.

Tuesday: what flies

Eli: His freight reached him on Tuesday: around twenty-five tons, with both cars in it. On a flyaway, which is any race outside Europe, the freight travels in two loads, and only the critical one flies. That's the cars, and the electronics: the telemetry systems that stream readings off the car, the data servers, and the pit-wall computers that engineers and strategists work from.

Mara: Not as cars, though. They travel stripped down and boxed; McLaren, for one, usually turns up with a collection of parts. Its mechanics' own tools fly with them.

Eli: Like moving a very expensive sofa with the legs unscrewed.

Mara: DHL, F1's official logistics partner, describes the drill: the wings, steering wheel, mirrors and side bodywork come off, wooden panels go round the bottom and sides, and a bumper protects the gearbox. All told, a car is around five thousand components. McLaren doesn't even carry its own engines or tyres; its engine supplier, Mercedes, and the tyre maker, Pirelli, deliver those at the track.

Eli: Each team also sends about three pallets of priority cargo, IT racks and communications kit, timed to reach the track by the Tuesday. A race weekend can involve sixty screens and four hundred miles of wiring.

Mara: Formula 1's own TV kit flies as well; it handles a hundred and fifty trackside cameras, and miles of cable to get the pictures out.

Eli: The crates are shaped to fill the plane, each with a radio tag that says what's inside, down to which crate holds a gearbox, and GPS follows the cargo by truck, ship or plane. Even so, Micklewright's freight came in late: almost four hours, after a customs delay.

Mara: In his words: "We've got to get the right equipment to the right place at the right time and our paperwork has got to be up to scratch." Every shipment needs precise customs paperwork, and some need more than one clearance. DHL also handles the ATA Carnets, documents that let race kit into more than eighty countries without customs duties.

Eli: A passport for the kit, then.

Mara: More or less. The newest parts often skip the freight altogether: bits a team wants to test fly with team members, as checked-in oversized baggage.

Eli: DHL says that without a constant air bridge, there'd be no race the following Sunday.

The garage that sailed

Mara: In Doha, car assembly began on Wednesday, with the garage built around the cars to be working by Thursday. That's when a team like McLaren aims to start the car's engine for the first time that week, a day before first practice.

Eli: Most of that garage hadn't flown; it came by sea. The sea freight was the job of a colleague, Franco Massaro. He started at Jordan as a 'truckie', working on the team's trucks, then became chief truckie. By 2015 he was race team co-ordinator at Force India, making sure the cargo was ready by Thursday: the title Micklewright held in 2024. Force India later became Aston Martin; in 2025 he said he'd been there nearly twenty-two years.

Mara: Twenty-two years with one team.

Eli: By 2025, air freight costs had risen, so the team moved what it could onto ships and made a few extra bits of equipment. His team's example: a timing stand, a one-tonne piece of garage kit, saves nearly a quarter of a million pounds a season by sailing instead of flying.

Mara: Why not sail all of it?

Eli: Because ships are slow. A crossing takes about thirty days on average. In 2020, Haas's operations manager joked that if everything went by sea, Formula 1 would need a sixty-three-week year.

Mara: So the slow load travels in copies. In 2025 Massaro's team had six identical sets, worth around two million pounds each, mostly garage rather than car: panelling, timing stands, air conditioning. Each set filled five big containers with garage kit and two with hospitality, the team's kitchen and dining room at the track. A set did around four races a year. Two covered Europe by road; the others leapfrogged ahead by sea.

Eli: That takes patience, Mara.

Mara: Shipping lines aren't like airlines, he said: they can suddenly change plans. So the team built in a lot of extra time, aiming for sea freight at the track about ten days before the race, with an early build crew starting on the garage the weekend before.

Eli: Even the route can change. Ships were being targeted in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and many shipping lines avoided the area. At the start of 2024, his team's freight for Japan went via the United States, adding a lot of journey time.

Mara: The long way round to Japan.

Eli: He'd got 'a bit obsessed with online shipping trackers', watching a ship go 'from port to port, collecting cargo' and wondering if it would ever leave a certain area.

Mara: His worst case was a ship so late that the freight missed the race. When he spoke, in 2025, that hadn't happened to his team.

Sunday night to Monday morning

Eli: Back in Doha, the logistics man had a second job: from Friday to Sunday, Micklewright helped look after the tyres on Fernando Alonso's car and joined pit stops if needed. Qatar was the middle of three races on consecutive weekends: Las Vegas, Qatar, Abu Dhabi.

Mara: While the race runs, the pack-down is already under way. Every Grand Prix is a temporary city, built, powered, connected and broadcast, then taken down within days. The taking down starts on Saturday, with the non-essential kit. During the race, McLaren's crew lines up the travel boxes, teams box spare wings and backup electronics, and the limit on team staff is relaxed for extra hands. When the race ends, the forklifts come out, and within an hour the first items are on trucks to the airport.

Eli: Where the planes are fuelled and waiting.

Mara: Massaro knew that night from inside: in 2015, packing it up was his job. He called the Sunday-night paddock 'organised chaos', where 'everybody knows what they are doing'. By about nine, he said, 'it looks like a bomb site!'

Eli: Teams aim to have trucks rolling within five hours. In Europe, the trucks go all the way, often with two drivers per cab to keep moving day and night. On a flyaway, DHL charters six or seven Boeing cargo jets per race, often loaded overnight, and by Monday morning most air freight is on its way. In Doha in 2024, the pack-down ran into the early hours of Monday.

Mara: Micklewright's near four-hour delay didn't sink that week. One in 2021 came closer.

Eli: In November 2021, on the Tuesday after the Mexico City race, with São Paulo that weekend, fog came down on the airport. Some freight planes left late, and incoming ones were diverted. The last two landed in São Paulo only on Thursday morning. The garages weren't affected, because they'd come by sea. For the teams hit hardest, what was missing travels by air: cars, engines, parts and toolboxes.

Mara: Haas's toolboxes were among them. Its team boss, Guenther Steiner, said: "So we still cannot work on the cars, even if some of the parts may be there, because we do not have the tools."

Eli: The race date held; the rules bent. The curfew, the nine overnight hours when team crews must stay out of the circuit, was waived. The deadline for the cars' technical checks moved from eighteen hours before first practice to three. McLaren's crew had both cars built by about midnight, and they ran on Friday.

Mara: DHL puts the difference plainly: ordinary freight can miss a Friday and arrive on Monday, annoying but possible. In Formula 1, that option doesn't exist.

What never travels

Eli: One more way to be fast is not to move things at all.

Mara: Since 2020, much of the broadcast has been produced remotely, from F1's Media and Technology Centre in the UK, with less cargo and fewer staff travelling. F1 calls it the world's largest intercontinental remote-production system. Teams do the same with engineers: fewer stand in the pit lane, and data goes back to factory control rooms, where staff support the drivers remotely.

Eli: Partly because they have to. A former F1 engineer said in 2024 that limits on how many people and how much kit can travel were pushing teams that way.

Mara: Whatever stays home never has to make the Monday flight.

Eli: The flights that remain are the biggest emissions problem in F1's logistics. But the fast core can't sail: ships can't yet replace those flights across a global calendar.

The people in the fast lane

Mara: What can't stay home is the people. From the Wednesday of race week to Sunday night, the days run at least twelve hours, with no recovery built in before the next flight.

Eli: One Red Bull mechanic has described those days from inside. Calum Nicholas had been with the team since 2015, fitting the engine into Max Verstappen's car and working on the pit crew. In February 2025 he talked through a race Sunday: a morning 'glued to my laptop', preparing engines for the next race and the parts going home, sometimes a hundred across both cars, each stripped, packed, sent back and logged.

Mara: How long did that Sunday run?

Eli: About fourteen hours by the time the packing was done, he said, 'really tough now', and usually back on the road Monday morning. He was away about two hundred days a year; his partner and daughter made 'huge sacrifices'. He last took races off when his daughter was born, three of them.

Mara: Even so, some mechanics, him included, had been reluctant to sit races out.

Eli: Coming back from those three, he'd found 'nothing's how I do it', and crews worried about pit-stop performance. But he said rotation, taking turns to miss races, was necessary, because 'Professional burnout is a real thing', and that everybody now accepted it. Two days after that interview appeared, he stepped back from the race crew to become a Red Bull ambassador. By 2026, some teams were sending garage staff to around eighteen rounds of a twenty-four-race calendar, to build in weekends off.

Mara: In Doha in 2024, Micklewright said the end of a season takes a toll. When things went badly, the crew had to 'stick together' and get through it.

Eli: The kit gets no break either, Mara.

Mara: When Massaro started, the team had October to December to service everything for the next year. By 2025, it serviced things whenever it got the chance. The sea-freight garage Micklewright's cars were built into went on from Doha. By early December 2024 it was already on its way to Australia, for the first race of 2025.

Eli: Long before the cars and crews follow.

Mara: Which brings us back to those shipping trackers: with six sets, part of the team's garage is usually somewhere at sea.

Close

Eli: To dig further, look up the ATA Carnet.

Mara: And keep following Formula 1 with us; how much more of what flies can go by sea is still an open question.

Eli: I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Thanks for listening.