Should Honda walk away from F1?

Would Honda looking set to link up with Toro Rosso and the fresh start it offers really allow it to realise its potential in F1? McLaren has won 182 grands prix and Toro Rosso has won just one, so if Honda couldn't work with McLaren, wouldn't it be better off just quitting F1 and never coming back?
David Wilson, via email

For Honda it will be a bitter pill to swallow, but in the short term it will be less pressure on them to build a winning power unit package.

Linking up with a team of the stature of McLaren, and with Fernando Alonso driving, was always going to be difficult, as everyone will look at it in the same way as you have: 'McLaren has won 182 grands prix and just look at them now, that Honda engine must be terrible'.

Being with Toro Rosso will allow Honda to restructure as it requires without the pressure of McLaren breathing down its neck. It also offers the potential of being able to join Red Bull if it get its package right, which should be looked at as a positive step. Honda has the facilities and the knowledge, it just needs to apply them.

As for Toro Rosso, it should benefit from the extra budget Honda will bring, but I am sure that within the team initially they will be a little disappointed.

Perhaps it will allow Toro Rosso to get back to what the team was set up to do, which was to introduce new, young drivers to the world of F1.

Toro Rosso can only look at it positively. After all, Honda may just arrive next year with a Mercedes-beater.

Regarding Fernando Alonso confusing his Honda engine by taking Pouhon flat - is this not a banned driver aid?
Michael Fitzgerald, via Twitter

I don't think it did anything that was planned for. As far as I know it didn't deploy any extra electrical power on corner exit because he hadn't lifted the throttle, so it didn't know he wanted to accelerate.

With the normally-aspirated engine it does what it does based on throttle position and so does the electrical power. But depending on the mapping, the electrical power probably tapers away to allow the driver to have some capacity left in the battery to accelerate the car back up to speed.

To get the best overall power distribution over a lap, the set-up of the current power units is incredibly complicated and it is probably one of the things that Mercedes is better at than most others.

The battery pack's fully-charged capacity is 160bhp for roughly 30 seconds, so it is about taking bites out of that when it can do most good for the lap time.

Marshals at the various fire posts around the tracks are issued with powder extinguishers, I'm assuming for fuel fires. These always make me cringe for the mess they make, and I'm sure as an ex-mechanic you have experience of cleaning this up. It seems to me the majority of uses of these extinguishers are on hot components brewing up as the car is stationary (brakes, exhaust, etc). Would it not be best to supply the marshals with CO2 extinguishers, which would cool down the components without causing the mess?
Tim Harrison, via email

Tim, you are correct. They do make a horrible mess. In the days of normally-aspirated open-airbox engines, the extinguisher powder would go into the air box and basically seize up the throttle slides.

Times have moved on and the risk of fuel fires in Formula 1 has reduced dramatically, but a lot of these circuits and marshals are also set up for club events when the risk of fuel fires is a lot higher.

I am sure there is a better solution out there and to have, as you say, a CO2 cylinder to use initially would save a lot of mess and work for the team.

Lots of people oppose grid penalties for power unit and related component replacements. You suggested deducting a percentage of points from teams, but would it be an idea to use penalty weight? Just add a few kilos when you swap an engine?
Mike Philippens, via email

Mike, that's not a bad idea, but you do need a reasonable weight to be a deterrent. Roughly 10kg is equal to 0.3s lap time, so you would need to add at least 5kg to make any sort of difference. In reality, these cars are getting very heavy just because of all these new technologies.

Taking away points from the teams is fraught with problems. As an example, it is very unlikely that Ferrari is going to win the constructors' championship, so all it would have to do is keep a close eye on Red Bull's potential points score, and it could then fit in as many new power unit elements to its cars as that would allow, giving it the best chance to win the drivers' championship.

No matter what the penalties would be, there will always be something wrong with them or some way of exploiting them. But the penalties we currently have do nothing for the racing, which is what we all want to see.

With the tracks not punishing mistakes anymore, do you think this results in team-mates being closer together? Do you think that the lack of punishment by the track results in drivers racing each other too aggressively and taking too many risks? Would there be a way to create a situation where the outside of a corner would be a kerb, then two cars' width of gravel, then asphalt, resulting in messed-up tyres? Mistakes should be punished by the track, not the race director, right?
Sander Adams, via email

Team-mates are closer together now because the majority of the car set-up is done on simulators or by the engineers in the back of the garage or at base. The days of the driver coming in and wanting to try a stiffer front anti-roll bar are long gone.

Also, the cars are now much safer, so the young breed don't really remember the days when it was common for one or two drivers to lose their lives during a season.

When you have different elements outside of the circuit, it is always difficult to get the transition right and not to have steps that can damage or turn a car over - such was the case with gravel traps.

We don't want a system that ends up losing cars. We only have 20 starting the race, so we can't afford to lose many before the racing would get lonely, but a price needs to be paid for abusing track limits and that shouldn't be down to the stewards, it should be down to the driver and his team.

For normal racing, I'm pretty sure that sensors could be used at, say, a metre offset to the outside of the track. That's a half-car width outside the track limit white line and, after all, that's where the driver is sitting so he should be able to judge it that little bit easier. If a driver abuses this, then perhaps he should have to give up a position on the next lap?

At the moment, it is far too inconsistent and to the viewer and spectator it is impossible to understand why one driver gets a penalty and another doesn't.

Jolyon Palmer and Max Verstappen seem to get a disproportionate amount of technical problems or 'bad luck'. How is it possible that the reliability between two cars within one team can be so different?
Erwin Bogaard, via email

Erwin, other than driving over the kerbs and basically giving the car a hard time, the driver should not be able to influence reliability. So I suppose you have to put it down to bad luck.

The engine that was in Verstappen's car at Monza was probably built with as much love and care as it could have and, in reality, it could have been fitted to Daniel Ricciardo's car. It's just the luck of the draw who gets what engine.

When the parc ferme rules came in and the teams couldn't work every available minute on the cars, everyone said reliability will suffer but actually it got a lot better. It was probably coincidence, but the team of people running a car can get so paranoid about reliability that they over-think it and, in effect, do too much.

For the sake of the show and also to cut costs, wouldn't it be better to get rid of all the strategists back at base and have only one race strategist per driver with a fixed amount of computational capacity? That would, in my opinion, bring back more surprises because not every detail can be calculated before the race. And the more complete driver who understands how to read the race benefits from it as well. Furthermore, I think it would save a lot of money...
Helmut Gaishauser, via email

It's very difficult to go back in time. The teams put a massive amount of effort (and money) into whatever small details can win them some time and, in the end, races.

I don't think the strategy group that any team has is the most expensive part of its racing programme.

I do agree with you that we need more surprises during the races, but everything is so well understood beforehand that surprises don't really happen anymore.

Unless the weather intervenes or they have a problem, practice gives the drivers the time to do their qualifying simulations, the teams complete race runs on the different compounds and gather mountains of data in preparation for race simulations. The race should only be about dotting the i's and crossing the t's, and normally that is what happens.

Perhaps withholding car performance data until post-race would be a simple idea. Give the teams access to reliability and safety data, but lock out performance data until after the event. That way, the drivers and engineers might just have to start to think about car set-up as opposed to using the data to determine what the car is doing and if it is within its working window.

Recently, there was an article on Autosport about work/life balance in motorsport. How difficult is it for someone like you to have achieved that, both in your days as a technical director and, before that, as a mechanic? Is such a thing possible, and has working in something like F1 taken a big toll on either your life or those you have known?
Derek Smith, via email

Derek, Formula 1 has always been tough on home life and if you want proof of that you just have to ask my wife of 41 years.

In the 1970s the teams were a lot smaller and you had to do a bit of everything. During the season it was driving to all the European races, working the race weekend sometimes from Friday morning to Sunday night with minimal if any sleep, and for the few long hauls we had it was a pleasure to take a flight and get in a rental car or a minibus.

The season normally started very early in January and ended in October, but there weren't as many races - 16ish was the norm.

During the winter you used to build your next year's car, so there wasn't really any time off then either.

In the 1980s the teams started to get bigger and more staff would go to the races, with most of them flying. It wasn't really any easier, but at least there were more people to get it done.

During the 1990s there was a major increase in staff levels and the designers, engineers and mechanics became a bit more specialised in each area of the car. By the 2000s it started to spiral to where it is now. A team takes roughly 65 people to a race weekend, but in the '70s we normally had eight.

Now we have the curfew, so everyone has at least the opportunity to get a reasonable night's sleep, and the compulsory two-week shutdown in August is great for home life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's easy, but when I was doing TV and radio work we were often there before and after the teams. We probably didn't work as hard, but it's all relative.

During my time as a mechanic and as a technical director, I was normally one of the first to arrive and one of the last to leave. I always took the pressure of whatever job I was doing on my shoulders, so I probably wrongly felt that I needed to be there just in case someone needed a question answered.

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