Chat with Tobi

We were able to have a sit down with Tobi, the Motorhome Manager, who was able to tell us all this information we have but also to show us a neat little trick, and just how cool the motorhome really is.

Nearly everything inside the motorhome can be controlled by an iPad - I know, right?!

Lights, air conditioning temp, heating temp, music and TVs.

Each floor has an iPad so the staff can control their environment to suit the guests. Tobi has the master iPad which can over ride and change any of the settings made by any of the other floors.

Tobi showed us how you can change the lighting in just one area, it can be dimmed or made brighter.

The TVs can have either art work of the cars, Mercedes Logos, pictures from previous race weekends or it can have the timing feed from the track, coverage of the on track action from broadcasters or other sports that their guests may want to watch including Wimbledon, Tour De France or Le Mans.

The motorhome iPad has a pre-programmed setting for the Thursday press sessions where everything is exactly as the team want it. So when the time comes Tobi presses the button and the lights brighten and the music stops.

The music is on a 16gb hard drive and takes about 3 race weekends for it to start repeating (so it's not the same song constantly on loop driving everyone mad!), the marketing team choose the music play list, so there's no fighting over music choices from the staff based in there.

There is 2 sets of furniture for the hospitality, 1 that travels with the motorhome and the other is flown to the other races where they have pit buildings that are used at the circuit, The idea is that the motorhome, pit building and factory hospitality are all identical, furniture, flowers, wall colour and decor, everything.

The pit buildings that are used in races like Bahrain, for example, they take temporary wall covers to put up over the walls there so that the decoration, furniture and layout are made to look alike so that from pictures it would be hard to know where they were taken.

Thank you Tobi for a great insight and chat!