Ask Gary: Who was the best driver never to get a top seat?

You've seen many technical innovations over the years. Which one most impressed you, be it for ingenuity, importance, performance benefit or whatever?
Niko Jarvinen, via email

Formula 1 has always been about innovation and hopefully will continue to be so. But the current regulations and the direction they are going in is quietly starting to introduce a spec-car philosophy.

When the chassis regulations were more open it allowed people such as Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray, John Barnard, Patrick Head and Adrian Newey to get the old grey matter fired up and find new solutions to existing problems.

Now it's all about optimising every small detail. Adrian is probably the only one of the engineers I've just named who has seen chassis regulations go from fairly open, allowing some innovation, to a bit of a closed box. As he has said on many occasions, it takes away the stimulation of open-box thinking.

I suppose the introduction of the carbon chassis structure and suspension components has been one of the biggest innovations over my time. Not only did this bring improved performance to the chassis because of its stiffness-to-weight ratio, but it's also responsible for the improved safety we've seen over the past 25-odd years.

Before that it was all about building a light survival cell structure that would do its job structurally. But the ability to move elements around and add different material in various areas has, I'm pretty sure, saved many drivers from serious injury.

The current engine regulations and the fact that from a 1600cc turbocharged V6 with a few electric gizmos and very little fuel, manufacturers are able to produce knocking on the door of 1000hp, is pretty good.

That, combined with the reliability especially from Mercedes, is incredible. That said, I'm not a big fan of these power units since they have too big a performance influence on what has been a championship for drivers and chassis.

I think the driver should be the hero and the chassis manufacturer should be the one responsible for giving them the tools to do the job. Going back to a normally aspirated V8 or V10 would be great. You can still have some form of ERS/KERS from the chassis side during braking. Allow the chassis whizz kids to come up with the innovation and have a simple engine.

Of all the eras in grand prix racing from 1950 onwards, which do you think was the best in terms of the rules, the cars and the racing - and why?
Mark Allen, via email

Each era has had its highlights and really the only thing that has changed since I started in F1 at the Spanish GP in Barcelona in 1973 - the 224th race - is that it has got much more professional. Now it's a business first and a sport second.

As time has gone by, the driver's contribution to success has diminished. Don't get me wrong, they're still very important, but this is shown more by a driver's consistency in winning. Today a driver such as, let's say, Charles Leclerc can't take a 2018 Sauber and make it a podium-finishing car. Put him in a Ferrari and he's a potential race winner.

The same thing can be said of Max Verstappen. In a Toro Rosso he looked very good but couldn't get on the podium, but put him in the Red Bull and he won his first race. For me, the car now combined with the power unit package is taking away from the driver contribution.

If I were to pick a decade I thought was the most exciting it would be the 1980s. There was something about those cars and drivers and the mix of different engines that meant when a driver won a race he had worked for it.

In the late 1980s, I remember Mansell in the Ferrari in Hungary following Senna for quite a few laps to work out where he was quicker. Then he dropped back a bit, built up his momentum again, caught Senna at a point on the track where he knew he was faster and nipped past. That was a driver alone doing his job, unaided by stupid stuff like DRS.

You've been critical of the way F1 is now - at what point do you think things started to go wrong?
Adrian Bernard, via email

Me? Critical? Never! For me, it's the fact that the regulations are too restrictive. There needs to be some room for interpretation and innovation.

When I started designing Formula 1 cars the rulebook was about 20 pages. Basically you could sit down one evening, read it a few times, and it would be imprinted in your mind. Now it's about 10 times the size and there is no hope of an individual reading it and taking it all in.

You need a team of people to decipher it and part of that team needs legal expertise because, in the end, it's all down to how it's interpreted. It's difficult to say when this all started to unfold but I think it was around the time Max Mosley was president of the FIA.

He was from a legal background and he started to push for tighter definitions. But loopholes always crop up and the more verbiage you add to the rulebook to close them off, the bigger the rulebook gets. The momentum becomes unstoppable.

So we have what we have today - the FIA, F1 and the teams all at loggerheads with each other, and all too proud to accept the others' proposals for fear of losing face. It's not unlike the situation we're in with Brexit in the UK - actually, it's scarily similar.

What is the most memorable moment you saw in the pitlane?
Alex Gates, via Twitter

It's a difficult one. At Monza in 1993 I can recall standing in the pitlane looking over the pitwall to the track, and Christian Fittipaldi in his Minardi ran into the back of his team-mate Pierluigi Martini and did a full 360-degree flip!

As well as that, I recall an incident in the 1986 Indianapolis 500. I was engineering with the Galles team and we were running Roberto Moreno and Geoff Brabham. At Indy there's a practice session on Thursday before the race and Roberto was out on a run.

I always had my trusty stopwatch out and was timing him as he came into view at the pit entrance, which is just after turn 4. In Turn 4 the car in front of him slowed and a brake disc exploded, which went through his rear wheel and tyre.

Roberto, trying to avoid him at 220mph, had no choice but to head for the pits. He hit one car that was slowing down on the pit entry and mounted the pit wall, which was about two feet high and protecting the fuel tanks, which were all full of fuel. He then went between the wall and another car that was sitting on jacks, ending up in his pit with no corners left on the car - and a driveshaft from one of the other cars sticking out of the side of the chassis just by his seat!

Just before that practice session, he was complaining about his seat being a little loose. He is a small guy and the seat was made from expanded foam so we put the seat in place and slipped a piece of 1/2" plywood cut to the shape of the seat down the side of it.

When the driveshaft came through the carbon chassis directly in line with his rib cage, the plywood deflected it rearwards into the foam seat. Was he unlucky he had the accident or lucky he had that piece of plywood in place?

While this was all happening I scampered and basically threw Rick Galles wife and Roberto's wife over a six-foot high wire fence behind the pits to get them to safety.

Which grand prix car would you like to have been involved in the design of from your time in F1 - maybe the one you think was the best that you'd have been proud to have worked on?
Sebastian Schneider, via email

My career changed dramatically from the early 1970s, when I was a mechanic, to the late 1980s when I became more involved in the design. I am still, to this day, very proud of the Jordan 191, 194, and 197.

As far as cars that I put my heart and soul into, these are the three Jordan cars that I fully focused on. As for the in-between cars, there were always reasons to not be able to focus on car design.

We were a small team and between the start of the design of the Jordan 191 in early 1990 to when I left mid-1998, which is eight years, we had six different engine suppliers. The initial 191 was designed with a Judd engine but a chance meeting with someone from Cosworth over a sandwich in a pub changed that quite late in the day.

If you look at the two little blisters on the engine cover of the 191, they are to cover the fuel rails. The Judd engine was lower in that area and when we changed to the Cosworth engine the engine cover pattern was well under way.

Building up a relationship with new engine suppliers takes time from everything else you have to do. Something has to give and rightly or wrongly I probably let the car concept and design slip.

After Yamaha in 1992, in '93 and '94 we used Brian Hart's little V10, before switching to Peugeot and then Mugen-Honda. So the longer we had the same engine supplier, the better the performance. Strange, that... I don't think there are any other cars out there that I would have found as rewarding to help design.

I've always been my own man and stood by my own convictions - any other car was always someone else's concept, so I would only have been a cog in a wheel. If I go back to when I was a mechanic, I was very honoured to work on some of Gordon Murray's cars, the BT42 and BT44.

Those cars were just a pleasure and in those early days, you could contribute to the design.

Which driver labelled as an underdog has surprised you the most during your career?
rfcorrales, via Instagram

As far as someone popping up with a result that was least expected, it has to be Pastor Maldonado for Williams in Barcelona in 2012. It wasn't that he won the race because of others faltering, he actually went out and raced with the best and won it.

I don't think there was a person in the paddock that wasn't 'surprised' by that result. We then all thought that Williams was having a barbecue after the race, but it was actually the garage that caught fire.

Pastor was the one to go into the smoke and help people to safety, genuinely it was his day to do the good deed. Normally the underdog status comes through from the team, and the driver-car combination on a given day punches well above their weight.

If you take that into account, I would say Jordan with Giancarlo Fisichella in Brazil 2003 surprised everyone, even us, and again Stewart and Johnny Herbert winning at the Nurburgring in 1999 was a bit of a surprise.

Anyone who was driving in those two races will tell you that they could have won them, but in the end, there was only one driver in each that survived the changing conditions and took the victory.

What was the toughest time during your career?
joewille, via Instagram

I've had a few tough times during my career and when you look back at most of them, they were more or less self-inflicted! However, the one that sticks out was when I was relieved of my duties with Jaguar.

When Jackie Stewart sold Stewart Grand Prix to Ford in mid-1999 it continued to be run by Jackie and Paul until the end of the season. But the Ford management started to be more involved, and with that more influential.

Jackie and Paul were a pleasure to work for and between them, they supported and encouraged every employee 100% through good or bad times. When the Ford management finally took hold it was like a light bulb just blew.

It was such a different working environment for everyone that it's really very difficult to explain. You were being managed by people who knew nothing about F1, but would stand in your way over anything you wanted to do. Basically, I suppose you could sum it up as 'they knew everything that was wrong but contributed nothing that was right'. One of their pet sayings in meetings was 'you will do it the Ford way or we will get someone else that will' - now that's really good for motivation.

We built a car for the 2000 season that I admit we had taken a few risks with, but the vision was to get to a point with the team over a couple of years where we could win races and perhaps a championship. You don't get there without trying things outside the box.

During our first pre-season tests both Irvine and Herbert thought they had the tools to win a couple of races that season - before it all started to go a bit wrong when we went racing. It would take too long to explain all the reasons, but I still believe the problems could have been eliminated very early if the Ford management hadn't stood in my way of going about fixing them.

I'm a hands-on person who likes to get involved in everything, but the Ford way was for me to stand back and allow others to rectify the problems. At the end of the 2000 season, I was relieved of my duties.

I think even with all the different people they brought in - right up until Red Bull bought the team - shows that the top management, the people that you can't change, didn't have a clue about F1 and how it works.

Who was the best driver that never had the opportunity to be in a top team? baptistesuprey, via Instagram

I'm sure there has been many but right now I would say it's Nico Hulkenberg. He has an incredible level of talent but has never had the opportunity to really show it. To think that he hasn't even been on the podium is downright ridiculous.

If he was in a top team he would win races for them, and if Renault stops talking about it and get on with it he might just achieve that.

Until we got this batch of young drivers coming through - I suppose started by Verstappen and now Leclerc, Norris, Albon and Russell - most teams stuck with the older, experienced breed. They did this because they felt it guaranteed a certain level of result: give that driver the tools and they'd win some races, justify the team's decision.

But now the times are changing and even Ferrari has bought into the fact that there is real talent in the junior formulas. Nurture it and help bring it on and there are more Charles Leclercs out there.

Do you have a question for Gary Anderson? Send it to askgary@autosport.com, use #askgaryF1 on Twitter or look out for our posts on Facebook and Instagram giving you the chance to have your question answered