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!