La moka di Berto

People ask why I bring my own coffee pot to work. I have a machine at home, they say, surely the Foundation can afford a machine. The Foundation can afford a machine. A machine is not the point.

I bought this moka at the Saturday market in Modena in 1998. It cost very little and it has been to every workshop I have worked in since: Formula 3, Formula Renault, GP3, Formula 2, and now ours. It has been dropped, scorched, and once repaired with a part from a gearbox, which I do not recommend.

La regola del caffè

The coffee rule. In every good workshop I have known, someone makes coffee for everyone, and it is never the same person twice in a row. In ours, the person who makes the first coffee of the day is whoever arrived last the night before. You would be surprised how this improves punctuality.

The students learn to make it in their first block. Some of them have never made coffee before. Kofi made his first one too strong and Sami made his too weak, and now both of them make it better than Davide, who will not like reading that.

It is a small thing. But a workshop is a place where people depend on each other, and a moka on the stove is a small daily proof that they can.

What the moka has heard

A workshop hears a lot of conversations in 30 years. I have told drivers they were not ready, and told them they were. I have told parents things they did not want to hear. I have fixed a gearbox with a borrowed belt buckle and decided a championship with a fuel calculation on a napkin, and the moka was on the stove both times.

What I have learned, if I have learned anything, is in a notebook in my office, and most of it comes down to this:

Il carattere prima del talento. Character before talent. Speed can be taught. Being kind to the mechanic who is fixing your car at midnight cannot, or not easily.

The students sometimes ask me which driver was the best I ever worked with. I tell them I do not know yet. Some of them are in the instruction room.

Now. Who arrived last last night?