How to force F1 teams to build cars to overtake

Could it become a requirement in the rules that anyone wanting to make use of a windtunnel must use two car models, and that the data can only be collected from the following/second car? It could be a simpler way to force teams to build a car to be optimal when following another, rather than when on its own.
Amedeo Felix, via email

It's a decent idea and you are correct something needs to be done to make the cars' design more turbulence-friendly.

A driver responds to the balance of a car and that is what gives them the commitment to the corner. The lap time itself is relative to the amount of overall downforce and hence grip.

To reinforce this, grip levels change with circuit conditions. If it gets hotter you lose grip and all the cars normally do slower lap times. If it is damp and slippery lap times get slower. Put on a harder tyre and, again, you get slower lap times.

If a car is not balanced and has understeer or oversteer, then the driver can do very little about it. They can only drive to a speed that the balance allows them to go at. It could be a Mercedes or a Sauber and they will both produce slower lap times than their true potential.

Currently, the following car will start to be affected at a distance of about 100 metres. If it closes in it will lose something like 20% of its total downforce. Most of that comes from the front, so it induces locking front brakes and understeer in the corners, making it more difficult to attempt an overtaking manoeuvre.

I believe the regulations need to be changed so that the cars are not so reliant on the front wing to produce their front downforce. Then they would retain a better balance. This could be done by changing the aspect ratio of the front wing - keep the cord length as now but reduce the cord height. We have also seven- or eight-flap front wings - you could reduce that to a maximum of four flaps, between say 250mm and 800mm from the cars centre line.

Also, allowing the underfloor to be more of a ground effect component, instead of it being flat, with its lowest point further forward, would mean the centre of pressure of that component would move forward. The underfloor is more resilient to turbulent airflow so the downforce loss would be less - it wouldn't be zero, but it would be less.

I was musing this morning whether the Ferrari run of poor reliability was a consequence of the accidents in the flyaway races at Singapore and Sepang overstretching their ability to service and upgrade at the same time. What do you think?
John, via email

John, it doesn't really matter which problems you have, once you start to play catch-up something else will normally suffer. It could very easily be that Ferrari is still feeling the consequences of Sebastian Vettel's Singapore and Malaysia indiscretions.

The reality is if you are going to challenge for a world championship your structure needs to be bulletproof and resilient to anything that can be thrown at you. Mercedes is a good example of this, it returns from a bad weekend stronger than it was before.

Setbacks are normal in any business and after all Formula 1 is just another business. It's easy when everything is going in the right direction, but the strength and depth of any company is only tested when it veers off course. Ferrari doesn't seem to be able to do right for doing wrong.

Let's see how Austin goes, that is the big test. Now all Ferrari can do to try to rectify the situation is to win races, with Vettel first, Kimi Raikkonen (or, more likely, one of the two Red Bulls...) second and Lewis Hamilton third.

That would give a 10-point shift per race in Vettel's favour. With four races left that is the least he needs to try to pull the championship back. But to finish first, first you have got to finish, and that is what Ferrari has been struggling to do.

One more problem and it's all over bar Sergio Marchionne shouting from the rooftops.

If the decision was made today to outlaw front and rear wings and all the other obvious aerodynamic devices on the body of the car, what would be the consequence? Could a current F1 car be adapted in a short period of time to be raceable in such circumstances?
Francois Petit, via email

Anything could be adapted but I think that would be a little over the top, basically it would be a Formula Ford with wider tyres and lots of horsepower.

There is a compromise somewhere in the middle. The regulations for these current cars were instigated to reduce the lap times by something like four or five seconds. They have achieved most of that, but it is impossible to actually see that corner-speed improvement unless you are standing trackside. In reality only a few people get the opportunity to do that.

If you look at the lap times from qualifying to the race the cars lose around five seconds per lap due to high fuel loads, older tyres and race engine modes. You don't really notice that, so if it was down to me I would be looking at a sizeable reduction in downforce. Something like 25%, at a minimum, with grippier tyres.

This would keep the pace the same through low and medium-speed corners, and decrease it through higher-speed corners - inviting the drivers to race more through that type of turn.

With all the concerns regarding both safety and costs in F1, do you think it sensible, or feasible, for the FIA to issue standard specification cockpit safety cells for integration into the various chassis? These safety cells could provide the required form of head protection (just please not another halo!)
Guy Dormehl, via email

Guy, that is a direction that I think would save every team a lot of money.

Currently the side crash structures for all the cars are to the one FIA design shape and lay-up specification. You could make them yourselves, or there would be one team that would make them for all.

Everything needs to be introduced slowly, otherwise people rear up and say 'that is not the DNA of Formula 1', which is rubbish. Go back a few years and more or less everyone was using a DFV and a Hewland gearbox.

I believe introducing an FIA-designed shape and lay-up specification for both the front and rear crash structure should be the next step. Again, if a team wanted to make it itself then fine, or one or two of the bigger teams could make it for all the smaller teams.

This way the impact test costs could be shared across all the teams instead of every team having to foot the bill for numerous tests on their own. This would save a lot of money.

Teams should also be allowed to clothe those structures in their own lightweight body profiles, so they would still be able to put their own stamp on what it looks like.

The news that the FIA will introduce biometric gloves reminded me of the physical monitoring F1 experimented sampled a long time ago. Nothing has ever brought home how physically demanding it is to drive an F1 car - do you have any idea why it wasn't continued and do you think the new owners should have a look at it?
Arthur Houtman, via email

Yes, it would be good to get a driver's heart rate, body temperature and breathing rate on the TV coverage. It would be interesting to compare who was hot and who was even hotter.

I remember many years ago that Ferrari, or someone involved with the team, had a heart rate monitor on Gilles Villeneuve at Dijon. He spun at the last long, fast corner and while spinning his heart rate actually went down compared to when he was on a fast lap.

To see that sort of thing from our current batch of drivers would be very interesting and so easy to do - after all the data is there to be had with a simple band around the chest. All they have to do is transmit it.

Come on Liberty Media, take a lesson from the simple cyclists who basically base their effort levels on nothing more than what we have talked about above. Give us something more to allow us to understand how hard these guys are really trying.

If they got their finger out they could probably test run it at the last race of this year.

Aside from Monza, Williams has run the same spoon-shaped, medium-downforce rear wing all year, and a medium-downforce front wing for many races, including Hungary. Why is a high angle of attack rear wing and larger chord front wing not being used at higher downforce venues as other teams do?

Iman Hansra, via email

As I have said a few times in my columns, Williams seems to be a bit lost in its aerodynamic direction. Either the windtunnel and CFD is leading it astray, or the team's aerodynamic specification brief is in the wrong direction.

Over the last few years Williams has always been a team that runs less downforce, and hence drag, so normally it is pretty fast on the straights. I'm pretty sure it is running as high a downforce front and rear wing set-up as it feels is the best efficiency for each circuit. But I think the performance shows that something in the modelling or simulation tools is not giving Williams the correct solution.

Williams had a great season in 2014 and since then has been on a slippery slope. One of the biggest problems seems to be getting new tyres, especially softer ones, to 'switch on'. This is normally caused by the car's inherent balance, if you have a little understeer on a soft tyre you will have more understeer on a super-soft tyre and more again on an ultra-soft tyre.

When you have understeer the driver normally induces a little more steering lock. It is very easy that with more steering lock you lose front downforce and hence generate more understeer.

Williams is normally better in race conditions, when the rear tyres have lost their initial grip, but to be competitive you need a car that can work, or be simply adjusted, to achieve a good balance in both conditions.

Should simpler front wings be introduced on safety grounds, to prevent widespread debris?
Ben Parker, via email

I have yet to notice common sense in my 40+ years in the sport, so I am not expecting it to appear any time soon. A simpler front wing would do no harm and, as above, if the regulations were written correctly it would probably do a lot of good for the racing.

If nothing else it would certainly do a lot of good for the budgets, when you consider that it is the most vulnerable component on the car. It costs around £80,000+ per unit and we see at least three or four front wing assemblies destroyed per weekend. It's just madness to stick with what we have.

Making them from aluminium might just be a step too far, but there many other composite materials that would be less vulnerable to braking up into shards, which as we all know does nothing but potentially cut tyres.

I very much like the idea of a wheel tether from the front chassis bulkhead through the nose into the front wing outer endplate area. That would have two positives in that it would at least keep the main parts of the car together with the chassis, which would also help dramatically in an accident like the one that claimed the life of Justin Wilson. It could be clipped into some type of a 'T'-style slotted fastener on the front bulkhead before the nose is fitted.

You often refer to the centre of pressure of the car and how it can be moved around by changing the aero balance. I think I understand the basic idea, but would it be possible to explain a little more what the centre of pressure means, the advantages of moving it around and how it might vary according to the changing state of the car?
David Taylor, via email

David, if you can imagine all the aerodynamic components that are on a current F1 car develop downforce and drag and together they add up to a total downforce number.

For a round number, and at a certain speed, let's say at 240km/h there's a total of 1500kg of downforce. That then pushes down on the car and is split into front downforce and rear downforce - if it's 40% front, that's 600kg, and 60% rear, that's 900kg. That point is then called the centre of pressure.

Typically a good car's centre of pressure shift would mean it moves rearward just a little bit at high speed, so in a medium-speed corner you have the 40% front, 60% rear downforce, but at high speed it might go to 38% front, 62% rear. That means the car will either have a little less front grip at high speed so generate a little understeer, which will give the driver confidence or it will have more front grip at medium speed, reducing the medium speed understeer. It's 1-2%, which is a lot when you are talking about an F1 car's balance.

This sort of centre of pressure shift can be achieved with the aerodynamic characteristics of the front wing, front wing endplates and or underfloor and diffuser. These components change their height relative to the ground as the speed increases more than any other component, and hence how they work in what's called 'ground effect'.

If all the aerodynamic components worked in a linear fashion (which they don't) then the force that is pushing the car into the ground increases with the square of the speed. So double the speed equals four times the downforce. These are the components that you can play tunes with as the car increases in speed.

If the centre of pressure moves forward as the car is increasing in speed, the car will have understeer in medium speed corners, or feel very nervous at high speed corners and spook the driver fairly quickly, reducing their confidence.

Because of the high rake angles (where the front is low, and the rear is high) that Red Bull uses, I think that is probably the team that has the best handle on this and is using the exaggerated rake to manage the centre of pressure shift through the car's ever-changing ride heights.

There are lots of other bits that can also alter the centre of pressure, like differing steering lock, at different speeds, but that is for another Ask Gary.

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