Will Renault beat Red Bull in 2018?

With Renault signing Carlos Sainz Jr and becoming stronger in recent races, do you think it's possible that it could be ahead of Red Bull and McLaren next year? After all, that team has regularly won races over the years as Benetton/Renault/ Lotus, so it must be a good operation, and Red Bull and McLaren haven't exactly been overachieving recently.
Lucas Martin, via email

The driver combination of Nico Hulkenberg and Sainz is as strong a team line-up as there is in the pitlane.

But Renault is still building up its infrastructure, and it takes time to put all of the pieces of the jigsaw together correctly and get them working to the maximum efficiency.

In 2018, Renault will have good races and not so good races. But if I were there, I would be setting out my stall to be the fourth best team behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull. I'm pretty sure Red Bull will start 2018 a lot stronger than it started '17.

Renault should be on level-pegging with McLaren, and hopefully Force India will be in there as well. You could also bring in Williams and a few of the other teams, but as a works team Renault should have fewer budget constraints than its rivals. So its development path should be stronger, meaning that by the second half of 2018 it should be a potential podium finisher in most races.

Regularly beating the big three is no easy task, though. As a works team that has to be Renault's goal, but I think it will be 2019 before there's a realistic chance of that.

Why has nobody other than Force India come up with the idea of the 'stegosaurus' engine cover? If you're allowed to put winglets there it seems an obvious place. Are there big downsides?
David Williams, via email

If you take a quick glance around a current Formula 1 car, there are probably 1000 components that contribute to its aerodynamic performance. All of them came into play at some time or another.

Like everyone, aerodynamicists have their eureka moment and the stegosaurus engine cover is one of those. The group of people entrusted with the design and development of an F1 car must think outside the box, and the guys and girls at Force India are pretty good at that.

There are many concepts and components on a current F1 car that came from the small teams. The radiator inlet and undercut sidepod was a Sauber concept, the vertical turning vane on the front corner of the sidepods was a Midland (as the Force India team was called then) concept, the undercut air intake/rollover bar was a Jordan concept.

Ideas and concepts have to be born, and for the stegosaurus engine cover the Singapore Grand Prix was its time.

Are there any downsides? Probably not, other than at tracks where minimising drag is critical - such as Monza. So I'm assuming we will see it regularly - and probably on a few other cars.

Mercedes recently revealed it has broken the 50% thermal efficiency barrier with its engine. Why is thermal efficiency of engines historically so unimpressive? Apparently the best of the V8s was at around 29%?
Mark Smith, via email

It was mainly down to the very high-revving engines. To achieve 20,000 rpm, the bore had to be very big and the stroke very short. So the piston diameter was, in reality, too large, and with conventional combustion chambers all of the fuel didn't get burned.

Basically, the flame wasn't fast enough to ignite all over the piston area.

Before there was any control over the fuel's make up, when we were using basically chemical fuels, it would burn across the piston and the power increase from higher-researched fuels was quite incredible.

These chemical fuels were producing something like 50bhp over a high-octane, high-quality equivalent. So they were well worth the fact that when the car was running you couldn't breathe in the back of the garage and some mechanics had to wear masks.

The pre-combustion systems in current engines - I'm led to believe there are a few different concepts - now mean that probably 99.9% of the fuel that is injected gets burned. This means everything is working more efficiently.

We could look at this and say 'isn't it great that F1 can bring this sort of thing to the table?' and that mass production will benefit.

But I'm afraid to say the spark was probably ignited by the road car industry and F1 probably accelerated its active use.

How much compromise do designers have to make for larger drivers, not so much in terms of weight but in terms of accommodating their frame? Do things like having proportionally longer legs or body create problems, and are there any drivers that were particularly difficult for this that you designed cars for?
Rachel Williams, via email

Within the regulations, there is a basic cockpit layout with a seat-back profile and a cockpit length. But still some drivers find it a little too short.

Drivers such as Nico Hulkenberg, who is tall, are a little compromised but they get used to it and it becomes second nature. If I were involved in the regulations, I would be adding a little to this minimum cockpit length.

One of the interesting things is that if you look at the drivers in their cars at the pre-season test, the short ones will all be sitting very low in the cockpit. They are positioned to fit the headrest design aerodynamically perfectly.

The taller drivers will be sitting that little bit higher, meaning that the headrest design doesn't look as well detailed. As the season progresses, and usually before or in Monaco, you will see the smaller driver moving up a bit - mainly because once they start testing and racing, they realise they just can't see well enough to place the car in a corner.

Up to the 2000s there wasn't any cockpit-length regulation, so making the car as short as possible was the best for weight and stiffness. That's why short drivers like Alain Prost were much sought after.

Eddie Irvine was probably the toughest driver I had to fit in a chassis. He had, and still has, short legs and a long body, so getting him comfortable wasn't easy.

If he wasn't comfortable, his back would cramp and on a couple of occasions in his early days with us we would have to assist him to get out of the car.

There's a big disparity between the have and have-not teams. Would a system like the satellite and factory team system that MotoGP has work in Formula 1? Some manufacturers are also allowed breaks to be more competitive
Mark Sawatsky, via email

I suppose what you're suggesting is a bit like customer cars. If every works team were to adopt a 'junior' team, and they were allowed to use last year's cars, it would probably pull the grid together that little bit.

But for Sauber, for instance, to run a year-old Ferrari would cost a lot more than it currently spends on designing and building its own cars. It would also sort of mean there would be two championships.

Some of this is done now with the smaller teams being able to use the transmission system along with the power unit from a works team, but to go much further means that the smaller teams would lose their identity.

I don't think any of the small teams want to go down this route. All they want is a fair chunk of the prize money purse and some sort of control over budgets. But that is very difficult to do in any sort of a fair manner.

I don't think a budget cap will ever work. Let's say Mercedes spends $300million and Force India spends $100m. If a $100m budget cap was brought in there is no way Mercedes could cut back to that. And it would be of no benefit to a team such as Force India, which probably finds it more difficult to obtain its budget than Mercedes does.

Has Valtteri Bottas settled into a number-two role at Mercedes? Since the summer break, he seems to be off the pace. At Monza, he reiterated that he was perfectly happy with the car but couldn't translate that into lap time and was some way off a cruising Lewis Hamilton. What are your thoughts?
Jay Menon, via email

He does seem to have lost his way that little bit, especially in qualifying. But I have to say Hamilton has also lifted his game since the summer break, so the disparity looks worse than it probably is, mainly because Hamilton is probably driving better than he ever has.

I don't think Bottas has settled into a number-two role and even if he has, a number two still needs to qualify and race as strongly as possibly to be at the front to help their team-mate. You can't help if you're playing catch up.

Over these next six races, he needs to find his feet again because the momentum from that will take him into 2018. He will probably have to accept number-two status some time during those races, but leading and letting your team-mate past to pick up maximum points is the best way to go about it.

Then everyone knows what could have been if the mid-season circumstances had just been that little bit different.

Why was the high-pitched whining we heard the cars making at Monza not there in Singapore? Was it a high speed thing?
Alex Hannon, via twitter

I have to say I didn't really hear that; being in the garage with these cars when they really did make a noise for so many years has probably taken a toll on my hearing.

It could very easily have been the turbo going down those long straights. The engine rpm doesn't change much because the car is fighting the aerodynamic drag, so the turbo would be running at a fairly stable rpm and it would give off a whine. Otherwise there will also be some gearbox noise that you might just be able to hear.

It's interesting that into the corners you can sometimes hear the tyre squeal when a driver locks up. You never heard that in the days of real racing engines, unless a driver was having a very serious moment.

You've written in the past about drivers you worked with who were outstandingly quick, easy (or difficult) to work with, etc. I am curious to know which driver(s) were the hardest-working? Were there any that stand out in terms of showing up to the track especially early for testing sessions, or spending long hours with mechanics and engineers after other drivers would have gone home? I remember reading something long ago about the oft-maligned Eddie Irvine ('lazy playboy, only interested in money') that quoted a Ferrari engineer saying that actually Irvine was the one who pounded around Fiorano endlessly and put in the gruelling hours, contrary to popular wisdom?
Lewis Thomas, via email

You will find that a driver will do anything, or at least most things, for money.

When Irvine was driving for Ferrari he was being paid handsomely and he was driving for probably the most prestigious team in the pitlane, so why wouldn't he turn up and pound around Fiorano?

Most of the drivers I have worked with would put in a reasonable effort; some of them, like Andrea de Cesaris, Robert Moreno, Rubens Barrichello, Giancarlo Fisichella, Michael Schumacher and even Irvine were easier to work with than some of the others. But all of them would be around if you needed them.

The relationship between the driver and engineer is very important. You need to be as one in your thought processes, and to do that you need to be operating at a fairly sociable level.

Since the radio content is now transmitted in the TV coverage, we hear engineers and drivers having a chat. Some are OK, but Daniil Kvyat and his engineer don't seem to be the best of buddies.

If he can fix that (if he gets the opportunity to), he might perform that little bit better as his engineer wouldn't be feeling that he was going to be hung out to dry for making the wrong comment.

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