Why truly fixing F1 may mean upsetting the purists

Toto Wolff suggested Ferrari lost "momentum" after what happened in Bahrain. Is momentum a real thing for teams - have you ever been in a situation where your team lost or gained momentum or is it just a term that sums up a wide range of factors?

Michael Jones, via email

Momentum is a huge factor, especially in sport, and motor racing is no different. Get into that winning streak and everyone just digs that little bit deeper. It's invisible and no one really notices that it's happening, but it happens.

If you looked at Charles Leclerc after the race in Austria you could see his shoulders had slumped. That was the second time this season that a potential win was taken away from him. Yes, the first was a mechanical problem and the second more to do with himself and his strategy, but he is now wondering when or if it will ever happen.

Mercedes is so strong this season and Red Bull is nipping at Ferrari's heels, which means that might just have been his last chance for a long time.

As you say, it's a wide range of factors that determine the outcome of any race, but for sure a little success goes a long way to affecting the end result. That in turn creates the momentum that Toto is talking about.

But all the momentum in the world doesn't make up for a good car and Ferrari needs to bring some developments to allow it to understand the package more. It was a rocketship in Bahrain and in Austria, but that's only two out of nine races so far this year. Not a very good hit rate.

How big an impact would switching back to the 2018 tyres have on this year's cars? Would Mercedes genuinely struggle?

coach_acron, via Instagram

When the thinner gauge tyres were first introduced for the Spanish Grand Prix last year, I felt that it might just affect teams differently. Mercedes had blistering problems, so I felt it might gain the most, but after the race, once he'd run in the test, Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari ran the two types of tyre back to back and were fairly vocal about the fact that it was the right decision. But not everyone gained. This is part of what I wrote then:

'Reducing the gauge of the tyre is mainly to reduce the risk of blistering. It is the rubber content that retains the heat in the tyre and that can lead to the rubber basically overheating and bubbling up. If it's not visible it can still be happening and they call that internal blistering.

'Also, with a thinner gauge the tyre will actually feel like it is a harder compound. This is because there is less rubber moving around so for some it will feel like there is less grip. A thinner gauge will play into the teams with higher downforce levels as the tyre will be more stable and because of the extra downforce the tyres will be worked harder generating better and more controllable grip levels.

'Bridgestone used to play around with gauge thickness from race to race but we were talking about 0.1mm difference on roughly a 3.50mm rubber thickness - so a small change - but even then it had a serious effect on how the cars worked the tyres.

'Pirelli said it reduced the gauge thickness by something like 0.4mm, now that's a lot when you consider that the overall thickness wouldn't be much different from Bridgestone. That change will have a significant effect on how the tyres come into and stay in their working temperature zone.'

So, to answer your question, yes I believe Mercedes gained that little bit more than the rest, but everyone made the decision to go with the thinner gauge tyres. Going back is just a retrograde step and I'm pretty sure if it meant Mercedes got into any problems, it would get on top of them fairly quickly.

What should Red Bull do about Pierre Gasly? What can you do to help a driver who is struggling that much or should they just give up on him?

David Allen, via email

Personally, I don't think I have ever really seen the fire in his belly. Even back in GP2, as it was called in his day, he seemed to struggle to be consistently at the front and in the year he won the title, he had to recover from a difficult start.

Some drivers come alive when they get into higher-performance cars and some struggle, and last year at Toro Rosso with his fourth place in Bahrain I thought he was on his way. He had four other decent points-scoring results, but that was the highlight of the season. Don't get me wrong though, they were great results and he thoroughly deserved them.

I think Red Bull reacted too quickly when it got the shock news that Daniel Ricciardo was packing his bags and on his way to Renault. The driver pool was a bit depleted at that time and Gasly was the best of its bunch, but as we've seen on many occasions Red Bull can make or break a driver's career with its decisions.

There is a long list of drivers that have benefited from its generosity, but an even longer list of drivers that have been put out to pasture with their careers destroyed.

This year, Red Bull is in a bit of a holding pattern. It is firmly stuck in that third spot behind Mercedes and Ferrari, and if it's in a potential winning position then Max Verstappen will be the man to achieve it. That means a quick decision on Gasly's future is not required.

Red Bull should give him a bit more time and try to help him through his problems. Next year is when it needs to make the right decision, because to challenge Mercedes or Ferrari on a regular basis a team needs two potential winners.

Why, bearing in mind the cost and fragility of front wings in the past, plus the difficulty of overtaking at places such as Monaco, did the last aero regulation update allow even wider front wings? At all the races we see the wings wobbling about to a ridiculous extent - surely the extra leverage on a wider front wing must exacerbate this and at the extremes of the 'wobble' contribute to the large number of terminally damaged and very expensive wings on the Austrian sausage kerbs?

Chris Stacey, via email

I must say there are many people out there asking the same question, but I'm afraid the powers that be decided that this was a good direction and would help with the lack of overtaking. 'Has it helped?' is a big question and the answer is 'if it has, then it's more or less invisible'.

Personally, I don't think the teams would have been able to exploit the outwash characteristics of the car if the front wing regulations width-wise had been left alone. Yes, go ahead and simplify the endplate detail as they have done, but if they had kept the narrower wings then it would have saved the teams a lot of money on aerodynamic development in that area and even more from accident damage.

The big problem is that the same people who came up with this regulation change for 2019 are the ones proposing the changes for 2021.

The proposals we've seen are for a much simpler car. But that's just a study in styling and nothing to do with what the cars will look like when the teams finally get their hands on whatever the new regulations end up creating.

Writing a rule to improve overtaking is impossible. Yes, you can simplify the front wing detail, you can create an underfloor that will be more robust to turbulence, but while you have a car that produces downforce from the speed that it's traveling at, you will always have problems when following another car.

You have to put the teams in a position where they have the responsibility to design a car that will work well in traffic. As far as I am concerned the only way to do that is some application of a reverse championship grid format. Many purists will hate this, but the races where one or two quick cars are coming from behind are always the exciting ones.

Can you imagine the grid at Silverstone? Robert Kubica on pole, George Russell beside him and at the other end of the grid Hamilton sitting there with Vettel eight metres in front of him? I would definitely watch it to the bitter end because there would still be battles going on until the chequered flag.

Why did you protest Michael Schumacher's victory for Benetton in the 1994 Brazilian Grand Prix? And why wasn't the concern raised earlier?

Jose Santos, via email

The reason was very simple. We at Jordan, (I), believed its car to be illegal and I still hold that viewpoint to this day. We'd had a terrible 1993 season and when we finished fourth in Brazil at the start of '94 it was just the fillip we needed. But promotion to third would have been great for a small team.

The reason we protested was that in the regulations it stated that the underfloor must form an impervious surface with no holes or cutouts. The dictionary states that the definition of an impervious surface is a surface that will retain water.

On the Benetton, the way the team had mounted the bargeboards had a bracket on the lower edge at the front and one at the rear. This meant that if you took the underfloor surface, which includes the bargeboard lower edge and the lower front and rear brackets that connected to the underfloor, there was a gaping hole in the middle of it. To me, you could pour water through this.

Mounting the bargeboards rigid enough with one bracket was not easy and there was a potential loss of downforce from them. But all the rest of the teams managed it and suffered the consequences.

The FIA decided the surface that was left was impervious, so that in reality meant you could have a floor with big holes in it and it would be deemed as impervious!

Moving on a few years, Red Bull was hauled up at Monaco in 2012 because it had some holes in front of the rear tyre similar to the louvres that everyone has.

Sauber started this trend, but what Red Bull hadn't noticed when it had done its research was that Sauber also had a small slot to the outer edge. It was only one millimetre wide, but it meant it wasn't a hole they had in the floor as the floor still had a periphery and inside that it was impervious. Red Bull had just put holes in the floor - nice holes, but just holes, and it was caught out by this.

Why didn't I bring it up before the race? Simple, I just noticed it on the grid and confirmed it in my mind after looking at the car after the race.

The progression of fastest laps in France was consistent and riveting. How could anyone say it was a boring race? Conversely, the Austrian event was touring between lap two and the first pitstops and a bit of a flurry near the end. Exciting for Max and Charles. Your thoughts?

Leigh and Jen Edwards, via email

Sorry, but it wasn't only me that thought the French race was boring. It's just a wide-open circuit with no character and no penalty if the drivers make a mistake.

As for the fastest lap progression, that just shows how much the top drivers had in hand and how much they were conserving everything. I'm pretty sure that at any point most of the top guys, with a little help from a couple of knobs on the steering wheel, could have found a second if they had really wanted to.

In Austria, you could see the risk that was being taken by the drivers. With Lewis Hamilton having to back off at the end of the straights to keep the temperatures down, it meant that to achieve a reasonable lap time he needed to push to the limit everywhere else. He was always running over the sausage kerb at the exit of Turn 1 and in the end that sort of abuse, this time at Turn 10, led to him damaging the front wing.

He was trying to make up for a problem, but in the end paid the price. At Paul Ricard, there would be no price to pay for that sort of commitment.

Everyone will disagree with what they think is good racing and what is not, and it's good that you could take enjoyment from the race in France. But from my point of view I really want to see cars running close together with the 'possibility' of an overtake. Verstappen on Leclerc in Austria was a very good example of this. More please!

There are currently 88 points available to the top six finishers compared to 13 for places 7-10 (not including fastest lap), and the difference between first and third is the same points you'd get for finishing fifth. Surely this just exacerbates the problem in a season like this when we have the 'Big Three' ahead, and Mercedes dominating the front? Would you support a system with 10 points for a win down to one point for 10th?

Glenn James, via email

There have been many points-distribution systems through the years and I don't think changing them has really impacted the outcome of any championships - especially when you consider that sometimes the change in systems impacts the strategy and approach.

In the early 1990s the points only went down to sixth place - so you could actually be having a good season finishing seventh in every race but have no points on the table.

Those were tough days for the smaller teams and even then we had what was called the big four - Ferrari, McLaren, Williams and Benetton. Beating any of the two cars of these teams was very rewarding, but with eight well-designed and well-funded cars and drivers and points only going to sixth it wasn't easy.

Then the points went to eighth and the gap between first and second got smaller. Then it went to what we currently have with points to 10th and the gap of 25 for a win and 18 for second, which was to ensure that race winners should be championship winners. For the smaller teams there were more points as a reward for pushing on and getting in the top 10.

But reliability has become the norm these days. Back in the 1990s probably half the field would fail to finish, but now it's seldom more than a couple of cars that don't make it to the chequered flag, so perhaps a review wouldn't do any harm.

There has been talk in the past of everyone getting some points. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does dilute the pressure to actually finish races on the road.

Perhaps something like 25, 20, 16, 13, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - that's points to 15th - would work. So not quite all the way and it does close the gap between first and second just that little bit.