Ask Tim: Where does "embarrassed" Ferrari go from here?

What are the things Ferrari needs to improve from a technical standpoint?

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Where to start! Sebastian Vettel said his Ferrari felt "unrecognisable" during the Austrian Grand Prix, but I don't think that the car handling is bad. Clearly, its struggles are down to the whole approach to the aerodynamics, added to the fact it has obviously lost a bit of engine performance from last year through its skulduggery...

Mattia Binotto has admitted that Ferrari has taken the wrong philosophy on its aero packaging with some correlation problems from the design office to the track and, as a result, it is going to bring a completely different car to Budapest. There's such a fine line between getting it right and not, and obviously Ferrari has got it wrong. It's the little details that make all the difference, as we've seen with Mercedes bringing a raft of changes to Austria when it already had a quick car in testing.

Binotto said that the layoff period meant Ferrari wasn't able to understand the problems it was facing, but I just feel that Ferrari has taken its eye off the ball. It has had plenty of time since Barcelona to look at what Mercedes has done, but we're now three months down the line and it's still in the same position.

We'll know more about the extent of its problems if the big upgrade package doesn't work in Budapest, but you would have thought it would at least bring some bits to try in Austria. A team with the technical capability of Ferrari must have been able to produce something to bring to the first race, so that was a big surprise to me.

To now be fast-tracking parts for the second Austrian race this weekend in my mind shows how much it is panicking and embarrassed with its performance. In the eyes of the Italian press, it is failing, and although Ferrari CEO Louis Camilleri has voiced his support for the team, it is bound to be feeling the heat.

Ferrari was lucky that Charles Leclerc managed to get P2 on Sunday - it was only the multiple safety cars that gave him that chance. Just imagine what it would have been like in Melbourne had the race gone ahead: the red cars would have been woefully slow.

Would the lack of substantial running from the end of testing until mid-late June have an impact on reliability?

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I can't remember the last time we had nine retirements from a Formula 1 race, even if it was the first race of the season, but I don't believe that the lay-off would have caused any more unreliability than we would have had otherwise if the first race had been in Melbourne.

Most of the cars ran pretty reliably in Barcelona, even if there was the odd engine hiccup, but the cooling issues and problems with sensors I think are circuit-specific. As I said in my column, the teams must have been aware of the problems that running over the kerbs can cause from last year, and in fact the Red Bull Ring has even improved some of the kerbs to help teams that were light on spares.

PLUS: Tim Wright: Safety cars saved a boring Austrian GP

As Andrew Shovlin said, this is something that especially for any Mercedes runners is causing them sensor problems which affects all sorts of things, not just the gearbox. There are so many sensors on F1 cars so if you're getting any electrical interference between different types of sensor, then you could be looking at all sorts of failures. For example, sensors on the gearbox will sense where the barrel is and which gear it's supposed to be selecting next.

Why were the Mercedes sensors not designed to handle the bumps found at many tracks throughout the season?

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I don't think Mercedes has particularly left itself open to this through any design fault. It really depends which sensors we're talking about and where they are positioned, but they are obviously affected more by vibration than they should be.

It could be that they're hard-mounted, which would lead you to suspect that they will get affected by vibration and it's then very difficult to put them in a place where they're going to be efficient and still do the job without being affected by the bumps.

Lance Stroll's problem in the race was an engine problem rather than a gearbox problem from what I understand, so that's probably another sensor which has been affected by the same thing as the Mercedes cars had. It's so difficult to tell because there are so many sensors on an F1 car, but it's a bit odd that there's interference between different elements of the electronics.

What do you think happened with Raikkonen's wheel-nut? The pit stop seemed to go smoothly, so was it the kerbs?

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If Kimi's wheel was cross-threaded, why didn't the wheel gun operator know?

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The biggest surprise to me was that the unloaded wheel came off. He'd already gone around a right-hander and it was in between the two right-handers leading onto the start/finish straight, which suggests it wasn't anything to do with the kerbs. The wheel-nut just didn't go on sufficiently, but I would have thought that Raikkonen should be able to feel that going through a left-hander.

The FIA report said that the wheel nut had been cross-threaded, but in that case, he'd have felt the wheel wobbling. It's a very strange one, but obviously the wheel nut came off at some stage which then allowed the wheel to depart. I don't think it was put on properly in the first place.

It's unusual in this day and age that they got it wrong. Most of the time now the nuts are actually attached to the wheel, but as we saw with Haas last year in Australia, finger problems in this area can still happen.

What was the deal with Haas's brakes over the weekend? Grosjean lost them in practice, and then they both lost them during the race. The VF-20 looked horrendous to drive. Mostly due to unstable braking?

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I really don't understand how teams can have braking problems nowadays. There is so much expertise coming from disc and brake manufacturers that they shouldn't still be having problems. If you've got AP or Brembo or somebody as a supplier, then you just take their advice and go along with it.

Guenther Steiner said Haas doesn't know why the braking issue came up, but for it to keep on losing the pedal, there may be a design problem with the whole system. Kevin Magnussen's failure wasn't that long into the race, so he shouldn't have worn out the brakes unless he was running excessively forward bias, but the engineers would have picked that one up. Romain Grosjean seems to have been having brake problems every year with the team and I just don't understand that, this far on the team should be on top of that.

I wouldn't have thought that there will be anything Haas can do to fix it in the short gap between races, unless it already has something in the pipeline and if it were a cooling problem, I'm sure it would have identified that before now.

But even if it means taking a hit aerodynamically by increasing the front and rear brake cooling, you have to do it just for the sake of the driver's confidence. If the drivers don't have confidence in the fact that the car is going to stop, then how can you expect them to wring the last bit of performance out of the car? It's absolutely crazy.

Could Alex Albon's failure have been initiated by his contact with Hamilton? It was a large hit on his rear axle...

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I wouldn't have thought so, it was really only touching his rear-wheel that sent him off so I'd be surprised if it was anything related to that. There's a variety of scenarios there which you can look at.

Maybe again sensor problems could have been the cause, but I don't think the touching of the two cars would have given him a problem with the engine, unless somehow the engine over-revved with him trying to get it back on track. He could have picked up stones from the gravel that affected something but that would be pretty unlucky.

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