Ask Tim: Why the FIA was right and wrong on Racing Point

Racing Point claimed it received a set of 2019 Mercedes rear brake ducts as spares for its RP20 car for pre-season testing. How is it possible for the 2019 Mercedes brake ducts to be used on the RP20 car if the brake ducts Racing Point claimed to have designed itself for the 2020 car are not identical and a complete copy?

Justin Mayberry, via email

To answer the first part of that, the fixings where they attach to the uprights or suspension can be interchangeable with the Mercedes, as Racing Point has the Mercedes rear suspension components anyway given they're non-listed components. So that's how the RP20 could theoretically accommodate the rear brake ducts from last year's Mercedes, as they become part of the suspension upright.

I understand that Racing Point was supplied with all the CAD drawings of the 2020 rear brake ducts, so it could adapt those to suit. What I'm unclear on is, if the team says it has made changes, how is it that the powers that be can't see that having looked at all the components and the drawings and compared them to the Mercedes ones? It seems absurd to me that it would take the chance that it wouldn't be found out.

As for the ducts now, the actual shapes and internals could be slightly different.

Given that it's not the part itself that's been ruled illegal, but more the way it was acquired - as a breach of the sporting rather than technical rules - it's a delicate situation. Of course, the other teams will naturally be upset that Racing Point is allowed to keep running the same part for the rest of the season and in that respect, I think the FIA has been a bit short-sighted. If it is saying that the ducts are a copy, then Racing Point has got to come up with something else.

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The problem for the team is to produce something different in a week and know that it's going to work without doing the necessary testing. I can't see that it will be able to do that, especially with heavy-braking circuits like Spa and Monza coming up. It's asking the impossible to design and windtunnel it and so on.

From that sense, allowing Racing Point to run them at least in Barcelona was the most logical thing for the FIA to do. Otherwise, the car could have potentially not been able to race. The only way the FIA could do it was to say 'we're going to take away the points and give this fine', but it should have been a bit firmer with a deadline on when it to come up with something different. It's going to rumble on and on until Racing Point is forced to come up with something different.

It's nice to see teams other than Mercedes winning, but it seems a bit unfair that the team was effectively penalised for doing a better job of extracting the most downforce from the car by the tyres. Should F1 go back to having more durable tyres?

Adrian Kendrick, via email

It was interesting that Pirelli chose to go softer while increasing the pressures, but ultimately it's up to Mercedes like every other team to respond and get the best out of it. That's the challenge of F1: teams can't run a Monaco set-up at Monza and expect to be competitive. The same principle applies with tyres - teams have to adapt their set-ups to suit the circumstances, so I don't necessarily think it's unfair on Mercedes that it wasn't able to use its downforce advantage.

Red Bull was better simply because it had less downforce and a better set-up

Perhaps it didn't run the hard tyre long enough in practice and just got caught out. It's not only the tyre pressures, you've also got to take into account 'can we run this much camber and this much toe in' and so on. Interestingly, virtually everybody else tried a lower-downforce setting because of the tyre problems from the week before, which surely should have been on its radar as well given what happened to Valtteri Bottas.

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Mercedes has probably got the most downforce of any car on the grid and maybe it thought the tyre pressures would result in having a bit less grip. Equally, it could have been concerned about the car sliding around a bit more by taking downforce off, but that would have avoided putting so much pressure on the tyre.

I get told by tyre engineers all the time, 'you've got to be running this tyre around 2-bar to get the best out of it' but in actual fact we don't because we adapt it to suit the car and the conditions. That's exactly what Mercedes should have done. Red Bull was better simply because it had less downforce and a better set-up.

Going back to harder tyres definitely isn't the answer.

What's the main reason for cars to perform so differently on the same compounds?

@f1_nugget, via Twitter

It comes down to how the car is set up to get the best performance from the tyres. The engineers have got a lot of things to play with, especially on a Formula 1 car where you've got all the electronics to help as well. It all comes down to how much camber, how much toe, what springs they're running, how much wing.

It's a whole bunch of things and all the cars will have a different base level of downforce that they strip back from, as Red Bull did last weekend.

Mercedes has been head and shoulders above everybody else in terms of handling and downforce, but every car is going to be different in terms of how it's balanced, so it's up to the team to get the most out of it with their set-up.

Is Sebastian Vettel's lack of performance down to lack of confidence in the car, or could there actually be a defect in his chassis that explains the differences from Charles Leclerc?

tctempleton, via Instagram

Ferrari has said it might change Vettel's chassis if it will help him cure his current problems and it's not unknown for this to make a big difference. It might be that he's hit a kerb somewhere and the chassis has cracked, which can affect the handling of the car, but of course he doesn't have the luxury that drivers had in the past of being able to take the spare and conduct a back-to-back test.

Back in the days when Formula 1 allowed teams to have a T-car, I'd run drivers who would sometimes find they could get a lot more out of it. The most famous example of that was Ayrton Senna at Monaco in 1988, when he was 1.4s faster than Alain Prost.

It does seem like Vettel's confidence has gone, his belief in the team has gone and maybe there's something wrong with the chassis which is compounding it

They're all built to the same spec, but these days, the cars are running so low at the front that you can clobber one of the great big sausage kerbs and it's quite easy for a crack to appear. It's one of these things where you need to strip the car down to the bare chassis to find - it could be that the mechanics are just looking on the outside when it's actually on the inside.

That said, all the other stuff that's going on with his contract and looking for another drive appears to have distracted him to the extent that he's not performing as well anyway. Look at the start of the last race. He's a world champion, you shouldn't be making mistakes like that.

It does seem like his confidence has gone, his belief in the team has gone and maybe there's something wrong with the chassis which is compounding it.

I know it's not the fastest way around a corner, but after again coming across a photo of Jack Brabham in a beautiful four-wheel drift from 1966, I wondered 'Could you actually do that in current Formula 1 car?' I feel the current cars hate any yaw, and exponentially shed downforce with even small degrees of yaw. And those lovely shark fins at some stage also hurl dirty air at the rear wing. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Hans Schmidt, via email

Back in those days they still had treaded tyres and you could get away with drifting. But the way tyres are made today, they just wouldn't withstand it. You do see it occasionally, but it's normally one end or another that gets loose, it's very rare that you see a complete four-wheel slide on these cars because of all the extra downforce that they have compared to the sixties and seventies.

There is a slight element of the fin giving dirty air to the rear wing, but the teams put the car in yaw in the windtunnel so they would know exactly how far the car would need to go before it started having problems.

The other thing to consider was that you had drivers realising they could gain time by being smoother. Brabham was a very quick driver, but then you look at somebody like Jackie Stewart, who very rarely got his car out of shape because he was more precise and got more out of it that way.

How much of an improvement could the Peugeot 905 Evo2 been over the previous 905 if its development had continued in preparation for 1993 World Sportscar Championship that never was?

Ben Johnson, via email

I'm not so sure. We all got really excited about the Evo2 and decided that we needed to do something a bit different. Jaguar put front-wings on its XJR-14 so we copied that for the 905 Evo 1, and then we tried this separate wings and narrow nose concept.

I really wanted to race it, but we couldn't get it balanced in Magny-Cours so it was shelved

We took it to Magny-Cours and used it in practice, but I couldn't get the thing to balance because it just had too much front downforce. I'd like to think we would have been able to make it quicker, and I'm sure in the end we would have been able to get over it.

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It would have been fun to play with it a bit more and I really wanted to race it, but we couldn't get it balanced in Magny-Cours so it was shelved. Of course you wouldn't have taken it to Le Mans in that configuration anyway and then Peugeot pulled the plug, meaning we used the same car for the 24 Hours in 1993.

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