Why rivals should shut up about Bottas's 'jump start'

Valtteri Bottas's not-a-jump-start was the biggest talking point after the Austrian Grand Prix, certainly for Sebastian Vettel. But he did nothing wrong and the others were asleep, so his rivals should get over it.

The speed of light is almost 300 million metres per second. The lights are, by definition, a light source and the distance from the front of the grid to the back could be around 200 metres or so. In reality, that means zero difference in time, so it is all about human reactions.

The teams will (or should) have supplied each of their drivers with a startline simulation light box kit. They should have this at home to practice their reactions to the lights going out. It will function exactly the same as the real thing, the only difference being the lower stress level of your lounge compared with that of the F1 grid.

One of the tests we used to do was a simple one involving dropping a ruler. We had drivers that were really good at it and others who were, let's say, less good! Giancarlo Fisichella was terrible. When I worked in Indycars, we had Geoff Brabham driving and his reaction time was fantastic. Pressing a stopwatch button twice, on then off, he could regularly do it in 0.04s while all others were in excess of 0.1s.

The way the system works on an F1 car is that there is a sensor embedded in the track at each grid position and there is a sensor in the bottom of the car. When a car arrives on the grid it can vary a little in position, so at some point during the light sequence, the sensor is zeroed.

There will always be a movement tolerance on this zeroing to allow for the car to jump that little bit when the driver puts it into gear. Otherwise, more or less everyone would get done for a jump start every race weekend. Let's say that tolerance is 10cm, that plus a reaction time will be the minimum acceptable time from lights out to car movement.

So if the driver gets it just right and engages the clutch just as the lights go out, it is possible to see car movement right at that crucial time. But if the car hasn't travelled outside of its movement tolerance then it is fine. Bottas is a driver who doesn't seem to get stressed, and he aced it. It's as simple as that.

We also saw the consequences of a poor start for both Carlos Sainz Jr and Max Verstappen. They were slow off the line and, as you would expect from any driver worth his weight in gold, when an opening offers itself to you, you have got to give it a shot.

That's exactly what Fernando Alonso did at the start. On the run up to Turn 1, he made up a few places. Daniil Kvyat did exactly the same but the big thing is to bring it back under control and hold on to the advantage generated by that opportunism. Kvyat failed to do that, locked up and wiped out Alonso, who in turn took out Verstappen.

In the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the severity of penalties being dictated by the consequences of the action rather than just the action itself. I am all for consistency in penalties - if they are consistent then they can be reviewed, but when each one is purely random then how can the overall penalty system ever be reviewed?

Surely this incident was very similar to what Romain Grosjean did at Spa a few years ago. He got a one-race ban for that, whereas Kvyat got a drive-through penalty and not even a stop/go like Sebastian Vettel did in Baku.

While I'm on about penalties, there is a lot of talk about engine and gearbox penalties and how the driver suffers when, in reality, it was put into place in an attempt to control costs and the driver has no control of 99.9% of these failures anyway.

We all want to see the top drivers competing against each other. When grid penalties come into play, it detracts from the spectacle. Taking away constructors' points would be a much more reasonable idea. But it would need to be set out as a percentage. After all, 10 points for a new turbo makes a big difference to teams in the midfield or at the back, but a much smaller difference to the dominant teams.

Ten percent, or similar, would be a fairer penalty and would allow the drivers to get on with the job of racing. My suggestion would be that if power unit components were replaced beyond the allocated amount, the penalties should be:

Complete power unit - 10%
Engine - 2%
Turbo - 2%
MGU-H - 2%
MGU-K - 2%
Energy Store - 2%
Control electronics - 2%

The gearbox should be a 10% penalty if replaced earlier than it should be. All of these figures would be rounded up to the nearest full point.

The above percentages are just a rough guide. It would all need a bit of working out, but as the season progresses the penalty get would higher so it could also make for an interesting end to the year.

The Red Bull Ring is an intriguing circuit because it is so short, and it has a mix of slow, medium and high-speed corners - all of which, at some point around the lap, lead onto reasonable straights. So each and every one of them is vitally important to achieve a decent lap time.

Once again the big three - Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull - have shown they are well ahead of the midfield. Haas put up a good fight, but when push came to shove the gaps between the haves and have-nots showed. Romain Grosjean was absolutely right when he said after finishing sixth, "we won Formula 1 Grand Prix 2".

Corner entry on the brakes and good traction is important into and out of the slower corners and the middle and last section responds well to downforce.

When I talk about aerodynamic set-up compromise, it's all about the level of downforce, and hence drag, you try to run on the car. More downforce and the car will be better and more stable into, around and out of all corners. But you will be slower on the straights. The driver will always love that extra grip, but if the compromise is too much one way then the lap time will not be there.

If you were to get the compromise way out, it would be like running Monaco downforce at Monza, which the drivers would love, or Monza downforce in Monaco, which the drivers would hate. But in either condition, the lap time would be way off.

The reason I am harping on about this is that I would love to see McLaren hanging it out there just that little bit more. McLaren is always going on about how good the car is and how its Honda power deficit is destroying the team's competitiveness, but the rear wing on the car was by no means the smallest in the pitlane.

Trim the car out that bit more, make it more of a white knuckle ride - at least until Honda has a chance to catch up. I'm not saying Honda is not at fault, just that there is maybe a step that would make the McLaren chassis look a little more of a handful. I'm sure Alonso could live with a bit more of a rollercoaster ride than he currently has.

Talking of rollercoasters, track limits come to mind. How does the casual viewer get any understanding of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. Casual viewers probably make up 90% of the viewing numbers, and while enthusiasts will always watch, the visual part of F1 must be understandable and accessible to casuals.

With current technology, do we really have to constantly listen to commentators rabbiting on about track limits and kerbs? These baguette kerbs, as they are called, are all over the place to attempt to keep the drivers from abusing track limits. All they do is damage cars.

When a driver arrives at a corner, he stays off the kerbs otherwise it will affect the braking. They might clip the inner kerb at the apex, but it is always the exit kerb that gets over-used. Drivers don't do this for fun, they do it because it is faster either on exit, or on entry and in mid-corner. In any case, the track should just be the track and an easily understandable visual thing.

Technology using sensors at corner apex and corner exit at an offset from the track limit (defined as the white line) means that if a car runs over them in practice or qualifying then the lap is deleted immediately. Or, in the race, you could say you have to give up time, say five seconds, to the car behind you by the finish line on that lap. Then if you fail to do that, you have to give up 10 seconds the next time round.

A price needs to be paid for abusing the system, one that has an impact on the race or in terms of progressing to the next qualifying stage.

Whatever the solution to this simple problem, it needs to be consistent and visual. Take tennis, for example. The umpire often overrules the line umpire's calls, but Hawk-Eye is never questioned.

I thought this weekend showed how far away from understanding its tyres Pirelli really is. Poleman and race winner Bottas took his ultra-soft tyres to lap 40 of a 71-lap race. This is the tyre that should have been mega-grippy for qualifying and been hanging off the rims by lap 10. But no, it just kept getting quicker and quicker.

Pirelli also thought the soft-compound Pirellis would be important in the race, but starting on ultra-softs and moving to super-softs was fine. It was nice to see a bit of tyre blistering and the drivers having to manage it. But it was like the old days. It was 'visual' tyre management, not this hidden temperature stuff that no-one can see.

Williams arrived in Austria with a raft of developments. At a circuit where it locked out the front row in 2014, the team had high hopes. But its drivers ended up 17th and 18th on the grid, its worst qualifying performance of the V6 turbo era. Yet in the race, both Felipe Massa and Lance Stroll were in the points.

So why can this happen? Williams was fairly confident it came down to the tyres, but I am not so sure. The issue is grip and if that doesn't come in on all four tyres at the same time, then you will struggle with overall grip and lap time.

It is the car balance that brings the tyres into that working window, and on the Williams the balance didn't look good. If the fronts come in too soon, the car will be oversteery, especially on corner entry, and that is what we saw.

A small reduction in front wing angle to compensate for that and then you have more understeer in the fast corners. Again, that is what we saw, so it is very easy to get in a bit of a muddle when perhaps it is just some of your developments not working as predicted.

In the race, it was better because you are not doing short runs where initial tyre performance balance is vital. Over the longer race runs, the tyres get time to sort themselves out but for Williams to get back to where we all want it to be will require a lot of head scratching.

As for the fight up the front, for me Mercedes is just edging ahead.

Not by much, but if this battle is to continue to the end of the season Ferrari needs to kickstart its developments quickly.