What to expect from the F1 2017 arms race

What is the scope of part developments for Ferrari and Mercedes in Spain?
@gujjublackadder, via Twitter

As I said in my column last week, when you're near the top of the ladder the last steps become more difficult. For both Mercedes and Ferrari, finding those last few tenths of a second won't be easy.

It's all about recognising your current problems and trying to address them, as opposed to just trying to develop blindly. Without a sense of priorities, it's very easy to make a small problem into a bigger one.

Ferrari needs to look at finding that last two or three tenths of a second on new tyres for qualifying, while not throwing away the characteristics that allow it to encounter less tyre degradation over the long runs.

To achieve this, I would be looking at front-wing stall characteristics. For qualifying, you want the front wing to stall less when it is near the ground during braking and corner entry.

You need the front-end bite to make the best of the new tyres, and, since you can alter the front wing angle before the race, you need a setting that will introduce more of a stall to protect the rear tyres for the longer runs. Forget having more or less front downforce, it's the aerodynamic characteristics you need to focus on.

For Mercedes, I would be looking at why it overloads the rear tyres on long runs. It is working the rear tyre too hard on corner entry, and whatever it came up with during the Bahrain test seems to have put a bandage on this problem. But it comes at the expense of overall car performance - especially for Hamilton, judging by what happened in Russia.

The development trajectory is more or less the same as Ferrari, in that it must focus on rebalancing an already quick car's performance attributes; in this case, keeping the speed and finding a setting for the race that reduces the load on the rear tyres.

In Russia, we saw that the left-front tyres were blistering quite badly on the inner shoulder. This wasn't really a problem, other than being disconcerting for the drivers because it was happening within their field of vision.

It was caused by the long left-hand Turn 3. The load there is all on the right-front tyre, but when the car is rolled with the cornering forces, the left-front is being dragged around with more or less no load on it. The inside 5cm or so gets very hot and the rubber basically boils.

How significant is the difference between the wheelbase of the Mercedes and the Ferrari, and do the regulations allow that to be changed in season?
Vinayak Pande, via Twitter

Mercedes has openly said that its car, which has a longer wheelbase than the Ferrari, is actually overweight. The weight penalty on a typical track is roughly 0.3s per 10kg, which is a big one to pay for something when Ferrari has shown the alternative is still a competitive car.

As with everything in life, a racing car's concept is a compromise and a longer wheelbase will definitely have an influence from track to track.

A longer wheelbase will be more lazy to drive and should be easier on tyres in long, fast corners. A shorter wheelbase will be more responsive, especially in slow-to-medium-speed corners.

The Mercedes package has been very successful over the past few years. If you just want to reflect that, then working on the basis that the car's tyre contact-patch width has increased by something like 8% to achieve the same aspect ratio of width to length of your current car, increasing the wheelbase by the same amount should give you the same mechanical balance characteristics.

It also helps to move the front wheels away from the sidepod leading edge, allowing the greater volume of dirty air from the bigger front tyres more space to be managed.

The problem with a longer car is that it will be heavier, and it will also be more difficult to achieve the same chassis stiffness without adding more weight.

The big question is what is the difference between a long wheelbase and a short wheelbase? This 8% I talked about on a current car is roughly 25cm, so that's a significant amount.

From the drivers' comments on the 2016 car, Ferrari probably thought its wheelbase was long enough so decided to manage that airflow around the wider front tyres by creating that intricate bargeboard arrangement it has on this year's car.

Because of its recent success, Mercedes probably thought it could maintain its position, or even improve further, with a longer wheelbase.

Designing an F1 car and its potential success is all about the decisions made at least six months before the car first sits on the ground.

You can change a car's wheelbase within the regulations. When the cars initially got narrower and grooved tyres were introduced in 1998, nearly all of the teams, including us at Jordan, brought in development packages that altered the wheelbase.

This was achieved through different suspension layouts, either front or rear or a combination of the both.

Can Red Bull make up the gap with what some are calling a 'new' car in Spain?
Katy Smith, via email

It must do if it is to have any chance of fighting Mercedes or Ferrari for either of the championships.

You could argue that Red Bull is in a position where, if it just keeps its head down and spends wisely, third place in the constructors' championship is assured. There are plenty of teams who would be very happy with that. But Red Bull's sights are set much higher.

Team principal Christian Horner keeps talking about the low-drag configuration that it decided to adopt for 2017. When Red Bull was winning everything from 2010 to 2013, it had one of the highest-drag cars in the pitlane. But with that came lots of downforce.

It was able to qualify on pole and disappear into the distance before the others woke up. Surely an organisation like Red Bull doesn't change such a fundamentally winning formula overnight?

I know Red Bull hasn't got the most powerful power unit in the pitlane, but back in its years of dominance, the Renault V8 wasn't the most powerful either. It was just pretty good at everything: reasonable power, good fuel consumption, light and easy to cool. That's a good all-round package.

The car I saw in pre-season testing wasn't as well-refined as the Mercedes or the Ferrari. I said then it didn't have that 'wow' factor where you look at components and think that they are optimised and well-integrated.

This is what made the Red Bull through its winning years. Red Bull set the standard in aerodynamic complexity and optimisation, but it seems to have lost that lately. If it is going to start challenging at the front, Red Bull needs to find it again and quickly.

Max Verstappen is a future world champion. If Red Bull wants that to happen in one of its cars, it needs to show fairly quickly that it is capable of supplying tools to do the job.

With Kimi Raikkonen's contract expiring at the end of 2017, Ferrari might just be on the phone. I know he has a Red Bull contract, but that's just a piece of paper.

What do you make of the Sauber-Honda engine deal? It can't be a good thing for the worst team on the grid to partner with the worst engine, can it?
David Jones, via email

On face value, it is a very difficult thing to understand, but for both it could be good.

I'm pretty sure Sauber will have got a reasonable deal financially and Honda is not going to stand still. As soon as it can alight upon the required development direction, Honda will deliver - and, with the pressure it's under this year, no stone is going to be left unturned. So 2018 could be Honda's year.

Honda gets another team from which to obtain data. We also need to remember that the relationship with McLaren is fairly strained at the moment, so if another manufacturer were to offer McLaren a sensible deal, they would walk pretty quickly and leave Honda with a massive investment and no-one to run it.

Sauber's deal with Ferrari to run one-year-old engines was probably a good idea at the time, but it is probably more of a pain for Ferrari than if it were supplying the current units.

Also, since Ferrari now has Haas using its engine package - as well as being a technical partner and potentially a 'B' team - that is an easier relationship to manage.

I want to see tyre blankets outlawed in F1. These guys are supposed to be the best in the world, right? Would you ban them?
Geordie Pugh, via Twitter

I agree with you, tyre blankets should be banned and then we would potentially see strategy calls being made differently.

Currently, we hear a lot about undercut and overcut strategy calls, but they are all dependent on being able to get back out on the track with fresh tyres and immediately put the hammer down.

If the tyres needed to be nursed to get back up to temperature, then it would alter all this. It would also put more pressure and responsibility on the drivers to manage the increasing tyre grip to its maximum without making a mistake.

The argument for banning tyre warmers was to save money. Most teams will have upwards of 30 sets of tyre blankets all wrapped around tyres ready to go.

The argument against banning them is that if you don't have heated tyres, you need to do a lap or maybe two to get the tyres working, and that will cost more money than the outlay for the tyre blankets alone.

These arguments miss the point. Not having them will bring more potential for mistakes during pitstops and when getting up to speed. That should create another variable influencing race results.

There is probably a middle ground, which will allow each team a maximum of, say, three sets of blankets per car, which can be used for the three free practice sessions. But no tyre blankets would then be used for qualifying and the race.

What are the factors that influence degradation of tyres - why is a track like Sochi so low deg?
John Burt, via email

The Sochi track has a very smooth surface and the grip level is very low, so the load in the tyre is a lot less than at somewhere like Barcelona.

At a track like Sochi, there is potential for a lot more wheelspin. The drivers and teams have to manage this because a car that's spinning its wheels isn't going anywhere.

When you have a grippy surface, the tyre has the grip to allow a lot more torque to be put through it. With that, the tyre surface temperature builds up and overheats the rubber, which leads to less grip. The driver then needs to reduce the load on the tyre, which costs them lap time.

The tyre wears more, and as the rubber thickness is reduced the tyre will start to lose heat on the straights. When it gets down to a certain level, there isn't the mass of rubber to contain the heat. This is what the driver calls "falling off a cliff" and the lap times plummet.

What is the biggest turnaround you have seen in performance from a car you have been involved in and why?
Keith Clark, via email

I suppose the biggest turnaround that I was partly involved in was with the 1998 Jordan-Mugen Honda.

When we started the season, we just weren't competitive enough to get anywhere near scoring points, but by Spa the team finished first and second. Yes, it was a wet race, but from the British GP, when we started to introduce the fruits of our early season developments, plus engine upgrades, the car started to come alive and the drivers started to get confidence in it.

We used a Peugeot engine from 1995-1997. Over three years with Peugeot, we worked very closely to develop and by the end of '97, other than being a bit thirsty, it was probably as good as any. For 1998, we changed the engine.

When we started running the car, we discovered the Mugen-Honda engine was nowhere near as powerful as what we were used to with Peugeot. Also, the car didn't meet its design objectives. Not only that, but our drivers Ralf Schumacher and Damon Hill just felt that it was nasty to drive and very unpredictable.

I set about trying to convince Honda that the engine was not up to what was required. This was no easy task, and I say Honda here because the engine was actually built by Honda and serviced in Europe under the banner of Mugen-Honda, but with Honda personnel.

I spent four months having meetings before the penny finally dropped with Honda, but after that it made progress on a race-by-race basis. After my experience with Honda, I can feel for McLaren, but once Honda have grasped the right direction for development then they have the means to join the big boys very quickly.

From the car point of view, we had done everything you would expect. It was lighter than its predecessor (so it could carry more strategically placed ballast), stiffer, more efficient and had more downforce. That should have added up to a step forwards. Wrong.

On track, none of that came to the fore. We had an underlying problem that we didn't understand or expect.

We started researching in directions we had not done in the past and found a strange shift in the centre of pressure (the area of the chassis where the aero load is concentrated) when the drivers were applying steering lock.

This took time to understand, but we came up with some new sidepods, front-wing endplates and bargeboards that altered the characteristics of the car when the steering lock was applied.

This update didn't have more overall downforce, it just changed how the centre of pressure shifted. This, combined with a new engine specification from Honda, was fitted to the car for the British GP. Ralf went from the back of the grid (after his qualifying time was taken away because he couldn't pull his legs back while sitting in the car) to score our first points of '98.

The race was wet, and Damon spun off, but both drivers felt the car was allowing them to drive it as opposed to it driving them.

Which engine would you choose?
Richard Bell, via email

It would be very difficult to look past what Mercedes has produced, but it's not always what the eye can see that gives performance.

Since these new regulations came into play in 2014, everyone has been trying to catch up with the standards set by Mercedes. It's not any one thing that makes it superior, it is in the detail of how everything works as one. Ferrari seems to have more or less got there now, but it has taken three years. I still think Mercedes has that little bit left when it needs to turn the engine up for qualifying.

When you consider we have a V6 engine with a single turbocharger on it, which also powers the MGU-H, the turbo size is not a simple call. If it was only for the engine then that's one thing, but it has to do two functions.

The splitting of the compressor side from the turbine side of the turbo is again another feature that I expect does more than the casual observer can see.

Then there is the storage and, more importantly, the deployment of the energy that is created. In this area, I believe Mercedes has the upper hand.