Bottas and Button can solve Mercedes' driver problem

What do you think of Nico Rosberg's decision to retire, and who would you pick to replace him at Mercedes?
Ben Smith, via email

I must say, I was a bit surprised but after the race in Abu Dhabi he looked like he had had a very stressful weekend, or stressful few weekends, and his release wasn't just joy and emotion - it was relief.

He has a wife and young family that he adores and travelling around the world constantly doesn't give the time or opportunity to experience that properly. He has enough cash in the bank not to have to set the alarm for too early in the morning.

Rosberg has succeeded in what he set out to do and the chance of him doing it again in the next two or three years is probably less than 50%.

Don't get me wrong, he is a very deserving world champion and would be very competitive, but against Lewis Hamilton and with a new set of regulations to get your head around, it would not be easy to repeat this year's success.

As for who should replace him, Valtteri Bottas is the man. Mercedes needs to get him out of his Williams contract to do this. So what does Williams do? How about getting Jenson Button to come back to do another year as a mentor for young Lance Stroll?

With this solution everyone wins. We would finally see Bottas in a race-winning car and he will not take too much rubbish from Hamilton. A Mercedes-engined Williams would be great for Button and he would help Stroll find his feet.

Some have a theory Mercedes will quit Formula 1 after 2018. It already has a Formula E entry. New paradigm? What do you think?
@eggry, via Twitter

Who knows. I am sure Mercedes will quit sometime in the near future but I don't think it will do it for Formula E. The difference in the level of these two formulas is like night and day.

Mercedes has done a fantastic job and it could get a lot out of promotion from its hybrid ERS units. The main problem is that none of the promoters, FIA or FOM or the manufacturers Mercedes, Renault, Ferrari or Honda, are actually doing anything to promote the fantastic achievement that they have all brought to the show with this technology.

The French Grand Prix looks like it's going to come back in 2018. When you are working in F1, do you care much about where the track is located and the circuit itself? And do you have any good memories of the French GP?
Marcus Turner, via email

During my time in F1, the French GP was at Paul Ricard, Dijon and Magny-Cours. For me, it didn't really matter as long as the facility was up to the right standard.

The trip from the Paul Ricard circuit down the mountain to Bandol was always an experience. It was a challenge trying to do it that little bit faster.

And at Dijon one year, we were a bit disgusted with the toilets, so late one night we made an oxygen and acetylene bomb - basically lit a welding torch, stubbed it out and put the gas into a dustbin bag, then hung a broken bulb into it with a long wire coming out of the bag.

The toilets were twin devices sitting on a two or three step concrete base. We put the dustbin bag down one of these toilets with the wire back to the truck, touched it down to a battery and bang up she went.

The only problem was that while we were getting organised, someone went into the toilet next door. You can imagine the scene as we were standing there congratulating ourselves when whoever this was came flying out of the toilet with his trousers around his knees thinking 'I wish I hadn't had that curry last night'.

You have pointed out repeatedly how it is possible for teams such as Ferrari or McLaren to squander big budgets, but what about the reverse? If Force India added $100million to its budget, how could it spend that money to improve? Becoming a championship contender may be out of reach, but perhaps getting back to the Jordan days when an occasional win was a possibility?
Al Gordon, via email

Al, Force India does a very good job at getting the best bang for its buck. But I am sure things would be a bit easier if it had an extra $10million - and I am sure the team would be able to put that directly into car performance.

However, if the golden goose was to lay one of its very special eggs and Force India woke up in the morning with an extra $100million, the company would have to completely restructure itself. In doing so, it would probably lose itself for two or three years at least.

It's not the big budget that would help a team like Force India move forward, it's consistency of budget. This would allow it to plan things that little bit longer term.

I'm sure if you ask anyone there, if the choice was between a one-off lump sum of $100million or $10m a year for the next 10 years, they would go for the latter.

I was reading about how Herbie Blash worked on the Yamaha engine project in 1992, so presumably you worked with him. What was he like to work with and did you manage to make much progress on surely one of your favourite engines...
Phil Retsas, via email

I have known Herbie since my first days in professional motorsport. He was team manager of the Brabham Formula 3 and Formula 2 team, which I did a couple of races with at the end of 1972 and beginning of '73.

I then moved on to the F1 team and it wasn't long after that when Herbie took on the responsibility of F1 team manager.

He was a pleasure to work with in those days and we had a lot of fun. But that's when F1 was fun.

Obviously, his responsibilities with Yamaha made things a little different, but he maintained a sense of humour through difficult times.

Yamaha had one purpose for being in F1, and that was as a marketing tool to sell its proposed F1 sportscar. It wasn't really a Yamaha effort, more of a garden shed operation attached to the main Yamaha building in Japan.

The chance of it ever working to the level required to be competitive in F1 was non-existent. It was basically a ship's anchor.

Saying that, there was the odd time when an actual competitive engine would appear. The problem was that no one knew why. As reliability was always a problem, such engines never lasted long.

We even had fresh replacements seize on the car stands before they ever saw the light of day.

We are always being told an F1 car could run upside down in a tunnel because of the downforce. So how come cars still aquaplane?
Alan Baulch, via email

Yes, an F1 car could run upside down. At around 190km/h (118mph), it could support its own weight.

The aquaplaning is something very different. This is when the tyres just can't cope and ride on top of the water running across the track.

Tyre aquaplaning has been around since the wheel was invented. A rotating wheel will always try to ride on top of a wet surface, but the tyre tread is designed to pump the water from the centre of the tyre to the outside.

The more downforce, the less aquaplaning but it will still happen and as tyres get wider, the bigger the problem will be. So if you thought this year was bad, just wait until next year with the wider tyres.

In the Bridgestone days, we had exactly the same problem, if not worse. To cope with this, Bridgestone was actually forced by FOM and the FIA to bring an intermediate, a wet and a monsoon tyre to some races.

The other problem is if the car is too low to the ground, the water film on the surface of the track actually reduces the ride height and effectively increases the ground effect. This sucks the car down to the track and usually happens on the front axle as it's much lower than the rear. So it's ineffective in increasing the front grip, and forces the car into oversteer.

Nothing's new. People in F1 are just getting better at moaning about things like this.

How will the 2017 increase in downforce impact the issue with dirty/turbulent air? Will following/overtaking be harder?
Andrew Tyrrell, via Twitter

There is a good argument to say that downforce produced from the underbody - or as it's known 'ground effect' - is less critical to turbulence. The underbody is working like an expanding duct with the opposing surface being the ground. Because of the changing ride heights it has to cope with, its design needs to be fairly robust.

It should be better in turbulence than a wing that has had its surfaces optimised to work in clean, non-turbulent airflow. All that said, if the front wing stalls it will cause havoc to everything downstream, so the underbody will suffer. It's all in the design.

As for the second part of your question, more downforce and more tyre grip will give more overall grip in both low and high-speed corners. This will decrease braking distances, increase corner entry, mid-corner and exit speeds. All of these will make overtaking more difficult.

So I'm afraid someone forgot to engage their brain before they opened their mouth when they came up with this change in regulations.

Nobody ever talks about wheelrims in F1. What are they made of, is there any advantage or disadvantage in terms of materials, weight etc? How have they changed over the years?
David Stevens, via email

The current rims are machined from an aluminium spinning, or in some cases a pressed forging.

Weight is important and everyone pushes to minimise the unsprung weight, which the wheel is part of. The stiffness of the wheel is even more important, as if it deflects it reduces the forces being put through the tyre, so stiffness-to-weight ratio is a compromise.

Over the years, there have been many different solutions worked on, from fibre-reinforced aluminium to carbonfibre. But the FIA did step in and, on safety grounds, introduced a regulation to try to control the stupid spending of some of the bigger teams.

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