Some
of the most senior members of the F1 press corps can still remember the
days when there were no television monitors at the circuits and the only
way to find out how a driver had performed that day was by chatting with
him that evening in the hotel bar!
Different times, different customs as Formula 1 has grown into a global
sport, generating thousands of column inches in newspapers, magazine and
Internet sites on a daily basis, not to mention extensive television
coverage. It would be impossible to allow the race drivers and team
personnel to simply give interviews on an ad hoc basis as it would leave
them no time to get on with their work.
Therefore, all the F1 teams have a press department, some big some
small. Ferrari’s position in the sport and the fact that its activities
have a national importance in Italy on a level that does not apply to
the other teams in their home countries means that the Ferrari Motor
Sport Press Office is at the larger end of the scale.
Today, the Ferrari media office is headed up by Luca Colajanni. Working
with him are Jane Parisi, Regine Rettner, Matteo Bonciani and, with
special responsibility for the Internet site, Lucia Pennesi. At the race
weekends themselves the operation is supported by Stefania Bocchi.
Formula 1 is not the only motor sport activity for the Ferrari Maserati
Group and, looking after such events as the Maserati one-make series and
the Ferrari Challenge is Alberto Borgini. In addition, Michael
Schumacher has his own personal media consultant, Sabine Kehm, a former
journalist.
Preparation for each grand prix starts at home in Maranello. A large
amount of equipment has to be taken to each circuit, all of it loaded
onto the dedicated Media motorhome, while for the 'flyaway' races
outside Europe, a more condensed package of material, including press
paper, photographs, posters and the race notebook, packed with
statistics and blank pages for the journalists is packaged with the
team’s freight. The Media motorhome is the office for the race weekend,
but also doubles as a popular meeting point for journalists. It was
built to be ecologically friendly, using a large percentage of
recyclable material. But in truth, this matters little to the
journalists from around the world who are more interested in the famous
Ferrari pasta served up for lunch!
Apart from ensuring all the equipment is packed, the media department
spends time prior to each event planning the media schedule, programming
interviews for the drivers, for Managing Director Jean Todt and the
senior technical staff. The baseline for this list of interviews changes
according to which Scuderia team member is called up for the official
press conferences organised on the Thursday and Friday of every grand
prix by the FIA Press Department. If the drivers are not required then
the Scuderia organises informal press meetings for them at the motorhome
in the late afternoon on those two days. Thursday is also the day for
one-to-one interviews, usually with TV broadcasters or major print
media, while Friday sees Michael Schumacher give interviews in the pit
lane immediately after the end of free practice, with Rubens Barrichello
facing questions later at the motorhome. Saturday follows a similar
pattern, although naturally the hope is that Michael and Rubens will
face the press in the FIA conference for the top three qualifiers.
In a perfect world, all interviews are pre-booked well before the event
and last minute requests are usually turned down as the drivers and team
members must have a press schedule that allows them to concentrate and
focus on their track activity.
The team’s sponsors also have their own media agenda that has to be
dovetailed into the programme. Quite often, sponsors such as Shell and
Vodafone will organise events outside the track to bring the team and
the drivers to a wider audience, as they look to generate publicity by
associating their brand with the team and especially the drivers. This
year in Melbourne for example, Vodafone organised a mini-triathlon style
event with Michael and Rubens competing against the press. The events
were basketball, golf and football. Ironically, given that the German is
a keen soccer player and the Brazilian a golfer, they each got beaten by
the other in their favourite discipline!
Every day at the race track starts the same way for the press office
staff, as they collate all that day’s cuttings from a variety of
newspapers from around the world. Bound copies of the 'Rassegna Stampa'
are then put out on the tables under the motorhome awning where they are
eagerly awaited by the journalists, keen to see what their rivals have
written. The cuttings are just a small part of a media monitoring
undertaken by the Ferrari Press Office, which makes use of media
monitoring to check TV and radio broadcasts as well as the print media.
Self-monitoring is also part of the department’s remit and every
interview given by one of the drivers or team members is attended by a
member of the Press Office, who records the interview using a digital
voice recorder, supplied by team sponsor, Olympus. Olympus also supplies
photographic equipment which Ferrari photographers seconded to the Press
Office use to illustrate press releases and Internet pages.
Away from the race tracks, the Motor Sport Press Office is kept busy all
year round back in Maranello, dealing with a daily influx of interview
requests. These can range from hosting a Chinese TV crew for two days of
filming in the factory to answering questions e-mailed from a small
newspaper. All queries are answered and graded and on average the
department handles around a thousand requests a year.
Underscoring all this work is the more intangible aspect of the job,
which is to act as the public face of the Scuderia, generating goodwill
towards the team, which with around 300 journalists attending every
grand prix is no easy task!
