Ask Gary Anderson: Ferrari's 2015 prospects

Will Sebastian Vettel struggle again this season, considering Ferrari is behind schedule on its car design?
@Aman_Arya85, via Twitter

Restructuring is always difficult as it takes time for everyone to fit together. Take Mercedes as an example: it took three years building up after the year as Brawn GP before it looked like a genuine frontrunning team again.

But restructuring does allow you the chance to change how a company operates.

It can be a good thing, as far as a team is concerned, to be running a bit late with car build. Every time a drawing is released for manufacture, it has a date stamp on it and the earlier it is released the further out of date it will be when it is bolted onto the car.

One of the things that has served Red Bull well over the years is the fact that, after it bought Jaguar, a lot of effort went into structuring the company to be able to manufacture the car in the minimum amount of time.

This left the design and research team the maximum time to come up with the best-performing package possible.

If the company can be set up to work like this through being restructured, then it will offer the opportunity to build the best car from the off. And it will also improve mid-season development reaction.

But if Ferrari is just changing the names on the office doors and is late releasing drawings with a company that is not set up to be reactive, then it's a game of catch-up that will last for a long time. Time will tell as to which way Ferrari has gone.

As far as new boy Vettel, and its driver line-up in general, are concerned, Ferrari might just have bitten off more than it can chew.

Michael Schumacher was one of the best drivers that I have seen at adapting to a car's characteristics. He always drove the wheels off what he had on a Sunday afternoon and Fernando Alonso is not far behind him, as we saw during his time with Ferrari.

Now take Kimi Raikkonen; he struggles if the car is not to his liking. He can't cope with understeer and we saw during his Lotus days he also needs the feedback from the steering to be just as he wants it otherwise he is basically nowhere.

Vettel also needs a car that suits his style. He was fantastic at how he used the cars with the exhaust-blown diffuser but when that was taken away for 2014 he still kept trying to drive the car in the same way and the on-power grip level in the corner just wasn't there anymore.

At Red Bull, he had Adrian Newey, who designs and builds a car to be driven in a certain way and who understands what his car is capable of, making him able to relate that to the driver.

At Ferrari I don't think he has that person, so I expect life to be tough for him for a while.

What clues do fans need to look out for in testing in order to know which team's
going to have a good/bad season?
@motor_racing_addict, via Twitter

The easiest way to hide a car's true performance is to always run it with a reasonable fuel load. Something like 50kg minimum costs around 1.5 seconds per lap.

On long runs, a driver could start with 100kg and run down to 50kg, which would equate to a one-stop race and just keep topping up to 100kg every time they change tyres. This means you will never see the car's true pace.

I always look at how easy it is when a driver leaves the pits to put in a decent laptime. Then, I look at how consistent the laptimes are after that. This normally reveals a good, well-balanced car.

A fast car is difficult to go slow in because laptime comes from the car's aerodynamic transient reactions. It should just flow from the braking and corner entry to the corner exit and if this happens the driver will flow with it.

A slow car is just the opposite. It's all jerky reactions mainly because of inconsistent grip levels. Each corner becomes a new experience and the days of a driver making up for a car's inefficiencies are long gone.

Are we likely to see Honda suffer the same problems as Renault experienced in getting their engines running properly in 2014?
James Frankland, via Facebook

Honda has a very good chance of building a power unit that will be competitive from the offset mainly because it has had an extra year to do the research.

With Mercedes doing such a good job in 2014 and Renault and Ferrari struggling, Honda will also have learned by others' mistakes. And it can now modify its engine during the season.

From an engine manufacturer's point of view, the engine is just a turbocharged V6 with certain mechanical regulations defining what you can and can't do.

So in that area I see no reason why the might of Honda cannot come up with as good a unit as Mercedes.

But it doesn't stop there. These power units are very complicated and the MGU-K and MGU-H need to be an integral component, they can't just be an add-on to a good turbo V6.

On top of that, the main challenge is how to get the best recovery of energy from the MGU-H. This is the one component that is free from regulation and the more energy you can recover the more you have to use to improve the laptime.

After that, it is about using it efficiently to again improve the laptime. McLaren, with its Mercedes experience, should be on top of this.

Will Sauber be left to the last position in the constructors' championship?
@William_Olive2, via Twitter

Sauber struggled in 2014 but never count any team out. When you have a bad year that you did not expect, you have to dig very deep to try to understand what you did wrong.

That means Sauber will have learned a lot during 2014. If it puts that knowledge into 2015, potentially it could surprise a few people.

There is no team out there that understands 100 per cent of what makes up a racing car's ultimate performance.

Let's say that Mercedes is top of the tree at the moment and knows 80 per cent of what makes a racing car work. It will hone and improve that 80 per cent in the finest detail and will go into the new season full of optimism

But if it has made a mistake on the 20 per cent that it doesn't know about, the car will not be as fast and the team will be left scratching its collective head until the problem is researched, identified and rectified.

When that is achieved, it will mean it now understands 85 per cent of what makes the car perform. So for the future, it will have reduced the risk percentage.

When you see a small team overachieve, it is because by luck it hasn't made a mistake on the percentage of the car that isn't understood or researched. It is not because it has suddenly had a eureka moment. Believe me, I've been on both sides of this situation.

I've just read the article on 1000bhp future F1 cars - it ends with the possibility of ramping up downforce. Are they insane? Surely by now it is common knowledge that increasing downforce ruins the racing?
Jack Hanley, via Twitter

Insane is, I suppose, a polite way of putting it. I like the idea of 1000bhp some of the time but, as you say, increasing the downforce is a wrong move. Everyone has their own idea, but here is mine. I think it is pretty simple and easy to achieve.

1. Allow each driver five power units per year. In reality, the cost of an engine is not what is driving up the budget, it is the research required before you end up with an actual component.

2. Remove the fuel-flow meter that limits the cars to a 100kg/hour flow rate to remove the aggro of this invisible-to-the-public piece of kit.

This valve is in use for one thing only: to control the amount of turbo boost that a driver can use (boost level is not restricted directly by the rules). So by removing it you would be able to increase boost to whatever level you felt comfortable with.

By increasing the turbo boost, we could see for some of the time power outputs well in excess of 1000hp.

If the maximum fuel used during the race is kept at 100kg then the drivers would use that extra boost during qualifying and possibly at sometime during the race, depending on what sort of strategy they were on. So it would be a game of cat and mouse.

All of this could be done with more or less what exists as a power unit now. Wouldn't it be exciting to see a driver using lots more horsepower for that last lap of qualifying?

And similar to a boost button, more power would then be available when you do catch another car during the race and as long as you don't use more than your allotted 100kg of fuel over the race distance you have still satisfied the green credentials.

3. Aerodynamics is the tricky one. The set of regulations that the overtaking working group came up with a few years ago was a complete waste of effort. No matter what you do, aerodynamics will always exist.

It is not easy to do but a reduction in downforce of something like 50 per cent while still keeping drag levels fairly high to control top speeds to a reasonable level would be ideal.

Doing this would close up the grid as the importance of aerodynamics on ultimate performance would be drastically reduced.

4. Wider and maybe even larger diameter tyres, especially the rears. Give the grip back via the black stuff. Every team can then bolt the same amount of grip onto its car as opposed to the big-budget teams spending millions on aerodynamic development.

So do the above and you end up with cars with well in excess of 1000hp some of the time, bigger and gripper tyres for everyone to transmit that extra power into the asphalt, reduced downforce, which will close the grid up significantly and improve the racing as the cars will not be so aerodynamically critical.

And, vitally important in today's climate, it will dramatically reduce the cost of aerodynamic research.

Which driver in the midfield do you think needs to perform well this year or face being replaced in 2016?
Jake Nichol, via Twitter

It is not only the midfield drivers who need to be keeping an eye out for the big boot up the ass, outside of Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo and possibly Daniil Kvyat, no one is safe unless they have big money available.

Formula 1 is in a bit of a sorry state at the moment. It is just too expensive for someone to own a team and run it as a business to make a few bob, as Eddie Jordan did back in the old days.

It has now become a victim of its own success. Because of that, it is either going to be only manufacturer teams or large company-owned teams like Red Bull that will exist.

The days of the true privateer are gone forever, I fear.

Hi Gary. I have heard that you used to make your own cars under the Anson name and internet searches throws up lots of results but not much information. What can you tell us about the Ansons?
Dan Martin, via email

Indeed I did. When I got involved in motorsport in 1972 I was a budding racing driver so in 1975/76 my brother-in-law Bob Simpson and I built a Formula 3 car in the garage at his parents' house for me to race.

It was called an Anson SA1 - we had some success but it didn't take long to realise that my talent and wallet both suffered from the same problem: they were low on resources.

I am glad I did it because it was the first thing that taught me that racing drivers were not just spoiled, whinging kids. When they are moaning about something there is actually substance behind it.

When I stopped, a guy called Dick Parsons drove the car with sponsorship from Unipart (pictured) and he got some good results. We built the Anson SA2 on the promise of sponsorship from Unipart but that faded away in what was my first insight into the politics of motorsport.

One day I got a phone call from Alex Hawkridge of the Toleman Group to ask me to come to a meeting. I went there and met with Alex and Ted Toleman, who wanted to buy the project and they would finance it to allow me to get on with designing the cars. Sitting looking at Ted Toleman with the biggest gold bracelet I have ever seen around his wrist, I said no, because I felt that we could somehow do it on our own.

After that they got involved with Rory Byrne. I wonder what would have happened if I had said yes? The project sort of faded away after that but was rekindled in 1981 - but that's a story for another day.