Can anyone else save McLaren?

Are there any potential engines, or engine manufacturers, out there in another series that can quickly adapt to F1 and 'solve' McLaren's woes?
Robert Pearson, via email

With the engine regulations as they currently are, I can assure you that if anyone says they can build one of these things quickly and solve McLaren's problems short-term then they are lying through their teeth!

Anyone starting the project now will take at least three years, and that is probably to get to where Honda currently is. On top of that, there's lots of talk about regulation changes in or around 2020/21, which just happens to be around three years away.

So why would anyone in their right mind commit to building a power unit now? It would make more sense to wait until the new regulations are finalised and then at least start on equal footing with the other manufacturers.

From what I hear, Mercedes doesn't want to supply McLaren, neither does Ferrari, and Renault, or at least the Red Bull side of Renault, won't want to supply McLaren.

I'm afraid McLaren has backed itself into a corner. A marriage only exists if you can take the good with the bad, so my advice would be to stick with Honda and improve the inter-company working relationship. Then success might just be around the corner.

Why is F1 pushing for cockpit protection when IndyCar hasn't, considering the serious accidents they have had?
David Williams, via Twitter

IndyCar has considered it, and intends to implement something similar to the screen that we saw Sebastian Vettel trial at Silverstone.

Injury has always been, and always will be, part of any exciting sport. After all, if it wasn't difficult or dangerous then why would anyone bother to watch? But when injuries happen through no fault of your own, and there is a potential solution out there that might just help, then it would be negligent not to implement something.

Closed-cockpit LMP cars are as claustrophobic as anything that a driver has to sit in, but still F1 drivers go off and race in them even at night in the wet without any problems. So I am pretty sure that the drivers we have in F1 would very soon get used to a screen.

It doesn't have to be as big as the shield on the Ferrari at Silverstone, since no matter what is introduced it will never be a catch-all device. It could be about two thirds of the height of the one we saw and the carbon mirror mounts could be part of the structure, effectively making it into a three-piece component.

What you have got to remember is that drivers hated seatbelts when they were first implemented, they hated the HANS device, they hated the headrest, they hated it even more when the cockpit sides were brought forward and upwards. Basically they are a brave and talented bunch of whingers, frightened that someone else will come to terms with change faster than them.

I don't mind the halo, but it seems a lot of people do. Why can't it be designed and built with a clear type of material that isn't as noticeable?
Robinder Dhaliwal, via email

The reason is fairly simple in that carbon (of some sort, and there are lots) is the best practical material for this type of structure. That's why F1 cars use carbon for suspension components, since its stiffness/strength-to-weight ratio is second to none.

I must admit that the halo does make it look a bit like a dirt track car from the States. I think they call them 'Outlaws'.

If the halo was to be made from some see-through material then it would need to have a much bigger cross-section.

As I said above, it will never be a catch-all device no matter what it's made of. But if you take a simple accident such as Felipe Massa's in Hungary in 2009, when he got hit on the head with a spring that fell off Rubens Barrichello's car, the halo would have a very minimal chance of deflecting it, while the screen would do something. Would it do enough? Who knows, but it would certainly have helped.

My problem is that I can see the halo being introduced and being fine for a while. But then someone loses a front wing and where it would normally have been deflected by the existing cockpit shape and the driver could do a bit of a duck so it misses their head, the halo would trap it in the gap between the central forward mount and the headrest and the consequences could end up being catastrophic.

So to sum up my position on the halo, I've been around motorsport for a while and this problem is by no means new. I was in the pitlane at Kyalami in 1977 when the Shadow of Renzo Zorzi stopped just across from the pits with a small fire in the engine bay.

A marshal ran across the track carrying a fire extinguisher, just as Zorzi's team-mate Tom Pryce crested the hill. He ran straight into the marshal, the fire extinguisher hit Pryce on the head, and both men died instantly.

Pryce's foot was still on the throttle, so his car carried on flat out until the end of the straight, where it crashed. That was 40 years ago and only an isolated incident among many, but that day we lost a driver destined for great things.

Surely it's time to do something - and then build on it?

Is Renault's performance at Silverstone now a benchmark for them for the rest of the season?
@StewartKSF1, via Twitter

Renault has been threatening to pull off a result like this for a while, but Silverstone was the first time it got the whole weekend together. Will it continue that way? Who knows, but one thing is for sure - Nico Hulkenberg is a very talented driver. Give him the tools and he will do the job.

At Silverstone, I was able to obtain a pitlane tabard that enabled me to get properly close to the cars, and at the end of free practice one I came back to the press room and downloaded my thoughts.

On Renault, it was that it looked like an underfunded team. This impression came from the overall feeling and appearance of the garage set-up, along with the car which is lacking both detail and (owing to its matt paint finish) any sparkle.

All of the bits were there, but they weren't that nice or that exciting, and there were varying degrees of differences between the two cars. So in general, it wasn't an exciting garage to look into or a place where you'd expect great things to happen.

Why are different engine modes allowed? The turning up of the Mercedes engine smacks of qualifying engines - weren't they outlawed?
Enrique F. Bobadilla, via email

All the components in a power unit can stand a certain load-to-life. If you increase the power output, the load goes up and the life is reduced. So using a different engine mode for a short amount of time reduces the overall life of the unit, but the teams will be monitoring that very closely.

If you take Lewis Hamilton's race at Silverstone as an example, as soon as he got away from Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari he would have been turning his engine performance down. The more he can do this, the more he will have in hand when he uses this unit the next time.

The current power units are very complicated beasts, but I would look at it the other way round. They are turning it down when they don't need that extra power to extend the life for a day when you might need that little bit more.

Looking at the damaged wheel tethers on Carlos Sainz's car, I was expecting them to be some sort of space-age high-tensile material in a cable form. So I was a bit surprised to see that they looked more like string. What are they actually made of and has the design changed much since they were introduced?
Phil Retsas, via email

Let me assure you they are made from space-age materials, and if you saw one of these cables being tested then you would be impressed. The difficult part is actually the end attachments onto the chassis or upright assembly.

They are made from a material called zylon, which has a very high tensile strength, and unlike carbonfibre it can be used in its dry-fibre condition. It needs to be protected from sunlight, so normally it's encased in shrink wrap and then inserted in the upper and lower wishbones.

The requirements used to be for one tether per upright assembly. But as with anything, that only gives you one chance to retain the assembly if anything goes wrong. If it gets cut, you have a 25kg upright and wheel assembly heading into the crowd.

So currently, you need to have two cables per corner of the car, one in the upper suspension arm and one in the lower suspension arm so it doubles the chance of keeping the assembly with the car. But as with the driver protection screen or halo, this will never cover all eventualities.

Do teams deliberately design aerodynamics that are there for the purpose of disrupting the airflow for the following car? If this is the case, it would be relatively easy to fix by limiting things like vortex generators, but would lead to less downforce. It seems to me that Brawn and co need to focus on simplifying the wings while getting more ground effect areas in the floor.
Robin Ducker, via email

No, teams really do concentrate on developing their own car to be the best package for themselves. Downforce versus drag is all that matters and very few of them would actually know or care what happens downstream.

In 2007 the FIA put together a group with the title of 'The Overtaking Working Group'. Its mission was to come up with a set of regulations for 2009 that would improve the racing and allow cars to follow each other closely.

One of the things this led to the introduction of was the mandatory front wing centre section. This was supposed to be the saviour of close racing, but actually it did nothing, as did the other changes implemented at that time.

Currently, front wings (and, in fact, most of the aerodynamic surfaces on a Formula 1 car) are working at their maximum. This means turbulence of a very small percentage has huge consequences on the downforce-producing performance of those surfaces.

Also, when turbulence from another car affects the front wing of the following car, then the turbulence from that has dramatic consequences further downstream.

Overall the downforce levels need to be reduced and tyre grip needs to be increased. Front wings need to be simpler and the car needs to produce a higher percentage of its downforce from the underfloor.

This will not change the turbulent wake it leaves behind, it will just mean that the following car is affected less by that turbulence.

Should F1 teams really be as big as they are? Why not just set a rule saying that only a small number of personnel are allowed to work on operating the car, as well as designing and developing it, to make it more like the days 40 years ago when small teams could do well?
David Barnes, via email

Although I wish it was possible, we can never turn the clock back. What you are asking for here is a huge amount of people to be put out of work overnight, and these people have mortgages, families, etc. So I think this has to be taken into consideration.

As the years have gone past, F1 has grown in stature and the teams have swelled to suit, so I think they need to be allowed to find their own level of personnel over a reasonable amount of time.

What needs to be controlled is the teams' enthusiasm for overspending. Unless you have a fairy godmother, or a manufacturer making up the deficit in your budget, you will end up in trouble. That is wrong.

When you consider that a large team like Mercedes employs in excess of a thousand people and only takes about 80 to the circuit, it means that for most of those employees it is a normal 40-hour-a-week job.

Budget control is a waste of time; component control, as with the engines and gearboxes, is the only way forward. If you had to run the same-specification nose and front wing, underfloor, rear wing assembly, etc, for at least five races in a row then this would save a huge amount of money. But it would still allow the teams to keep the same sort of staffing level and allow the normal staff turnover to reduce the numbers.

I do agree fewer people should be involved in pitstops. They are too cluttered and fast to actually see what is going on.

If I had anything to do with it, I would go for 12 people maximum: one to control the car, two on each wheel, one front jack person and one rear jack person, plus one other to be used as required (such as adjusting the front wing or cleaning out radiators).

People do get fed up with working for an F1 team and move on to 'normal' jobs, so again part of my regulation to reduce costs would be for a staff reduction of a 'maximum' of something like 5% per annum.

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