Alonso's F1 exit shows McLaren crisis is not ending

Are you surprised that Fernando Alonso has walked away from Formula 1, and where do you stand on the argument that he's a troublemaker and that has made it difficult for him to get a deal with a top team?
David Smith, via email

I'm not surprised at all. He is a double world champion - albeit with his last title coming over a decade ago - and it is a waste of his talent to drive around in the midfield year after year.

Alonso is in a team that is going through a crisis and I think his walking away just shows that he hasn't been convinced by the McLaren management that the end of that crisis is in sight.

As for him being a troublemaker, I have never worked with him so I have no real inside info on that. But during his time at Ferrari when I was doing my stuff with the BBC and Radio 5 Live, I was always surprised at how he seemed to be the one calling the shots. From the outside, he now seems to be doing exactly the same at McLaren and this is never a good thing to let happen.

The McLaren management seems to have bought into this and has even encouraged it. But this just creates a difficult situation and it shows a lack of management structure.

As I have said on many occasions, love him or hate him, this situation would never have happened on Ron Dennis's watch.

A team is made up of many individuals and all of them are what make it. The driver is only one part of that team. Yes, the drivers need to be respected but they can get too powerful. Each individual within the team needs to be able to express themselves in their own areas and if they feel handcuffed until the driver signs it off then they just won't be able to do that.

The management at McLaren needs to take a long and honest look at itself and ask the question 'Why did we let this all happen?'.

People talk about Alonso causing political problems in teams - but have you ever had this kind of problem with a driver? Maybe with one driver hiding data from the other or saying different things to different people? Does this really happen?
Joao Oliveira, via email

This always happens. Every driver wants to beat everyone else that's racing, including their team-mate. That's how selfish you must be to be ultimately successful.

I'm pretty sure it is the same in any team sport. No footballer wants to give away the ball to someone else on their team if there is a chance they can score. Everyone wants the glory.

Drivers will always keep a bit for themselves. If they have tested something and felt that it might just preserve the tyres that little bit, then instead of jumping in and saying they felt it was the way to go they wouldn't tell a lie, but they might just paper over it.

When we ran Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine at Jordan from 1993-95 it was a bit like that. And then again with Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher in '97.

As team-mates, they weren't drinking partners and that showed in their willingness to help each other in debriefs. But once you recognise it then you can handle it. It's when it gets onto the track and they wipe each other out through selfishness that it is unacceptable.

As a driver, you do need to be ruthless to be at the top of your game in F1. But that can be done on the track

As far as Fernando Alonso is concerned, you just have to think back to Singapore in 2008 when his team-mate Nelson Piquet threw his Renault in the wall to give Alonso an opportunity to win the race.

Yes, he said he didn't know anything about it and he was cleared by the FIA, which found no evidence he knew about it, but Renault must have at least had to convince him there was a decent reason he had to make an early pitstop that wasn't the optimal strategy given where he started.

Add to that Hungary 2007 - when he sat in the pitlane and blocked Lewis Hamilton from getting his tyres fitted for his last run in qualifying - and you can see he is thinking outside of his remit of just being a very good racing driver, which he undoubtedly is.

As a driver, you do need to be ruthless to be at the top of your game in F1. But I think that can be done on the track. After all, that is exactly what they are employed to do.

How reliably can a team determine the power output/performance of its competitors without have access to the dyno data. Can they determine in some way how much bhp an engine has based on GPS data, for instance? How do they do that?
Mike Philippens, via Instagram

The teams have very detailed GPS data to study. I believe they have data at about every 20 metres, so they can interrogate this to build a performance profile. Basically, everything will be compared to a team's own performance. You can look at time taken from data point to data point, and from this derive the car speed.

If it is going through a corner then you can have a stab at the downforce levels of other cars. If it is slowish corner exit and acceleration off the corner, it is then normally down to horsepower. If it is middle to end-of-straight it could then be down to horsepower or car drag.

The last one, the horsepower relative to drag, is the difficult one. With this one you really need to be honest with yourself because if you are faster in the corner then you might just be running more downforce, and with that extra downforce comes more drag, so you will be slower at the end of the straights.

Last year, McLaren, when it could hide behind the performance of the Honda engine, was very guilty of not being honest with itself. It was always talking about how the car was the fastest in the pitlane and that the Honda was holding it back. McLaren's performance this year is suffering from that reluctance to accept the facts in 2017.

Red Bull has, on occasions, gone down the same path. But when it has run its car with a more efficient aerodynamic set-up it has reaped the rewards.

How about F1 goes back to an open engine formula but with tight fuel and energy usage regs? Surely that appeals to more manufacturers and opens the door for independents such as Ilmor and Cosworth?
Graham Horner, via Twitter

Car manufacturers are at a crossroads. Governments are constantly tightening up on emissions to the extent that companies such as Volkswagen and a few others have come up with illegal software just to pass some of these tests.

Inner city emission output levels are only going to get more challenging, driving manufacturers to move onto other energy sources. So, I'm afraid, electric cars are going to be the short-term future. F1 therefore needs to stick with something that is at least a derivative of what it currently uses.

F1 is very expensive and for anyone to commit the sort of funds required to reach a competitive level would require long term stability from the regulations

I'm all for the hybrid formula with tight fossil fuel restrictions as long as it doesn't mean we get into a fuel-saving formula. If every car had to take on-board the same amount of fossil fuel and the only fuel maps you were allowed to use for the race was what you used for qualifying, then it should eliminate anyone from just burning off fuel for the sake of it.

There is a huge amount of potential power regeneration being wasted from the front axle during braking, and with the introduction of the 18-inch wheels perhaps it's time to harness that in conjunction with a race fuel load of something like 80kg instead of the current 105kg.

I'm still not sure it will bring in any other manufacturers. F1 is a very expensive series and for anyone to commit the sort of funds required to reach a competitive level would require long term stability from the regulations - or at least with long term incremental changes put in place that would cover at least the next 10 years.

But that's something that just doesn't happen. F1 is just too reactive.

Will we ever have a set of F1 rules where cars actually look different beyond the paint job? Or if the rules were more open, would everyone just do pretty much the same thing anyway?
Michael Harris, via email

For the cars to look different they would have to more or less do away with the regulations. But perhaps that wouldn't be a bad thing?

If they just had to drive through a set of goalposts when leaving the pitlane - for example weighing no less than 650kg with the driver and having a tank with a maximum capacity of 100kg of fossil fuel to do a 300km race, now that would be really interesting.

I wonder what the likes of Adrian Newey would come up with? The challenge would certainly stimulate his brain cells.

The only negative is that some would get it right and others would have to follow so cost would be a major factor, which I doubt the current business model of F1 could satisfy. With the current system, where everything is regulated to some degree or another, no matter how the rules would change the cars will always end up with the same visual appearance.

The inner detail is actually quite different, but unless you are up close you don't really see it.

Is there a way we might see a double diffuser kind of situation with the new rules?
Diogo Barros Pinho, via Twitter

For 2019, I don't think so as the changes are going to be reasonably small - front wing, rear wing and bargeboard areas - but for 2021 there will be more risk of a slip-up.

The double diffuser should never have been allowed to exist. It was more the fact that a small team found a loophole and was allowed to continue using it.

The double diffuser should never have been allowed to exist. It was more the fact that a small team found a loophole and was allowed to continue using it

This served a purpose as it meant the big teams - mainly McLaren, which at that time as at loggerheads with the FIA - were made to look a bit silly.

I'm not saying it was illegal, it's just that the FIA could have stamped on it as soon as it was introduced. I'm pretty sure the majority of teams would have agreed with that ruling, and it would have been a bit like the Brabham fan car - allow it to race once, reap the rewards for the efforts, but don't bring it next time.

That was a lesson learned and will never be forgotten, so before any new regulations get finalised I'm pretty sure they will be analysed in detail. The changes for 2021 will probably just be alterations to dimensions governing where you can place components.

What does flexing of the front wing actually do to help the car?
d_mornielli, via Instagram

Flexing front wings - that's illegal isn't it? Teams would never do that... But everything flexes to some degree. It is just that when there is a mechanism designed into the mountings to allow things to flex and recover that it is blatantly illegal.

If it is just the materials, then it must be questioned, but there are now quite a few load tests that the front and rear wings have to pass before they can be used. If they get through those, then any flexing will be minimal.

What we see on TV when a driver goes over a kerb and it looks like the wing is just about to fall off is actually detrimental to the consistency of the downforce it is producing. So, if I was involved with a team that had a wing moving around like some of them do, I would be stiffening up the mounting system.

But whatever a team thinks it can get away with it will try to achieve. The aim with a rotational flex is that the front wing relative to the rear wing will produce a higher percentage of front downforce in slow and medium speed corners than in fast corners.

If this can't be achieved with some flexing while still staying within the regulations, then it will be achieved by stalling the airflow on small parts of the front wing. This will also reduce the front downforce at higher speed as the wing gets closer to the ground.

Basically, all the aerodynamic forces end up pushing down on the car at what is called the centre of pressure. Let's just say that at 150km/h this is at 42% front, then at 200km/h 41.5% front, at 250km/h 41% front and at 300km/h 40.5% front.

If you have something like this, then in the faster corners the rear of the car will be more stable and in the slow and medium corners you will have less understeer.

Your old team, Force India, was recently saved by Lawrence Stroll. What do you think about the future of the team, and what is it about it that has made it consistently show up bigger teams over the years?
'Force India Fan', via email

It a long time since it was my team, but there are still quite a few of the original Jordan people there and hopefully they still think in the same way.

Jordan started life as a bunch of no-hopers, or at least that is what the majority of the press said when Eddie Jordan said that he was entering F1. But over the next decade the media was proved wrong.

Yes, Jordan had its ups and downs, but just look at McLaren currently and you can see it can happen to anyone.

Force India has never been that big, so has remained nimble, it can change direction without having committee meetings

The team was, and still is, a bunch of racers that try to get the best out of what they have. On race day, Force India runs a tight ship as far as decisions are concerned. Those on the pitwall even stick their hands out of the back of the stand to see if it's raining, as opposed to calling back to base to ask the guys and girls back there!

The other thing is that Force India has never been that big, so has remained nimble. It can change direction without having great committee meetings. But it's growing and that might just be the worst enemy of the team.

Going on to your question about the new ownership, I think it can only be positive. Vijay Mallya, backed up by Bob Fernley's management as deputy team principal and Otmar Szafnauer as chief operating officer - they gave the team stability for the first time since Jordan sold it.

It needed that after all the trials and tribulations of the various owners that were in place between the two of them. But now it needs to take that next step and Vijay has his own problems to deal with.

The new ownership is made up of seven individuals, so it's not just a rich man's pipedream. There will be questions asked and answers coming, but it will be in the owners' interests to invest in the team - especially if Lance Stroll is going to be one of its drivers.

Technical director Andrew Green is one of the original three that worked on the design of the Jordan 191 - or as it was first called the Jordan 911. That was until Porsche called and said it didn't like us using its numbering system - but that's a story for another day.

Andrew is a good guy, as are many of his team, but no matter how good you are you need budget stability and you need investment in equipment. If those are forthcoming I can see the team taking the next step forward and starting to nip at the heels of the big boys.

It won't happen overnight, but if I was there I would be rubbing my hands at the new challenge for 2021, when hopefully the new regulations will mean starting with a clean sheet of paper.