Ask Gary: Is there enough time to design cars for 2021?

Assuming the regulations for 2021 will be changed and finalised in October, is 14 months (November '19 to December '20) enough time for the teams to prepare?

Tono Villalobos, via Twitter

You are making a big assumption if you think that the 2021 regulations will ever be finalised! I'm pretty sure before anything gets agreed for '21 what we have seen so far will be dramatically diluted.

But just for the sake of it let's say it does get through, then 14 months is not a long time for a completely new concept. Normally, if the regulations are staying the same, or with visually minor but aerodynamically major changes like we have had for the 2019 season, research will always be ticking away in the background and some time will be allocated to researching what the changes might do to the current package.

That initial research would start about nine months before the car is due to run and this gives you some thinking time. But there will usually be a switch and a higher degree of focus on the new cars at least six months before they are due to test.

With a new concept that is anything like the proposals that we have seen for 2021, it will need significantly more time otherwise once again the rules are favouring the bigger teams with more manpower. The unfortunate thing is that it is the bigger teams that have the weight to delay the decisions, leaving the smaller teams to once again make choices later and spend lots of money just getting a car together for the start of the '21 season.

Those smaller squads will then have to spend again on developments just to get up to where they would have been if the regulations had been decided earlier.

Perhaps a simple regulation could be introduced based on team headcount. Let's say Racing Point has a total of 450 people, so it gets the regulations one year before the first race. A team like Mercedes, which let's say has three times as many people, gets the regulations four months before the first race. Something like that might just level up the grid.

F1 teams are so big now, can it really be possible for a technical director to be across everything involved in the car and is this problem a reason why so many teams underachieve? Were you able to be in your time and how did it change over the years that you were in the role?

David Stephens, via email

When we started to design the Jordan 191 in 1990, there were three of us - Andrew Green, Mark Smith and myself. That's nearly 30 years ago and the team, now called Racing Point, probably has 150 people doing the same job.

In my time, it probably went from those three being the design team to around 25, so not really a major change, but still it made it much more difficult to have your finger on the pulse in all areas.

Things have changed dramatically over those 30 years. Racing Point will have around 150 people but Mercedes or Red Bull will have well in excess of double. The cars are much more complicated and it does take a lot more people to detail everything, but managing it must be a nightmare. The team that creates the car will be divided into lots of smaller groups so it all ends up as a fir tree-shaped organisation. But there still has to be someone at the top steering the ship.

Many teams have tried and failed to create a flat structure with perhaps 10 people or even more all having the same level of authority. With the egos involved in F1 you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work out that this style of organisation was doomed to failure. All the systems that make up the car are as important as each other, but there still needs to be a priority. Currently, aerodynamics rule the roost so it gets the number one priority and after that everything else falls into place.

If you take the Red Bull structure, Adrian Newey is the chief technical officer and below him there will be many other people all heading up the various systems that make up the car. They will all be pulled together by a technical manager - or perhaps more than one - whose responsibility is to make sure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. If they have any problems achieving their objectives, Adrian is informed.

If for some reason it doesn't all pull in the same and correct direction then that is when a team underachieves, but more importantly loses its way and it takes time to understand where it all went wrong.

McLaren is a good example of this. In the Honda years it had a fairly flat technical structure, but now that has changed and everyone knows what the objective is and who they report too - so it's just a matter of getting on with it.

I still don't understand what Mercedes was doing at the first test. The car was massively different, with more of an outwash effect and given the short time between the tests, the second design had to be pre-planned. But how could it have learned anything from the first test apart from reliability? It doesn't make sense to me, but given the results, Mercedes must have known what it was doing. So can you explain it?

Michael Sturm, via email

The short answer is no I have no idea either, the first version of front wing endplate was inducing in-wash.

You are correct in that the parts for at least the second test must have been in manufacture prior to or at least the during the first test, but in reality that is what research and development is all about - you back-to-back test components or systems to help you understand the changes you are making.

If you just plonk on your best ideas and call it quits there without any reference, you have no idea as to which component to exploit further or what development direction to take next.

There is always a point in time when manufacturing has to start, otherwise you will miss the test, which as you say is critical to allow the team go through all the system reliability checks. At that date, you will manufacture your latest and best option, so I can only assume that is where Mercedes must have been with its R&D at the time it built up the parts for the first test. This allowed it do more work and produce new parts for the second test.

However, the recovery just shows how powerful and reactive the Mercedes technical group is and it fired a real warning shot of its intentions for 2019 over the rest of the teams.

F1 cars have grown ever larger in recent years, so is there a case for limiting the total lengths and also reducing overall width slightly, let's say from 2000mm to 1900mm? Shortening the cars while still keeping the large tanks to cover the races without refuelling would be possible by allowing the driver's feet to go ahead of the front wheel centre-line. While originally banned for safety reasons, it should be possible to design the carbon tube to offer enough protection now.

Sven Orup, via email

Everything is possible but change is change and it costs a lot of money for the teams, especially the smaller ones that are basically still fighting to exist.

In reality, the increase in width should never have happened. It was completely unnecessary as it was always going to make them take up more of the track width, but at that point in time it was all about making the cars as fast as possible with as much downforce as possible.

Now, for 2021 it's all change once again. Less downforce produced more consistently -especially in traffic - is the order of the day.

All that said, I think the cars actually look like racing cars for the first time in many years. Gone are those stupid-looking, narrow and high rear wings that were at one point in time going to fix all the problems of the loss of downforce in traffic. Do you ever get the feeling that we are a bit like hamsters treading that never-ending wheel of life?

I don't really see the need for shorter cars, or the need to put the driver's feet in front of the front axle. I'm not sure what that will do for the show. As the regulations stand, the cars can be shorter but a maximum overall length at whoever has the longest car currently would probably do no harm to limit it for the future.

Up until now, the regulators have been very good at introducing changes that have done very little for the overall show but cost the teams huge amounts of money over the years.

Yes, we still get some great races but we also get some pretty bad ones. This is the area that needs to be addressed and while we have the fastest car on a Saturday afternoon starting on pole, if everything goes as it should then I see no reason for the races not to be a procession.

You've written in the past about how in a wet race you need to adjust the setup to give better grip in adverse conditions. But what effect does the moisture in the air have on the aero? Is this noticeable in high humidity as well as rain?

Matt Buck, via email

The biggest difference on a car with atmospheric and track conditions is between cold damp conditions (not wet) and hot dry conditions.

The car will produce more downforce in the cold conditions and that downforce will be more robust to any airflow separation problems. In the hot conditions, everything will get that little bit worse and small airflow separation problems, which every car has somewhere on their downforce producing devices, will become more of a problem.

If a team wants to impress during testing, they will always give a lap time a go early in the morning or last thing at night - but not in the midday sun.

When it's wet with some standing water, the ride height of the car needs to be increased, especially at the front, which basically runs more or less on the ground otherwise the car will be very pointy and can suffer from aquaplaning.

The intermediate and wet tyres are both a step bigger in diameter than the slicks so this happens automatically when the tyres are fitted.

Also, normally a team will either increase the rear downforce, if it has the capability, or decrease the front wing angle. This is because in the wet you don't want the car to be on the edge of oversteer, you just need the confidence of that minute amount of understeer to allow the driver to commit to the corner carrying more speed.

The aerodynamic changes for the wet are not for better grip, they are for better balance. Mechanically, you might also soften the rear anti-roll bar but with the regulations as they are that's just about it other than the electronic set up of the differential.

After that it's down to the drivers and their feel for the grip levels, which I have to say is where Lewis Hamilton is exceptional.

Could Red Bull's issues with throttle response/turbo lag (a reference to Max Verstappen's complaints) be similar in some way to what Alfa Romeo got in trouble for at the start of the German GP?

Lee Johnson, via email

No I don't think so, although I don't know the detail of either problem.

I think the Red Bull/Honda problem was more to do with torque mapping relative to throttle application speed. Because of the maximum fuel flow and fuel usage, the mapping of these engines, especially the turbo boost, is massively complicated.

Allowing the turbo boost to be ahead of what you can use will increase fuel consumption and also reduce the potential electrical energy from the MGU-H. A small increase in the speed the driver can apply to the throttle can mean that the turbo boost is lagging that little bit behind, giving less instant torque than they feel they could use.

As far as Alfa is concerned, I am led to believe that it was a clutch mapping problem. Basically, you have two components - the steering wheel paddle and the clutch actuator. in theory, position-wise, they should follow one another but that is not done in practice.

Even with a simple hydraulic system, there will be some hysteresis due to the length of the hydraulic lines. The current electronic system was put in place to make sure the driver was in control of the start for a maximum of a 70m/s delay. If this is increased, it means the driver has that little bit more time to react to the grip level of the rear tyres.

If this offset time limit wasn't controlled, the team could come up with a clutch re-engagement set-up that meant the driver could basically just slip their finger off the clutch paddle and the clutch would re-engage at a rate that was best for the traction and car acceleration. This would basically be an automatic start and not driver controlled.

In your last column you wrote about team-mates hitting each other at Haas. Which of the two do you think most at fault? Magnussen is known to be a very difficult fellow to pass, and Grosjean known for making errors. I know who I blame. Who do you blame?

Anthony Jenkins, Canada

Blame is always a difficult thing to apportion. As you know, it takes two to tango. The drivers need to know that the team is bigger than either of them and that they need to respect each other. They are only there for the good of the team and, as with any other member of the team who causes problems and punches one of their co-workers, they can be replaced.

As you say, Magnussen is a hard driver and he seems to get into quite a few scrapes even with other drivers, and Grosjean still has a tendency to see the red mist, so he doesn't react well in those situations.

That said, I believe that whoever qualifies best should have priority at least for the first lap. By priority I mean if for any reason they get side by side the other driver should be the one that has to allow space. After that, it is up to the team to call the shots.

It knows if the strategy is going to mean that they are going to be fighting over the same piece of track later in the race and Haas should make the drivers aware well ahead of time what it expects to happen.

After that, if they keep doing it then at least as a team you have defined how they are supposed to behave and, if they don't, then standing on the sideline for a race might be the only option.

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