Ask Gary: Did the Australian GP flatter Honda's progress?

Honda got its first podium finish in a long time in Australia. Do you think Honda has really made that much progress or did the track make it look better than it was?
Jan Muller, via email

I'm pretty sure Honda has made some progress over the winter but I don't think it's up there with Mercedes or Ferrari just yet.

But it is probably in the mix with Renault, and there will be circuits that suit Honda that are like Melbourne but then others where out and out power is a lot more critical.

Honda was in reasonable shape at the end of last season and now it has a team that will push it but work with it to achieve both their goals.

Red Bull was very good at verbally abusing Renault, but now it has a true partner in Honda and it's in both of their interests to take the rough with the smooth. I genuinely believe Honda will make big progress this year.

Having Toro Rosso as a potential test team will also be a huge benefit, so when a new spec engine comes along Toro Rosso will be expected - or perhaps it's better to say told - to take the hit on grid penalties until Red Bull is confident that the performance and reliability is in line with predictions and expectations.

In Red Bull, and especially Max Verstappen, Honda has a team and a driver that if you give them a sniff of success they will be in there like a rat up a drainpipe. That will add motivation to Honda in knowing that its efforts will not go unrewarded.

Why was both the pace and speed of Ferrari so different from Barcelona to Melbourne?
Tono Villalobos, via Twitter

That's a question Ferrari would like an answer to. In Barcelona, in every condition its car was fast and looked very stable with good grip.

If anything it had a little understeer, but nothing to get too excited about. Melbourne is a track that punishes you if you have understeer, but even from looking at the onboard cameras the Ferrari looked fairly well balanced and, as opposed to the Mercedes, the steering input was very smooth.

Perhaps it was a bit too smooth and lazy? Uncommonly for Mercedes, the car looked nervous and it took lots of steering wheel action and feedback, but both drivers seemed to get on with it very well.

One-two in qualifying and one-two in the race confirms that the gap in Melbourne between Mercedes and Ferrari in 2018 was 0.818%, whereas this year it was 0.875%.

So it wasn't so different and in Bahrain last year, Ferrari bounced back. Perhaps we'll see the same again this year?

I'm pretty sure everyone at Ferrari will be keeping their fingers crossed that this does indeed happen, but if it does it still won't explain why Ferrari lost so much since testing.

If it doesn't then something is dramatically wrong. Just to complete the Melbourne 2018 to '19 comparison, here are the 10 teams ranked by how much they improved relative to the absolute fastest pace.

1. Alfa Romeo/Sauber: -1.908%
2. Toro Rosso: -1.634%
3. Racing Point/Force India: -0.958%
4. McLaren: -0.856%
5. Haas: -0.827%
6. Renault: -0.339%
7. Mercedes: 0.000%
8. Ferrari: +0.057%
9. Red Bull: +0.155%
10. Williams: +1.035%

Apart from highlighting what a state Williams is in, I think this shows that the big three lost some of their relative performance compared with the midfield teams. I'm pretty sure this comes from the regulation changes that simplify the front wing detail.

The midfield teams just didn't have the manpower to spend so much on this one area of minute detail. Now it has been simplified the field is a lot closer.

At what speed does the downforce start to work?
Paul Talbot, via email

Downforce is always there but, as the speed increases, it becomes more of a major factor in the cars' grip levels.

Everyone will talk about downforce levels at a certain speed, so let's say for nice round figures a car produces 1500kgs of downforce at 240km/h and the car weighs 750kg.

If the aerodynamics generated were as the theory has it then this is a very rough example of what the aerodynamics do to generate the impressive braking and cornering forces that a current Formula 1 car can achieve.

At 240km/h the car will have its own vertical weight of 750kg plus 1500kg from downforce, totalling 2250kg of vertical load - with a lateral force of 750kg trying to push it off into the gravel trap.

This means you could theoretically generate a cornering force of 3G. Halve that speed to 120km/h and you get a quarter of the downforce, so 375kg. Add on the car's weight of 750kg and you get a total vertical load of 1125kg.

Now, the maximum cornering force would be 1.5G. Go the other way and take a corner like Copse at Silverstone, where on new tyres you probably turn in at something like 320km/h.

With the same downforce level, you would have a downforce load of something like 2500kg. Again, add that to the car's weight of 750kg and you get a total vertical load of 3250kg.

The unfortunate thing is that the drag also increases at the same rate as the downforce.

That is why balancing the downforce levels for a given track - ie Monza, where high top speed is critical, or Monaco where downforce is key and top speed not so important - is always a compromise and not every team makes the best decisions.

In the Australian Grand Prix, Ferrari didn't want to pit Charles Leclerc to have a go at the fastest lap because the gap to Kevin Magnussen wasn't big enough for a risk-free pitstop. Why didn't they let Leclerc pass Vettel, build a 30s-plus gap to Magnussen then box for fresh tyres with less risk? It can't be that nobody had that idea, can it?
Toni Vidovic, via email

I'm pretty sure the Ferrari pitwall saw what was possible and, in reality, the gap was always there to allow Leclerc, and, if he had done it, even Vettel, to make a pitstop and go for the fastest lap without theoretically losing anything.

But no pitstop is risk-free, especially this early in the season. I know that could be the point that wins the championship, but Ferrari was sitting there with 12 and 10 points - a total of 22 for the constructors' championship.

As far as letting Leclerc pass Vettel, I don't think we will ever see that unless the championship is mathematically out of Vettel's reach. Team principal Mattia Binotto made a pre-season statement that it was backing Vettel for the championship.

That's not to say he doesn't want Leclerc to do a good job, but he needs to hope that when he is running in front of Vettel that there is a least one car from a different team between them.

Otherwise, I'm afraid it will be 'Charles, Sebastian is faster than you'.

Last column you stated that the bargeboards afforded the 'greatest area for development' over the 2019 season. If the governing body really wants to trim costs, why not just ban them outright for next season? Indycars have little to none. Cars look better without all that mega-expensive clutter, and costs would be trimmed substantially.
Anthony Mars Jenkins, via email

That is such a sensible idea that nobody with the power to do anything will ever take any notice of it.

Simplifying the front wing and endplates has, in my opinion, closed the grid up a bit just because the smaller teams haven't got the budget or manpower to devote to the detail that was required in this area.

I'm pretty sure the same would be true if the bargeboard area was, if nothing else, reduced in complexity to a simple one-surface single-component construction. It would be pretty easy to do, and as you say it would remove what you call expensive clutter.

It would also allow a sponsor decal to be positioned correctly and not obscured by widgets. We can only live in hope that the powers that be go down this simple route.

Yes, the regulations would need to be written correctly, but that's not too difficult.

Last year Mercedes made the claim that its power unit had reached 50% thermal efficiency. Where is the other 50% and how achievable is it to harness it?
James978, via email

Thermal efficiency is all down to the amount of energy you are putting into the engine against what energy you are measuring coming out of the end of the crankshaft. The missing energy, which in effect is wasted, is used up with internal friction that turns into heat and, in turn, needs to be cooled.

So this also compromises the cars cooling systems. The more heat-efficient the engine is, the smaller the water and oil radiators need to be and, in turn, the smaller the radiator inlet and exit ducts need to be. So, basically, everything is better with an engine that has better thermal efficiency.

1: The engine produces more power at the crankshaft.

2: The cooling requirements are reduced so the radiators can be smaller and therefore lighter.

3: The airflow required to cool those radiators is reduced, leaving more airflow to produce downforce.

4: And/or it takes less fuel for a given amount of power.

Regarding the recent Australian Grand Prix, do you think that the loss of such a small piece of the floor lost Lewis the race? Particularly when he set the second fastest lap of the race on the same lap (lap 57) as Valtteri Bottas did the fastest?
Graham Dalley, via Facebook

It would have had an effect on the overall downforce level of the car and, more importantly, its aerodynamic characteristics.

This area in front of the rear tyre is critical to the diffuser performance, especially when the rear ride height is higher under braking. So the major loss would have been on corner entry.

Let's not hide the fact that Bottas drove the race of his life. He was on it from the lights going out until the chequered flag, and I think if Lewis hadn't had any floor damage he would still have been beaten.

But to make sure he doesn't drop his shoulders it's better for the team to blame something.

If Bottas can keep this sort of performance up over the next couple of races, it could turn out to be a very different championship season in the Mercedes camp.

Regulations change yet team performance patterns don't. Why?
Sasha Selipanov, via Facebook

It really doesn't matter what the regulations are. If a team has the correct infrastructure, budget, equipment and manpower it will always come out on top.

Haas, in all those areas, probably has half of what Mercedes does so is actually doing a fantastic job. In terms of bang for buck, it has probably taken over from what was Force India, which has been very good at this for quite a few years.

In the past, when we had regulation changes, we would sometimes see a smaller team make a step forward.

But now the big teams are just so big and have every tool in the box required to optimise their creation before it hits the track, those days have more or less gone.

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