Ask Tim: How Hungary put the emphasis back on F1's rank and file

How did Red Bull manage to coordinate that repair job so quickly?

kirraann98 via Instagram

I only turned the TV on at the time the mechanics were already working on the car on the grid, so I actually missed all the run-up to it. But from what I understand, the team had a portable X-ray machine to scan all the bits and work out whether any of the parts were beyond saving.

It's very rare that Formula 1 mechanics actually get to show off their skills in a time-sensitive situation on a race weekend. Normally, any incident of that magnitude in the race itself will mean the car has to be retired, and crashes like that in practice would similarly result in the car being brought back to the pits to be repaired between sessions behind-closed doors. So from that perspective, Max Verstappen was fortunate that it happened on the way to the grid, as embarrassing as that undoubtedly was for him.

And while the team probably would have preferred it if that work hadn't been necessary, it gave the mechanics a chance to show what they can really do when the pressure is on. In rallying, or in endurance racing, the speed with which they can enact repairs can be crucial to the outcome of an event, but in F1, about the only opportunity the mechanics get to influence things is by speedy pitwork.

Red Bull was very quick in that regard too in Hungary, but typically the work done in pitstops only tends to get noticed if it is particularly bad, or results in an incident like the one that happened to Nicholas Latifi when he was sent out into the path of Carlos Sainz Jr.

In this case, Red Bull had the opportunity to show how well it is set up and the protocols in place it has to deal with eventualities like this which doesn't happen very often. I know sporting director Jonathan Wheatley (below) very well from his time at Renault and I know that he would have that team really on its toes.

You've got to have the spares readily at hand and make sure that any changes to the pushrod don't affect things like ride-heights, which the team will have spent all of Friday fine-tuning.

Track-rods are a little bit more difficult, but again it must have been a set length and it's the spares coordinator's job to make sure that whatever the spare is corresponds to exactly what's on the car.

While the mechanics doing the work did a fantastic job, it's the back-up that is the most important part. You could see that the chief mechanic was calling the shots, getting the bits that they needed and so on.

It's true that the engineers tend to get all the glory, where there's one race engineer who is that bit more recognisable at the forefront of running the car - like Pete Bonnington at Mercedes - there are just so many of the mechanics that it's hard to single one out in particular. But they did a fantastic job and Max was actually very good on the radio saying what a fantastic job they'd done. And quite right too.

Do you think Mercedes made the right call in bringing Valtteri Bottas in for a third pitstop and putting him on the hard tyres?

lvn1224 via Instagram

I think Mercedes made the right call to bring him in again as he was stuck in traffic and the team actually got him out into really clear space. He wasn't making enough progress, so why not put him on a different set of tyres and let him have a go? After all, he was setting fastest laps afterwards on the hard tyres, so I think it was a good enough call.

I don't think it would have made Bottas any more likely to get past Verstappen if Mercedes had put him onto a set of mediums instead of the hards. He was quite comfortable on the hards - he was never going to do the times Lewis Hamilton managed on the softs at the end but he was still doing a good job, just not quite good enough to clear Verstappen on a tight, twisty circuit. Still, Hamilton did it last year...

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Mercedes doesn't make these decisions lightly, it put the ball in his court with fresh tyres and clear air with the expectation that he would have been able to manage it. We should consider too that Bottas was lucky to be in podium contention at all, given his start. Without that, Mercedes certainly would have had another 1-2. But how he didn't get penalised for jumping the start, I don't understand!

Assuming the tyre compound rule wasn't in effect because of the wet start, why did nobody run medium-medium?

Leon_lanz via Instagram

I think a lot of it depends on the length of the stint you want to run. Obviously a lot of people at the start ran the medium - it was only Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Antonio Giovinazzi and Daniil Kvyat who were put on the soft and that was a huge mistake - but the medium wasn't ever going to do two stints, whereas the hard you could bet on lasting to get to the end of the race.

The teams would have information from practice on how long the mediums would go before they started having a problem, probably with the left-front, so I think it would have been a gamble if anybody had tried to go medium-medium.

To me, Ferrari's decision to gamble everything on it raining within the life-span of the soft tyre was symptomatic of where the team is at the moment, it keeps making the wrong decisions. That was a terrible call and Leclerc was almost immediately on the radio asking 'why did you put me on these tyres'. But even at the end of the race he was still complaining about the balance of the car so I don't think it would have mattered which tyres they put him on.

When can we expect to see Ferrari to start competing for a podium on merit?

faisalrahhal via Instagram

The Ferraris were better on their qualifying effort than they have been the last two races, but I can't see the situation really improving until next year. I don't think it can recover before the end of the year. It has tried basic updates on the car and now completed a race distance with both cars to evaluate those updates, but it's still being found wanting, so to recover from this is going to take a huge amount of effort, almost re-designing the car.

PLUS: Why the jury's still out on Ferrari's updates - and may be for some time

The way that the races are going to come fast and furious, I don't think there will be the time for make the changes it needs to get back to the front, and I doubt that the token system is going to make an awful lot of difference for it to recover that lost performance.

You can use up tokens for all sorts of things, engine performance and so on, but the FIA's technical directive has hit all of the Ferrari engine runners so hard that it's going to need a major rethink. Of course next year won't be a total redesign but there will be changes to the floors and things like that. With two races at Silverstone coming up, then Monza and Spa, I think Ferrari is going to really suffer.

Do you have any insight as to what 'anomalies' could be causing the problems for the Red Bull car? Is it maybe their extreme rake design being pushed past its limits starting to cause issues?

suvesh_misra via Instagram

No, I don't think so. There are quite a few teams that have gone the same route, but I can't help feeling that there is something that has gone wrong at the front end of the car. Both drivers have complained in practice about front-end performance and can't seem to predict what the level of grip is going to be.

It has added these long strakes underneath and changed the front geometry with an articulated pushrod to lower the front when the drivers put on lock. But from what I saw in Barcelona, it is exacerbated by the way the steering hook is arranged. It's a little bit like the Citroen 2CV does when it leans the wheel over, so it may be that it's gone too far with that.

The amazing thing to me was, from qualifying to the race, it was like it had a different car. Both drivers could push a lot harder in race trim than they had in practice and qualifying, but I read somewhere that they broke curfew to try and find out what was going wrong with the car, so they obviously hit upon something.

What are the mechanics doing to the front wing during pitstops? How does it help?

desh.ganesh via Instagram

They'll be either adding flap angle or taking it off, depending on what the driver will be reporting - 'I've got too much understeer or too much oversteer' - and they will know between one set of tyres what changes they need to make to help.

The way flaps are arranged on F1 cars now, it's just got a little screw and then it's a quarter of a turn that adds a degree of flap, so it's purely changing the aero balance for that particular tyre or whatever the driver is feeling. It's not an exact science, but can make quite a big change just a little bit more or a little bit less front wing.

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