Ask Gary: What's wrong with 2017 regs?

I can see why you think the proposed rule changes for 2017 won't have the desired effect, but I thought a chunk of the 5-6s improvement was supposed to come from the reintroduction of ground effect. You would also get greater traction in corners, meaning faster exits onto straights, and as ground effect is a more efficient way of obtaining downforce, it would result in a lower drag coefficient of the car, meaning the top speed of the cars on straights will be faster still. This, combined with stickier tyres and a wider track, would surely result in a formula that rewards balls and does not inhibit close racing? Or am I misled?
James Tregellis, via email

James, you are right - the majority of this laptime would have to come from the extra downforce and extra top speed. What I was saying was that it needs a lot to achieve that five- or six-second improvement.

The ground effect will not be as critical to turbulence as the current cars' downforce-producing devices are, but as with anything that is optimised around clean airflow, there will still be losses when following another car with the 2017 plans.

Again, I agree with you it would be great to see a driver rewarded for their bravery, but I am not sure it will lead to closer racing.

I don't think drivers will commit to an overtaking manoeuvre if they are travelling, say, 15 per cent faster around a corner.

Let's just take Copse corner at Silverstone as one example. In race trim the current cars' apex speed is around 174mph, so with the all-singing-and-dancing ground affect and the extra grip that gives them they'll be travelling at something like 206mph.

If you have an accident with another car at that speed it will be very similar to an aeroplane crash. Even if you just touch, you will be hauled up to the stewards to justify your actions.

Surely we want closer racing, not faster racing? The five-seconds-per-lap improvement is bunk because the cars are so fast it is hard to see them already. What is needed is a reduction in downforce of, say, 100kg. That would mean cars would slide, overtaking would be easier and tyres would last. What do you think?
Gerard Van Dam, via email

Gerard, I agree with you and I think I have answered above as far as increased downforce and decreased laptimes are concerned.

I also agree that reduced downforce would put more emphasis on driver control. Mexico was an example of this: the cars were running with Monaco wing levels but because of the altitude and the thinner air, they were producing a lot less downforce. That, combined with a slippery track surface, meant the cars were sliding around a lot more and we saw more driver errors.

If I had anything to do with it I would like to see the cars produce about 50 per cent of the current levels of downforce, reduce the complexity of the downforce-producing surfaces, introduce a greater level of downforce generated by the underfloor and increase the tyre sizes to give some of that grip back.

The aim of all this would be to give about the same laptime and corner speed as we currently have, but allow the cars to follow each other with fewer problems and to reduce the emphasis on budget-spend on aerodynamic components.

The tyres would have to be designed to withstand the extra sliding, but I'm sure Pirelli could cope with this.

How do downforce levels from early '80s ground effect cars compare to modern cars, and would you like to see ground effect return?
Lee Graham, via Twitter

Lee, downforce levels would have been a bit higher than they are currently, but not as much as you might expect because the understanding of aerodynamics in those days was fairy basic.

Windtunnel time was very limited back then. I think Gordon Murray at Brabham was the first designer to actually put together a programme to properly research aerodynamics as opposed to just drawing a few lines on a piece of paper, making something and track testing it.

Under the car you had a big section of floor each side of the chassis. The lower the front and the higher the rear, the more downforce you produced. That, combined with a sliding side skirt to seal it, was how you went racing. No one really paid much attention to pitch sensitivity.

You can see in the way Red Bull runs its car with lots of rake (front low and rear high) that it's still trying to get some ground affect out of what is now a flat-bottomed car. But to do this the aerodynamic flow-structure (which is the current aerodynamic buzzword) has to work to create an invisible seal along the sides of the underfloor.

Red Bull has mastered this, and others are still trying with varying success.

How does James Allison's 2015 Ferrari compare aerodynamically to Pat Fry's cars since 2010? Just how good is the SF15-T compared to the rest of the grid, and is Ferrari's future looking good under Mr Allison?
Liam Li, via email

Liam, I don't know James that well and have never worked with him, but I've always rated him. He appears to be a good lateral thinker and not just an engineering manager like many of his counterparts. He dabbles in everything and has a good understanding of how it all has to work together.

Is his car better than Pat's cars? That's a question that I'm afraid I can't answer.

I think the results over any of the seasons that you can compare say there isn't much difference. Fernando Alonso was usually able to put together some good results in one of Fry's cars even when Red Bull was dominating.

It's never one person that makes or breaks a team, and I hope that Ferrari has learned that with its management changes.

In the past it always seemed to need to find someone to blame. That culture hopefully has now gone and it's realised that it just needs to keep making the team stronger.

If there is an area where it's weak, then find someone to strengthen that area. Don't - as it has done on many occasions - keep throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Why, with today's technology, can't track-limits rules be enforced? Could there not be some kind of detection both on the car and track edge at certain points? If the car goes past this, then it registers at race control and time penalties/drive-throughs are applied? Arian Torry, via email

Arian, I agree with you completely. There are sensors in the floors of the cars for the jump-start system, so I'm sure with very little change to these, and with sensors added to the tracks, the car's location could be electronically monitored.

Road car manufacturers' plans for a driverless future shows what technology is out there. If F1 doesn't do this for track limits, then it is turning its back on current technology.

You ran Ralf Schumacher at Jordan in 1997. Was he just signed because of his surname, or was he genuinely a good driver in his own right?
Mark Amos, via email

Mark, Ralf was a good driver in his own right. His biggest problem was that his second name was Schumacher.

His brother was not only a good driver, he was a great driver. We also ran him in his first, very short, grand prix and I can assure you even in that brief time his quality stood out.

It's a bit like keeping up with the Joneses - sometimes it just can't be done and that was Ralf's biggest problem: he wanted to keep up with his brother, but in reality he was four to five years behind Michael and, good as he was, he just didn't have that last bit.

He was a good person, if a bit cocky, but then that's something that he probably got from his brother. What he didn't realise was that his brother had a right to be a bit cocky, whereas he should have just knuckled down and got on with the job and been his own man.

We hear a lot about the value of experience. From a technical perspective, how much better is it working with experienced drivers rather than rookies?
Lawrence Anderson, via email

Lawrence, as technology has increased experience is not so important. Many years ago when the only data system you had was an O-ring around the damper shaft to see how much the car was moving, experience was everything. But today, by just looking at the data the engineer will actually be able to tell the driver if he has understeer or oversteer.

I really enjoyed working with inexperienced drivers. Michael Schumacher, Alex Zanardi, Rubens Barrichello, Eddie Irvine (pictured), Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella were all new to F1 when they came to us at Jordan, and all of them were a pleasure to work with. They only knew how to give it their all - they would drive the wheels off the car and if we gave them the tools to do the job, they came back with the results.

Others that came from bigger teams always wanted to make something out of our cars that we didn't know how to achieve. If we did, we'd have done it already. Sometimes, even for an experienced driver, it's better to buy into what you have and get the best from it, as opposed to chasing something that's just not going to happen.

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