The Mechanic’s Tale by Steve Matchett

Author:Steve Matchett [Matchett, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

1993 – Chapter Six

A note for future historians – Moving into the new

factory – Formula One’s geographical relocation – Patrese

arrives – Mansell bows out – Active suspension –

Semi-automatic transmissions – A world record is set

in Spa – Nuñes wins in Estoril

The long hours, the all-nighters and the hectic workloads that we are sometimes forced to endure are terrible facets of work in Formula One, and at times it felt as if we were little more than slave labour. However, I’ve always thought that the pay I received in return for all my hard work was fair, but if my gross annual salary was divided by all the hours worked and expressed as an hourly rate, it begins to look like pretty poor remuneration. I’ve been jotting down a record of my earnings, from that first pay packet as an indentured apprentice onward, and I’ve continued to do this, year by year. I have always kept letters which refer to my wages and have included them to add a little further colour. However, one thing is certain, times are changing. It won’t be long before the need for mechanics will evaporate. I strongly suspect that within the space of another fifty or sixty years our skills will have become redundant, and just like the longbow maker, the knight’s page, the roof thatcher and the barrel cooper, the mechanic will become near extinct, part of history.

I don’t think I’m overstating the situation either. Take this book for example: I’m writing it on a notebook computer (I still want to call it a laptop), powered by a 200MHz Pentium processor with MMX (apparently the MMX bit makes it much more fun), it’s just over twelve months old and it cost me nearly £2000 – an awful lot of money, but a necessary investment which, hopefully, I can recoup with my advance from Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (I just hope Marilyn, my editor, likes what she reads or I’m sunk.) In 2001, the start of the next century which is only a couple of years away, this machine will seem like a fossilized artefact, nothing short of a whimsical curiosity. Compared with what will then be the latest machine, this one will be akin to scrawling on slate with a wedge of chalk. Within three weeks of buying my machine, ‘voice recognition’ software was on the market, and shortly after that I noticed that a 266MHz model was available. The other day a 333MHz machine was advertised in The Times for less than half what I paid nearly a year before! If that trend continues, sometime in the next century you’ll be able to buy a 1,000,000MHz (should that be 1000GHz?) machine for less than the price of a cup of tea; that can’t be right, can it?

Here we are in the very closing stages of the second millennium, with major, almost daily, advancements in microchip electronics screaming past us. I don’t think I’m being techno-phobic but I’m sure that some current traditional trades such

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