Gary Anderson: Are Vettel and Raikkonen doing enough?

With Sebastian Vettel hardly setting the world alight at Ferrari, how would you appraise his performances so far? How does he stack up in comparison to the dogged determination and performance that Fernando Alonso exhibited when dragging his less than desirable Ferrari to championship challenges?
Jay Menon, via email

I have to say I did expect more from Vettel in year two with Ferrari. He is someone that needs to understand the car and how it operates for him to drive it quickly and efficiently, and I don't think he has that confidence in the package that Ferrari has created for this season. The car just seems too inconsistent for him to get into a rhythm.

Other than in his last year with Ferrari when he'd just had enough, you are correct in saying that Alonso would always drag some sort of a result out of his less-than-competitive Ferrari.

But the real measure is against their team-mate, Kimi Raikkonen, who it has to be said blows a bit hot and cold.

ALONSO VERSUS RAIKKONEN (2014)

Races together: 19
Qualifying head-to-head: Alonso 16-3 Raikkonen
Points: Alonso 161-55 Raikkonen
Points per classified finish: Alonso 9.5-3.1 Raikkonen

VETTEL VERSUS RAIKKONEN (2015-16)

Races together: 29
Qualifying head-to-head: Vettel 22-7 Raikkonen
Points: Vettel 376-256 Raikkonen
Points per classified finish: Vettel 15.7-11.6 Raikkonen

The numbers speak for themselves. As you can see, Alonso's results relative to Raikkonen were stronger - scoring around three times the points and having a similar advantage in terms of points per finish.

Raikkonen has scored just over two thirds of Vettel's points during their time together at Ferrari.

What do you make of Ferrari re-signing Kimi Raikkonen? It surely shows the team knows he can still deliver and that only bad luck over the past couple of seasons has prevented better results?
Derek James, via email

Ferrari's decision to keep Raikkonen still confuses me. Yes, they may know that better results should have come his way if the luck had been more on his side, but the fact is they didn't. So the question is, what does Ferrari do for 2018 and onwards?

At the moment, Ferrari looks like a team in the doldrums. If it isn't reliability problems it's tyre warm-up problems. If it's neither of those two, it's strategy errors or, as both Vettel and Raikkonen have suffered this year, accidents and incidents.

Changing Kimi for 2017 to someone that would probably respond well to becoming a Ferrari driver would have reignited Ferrari.

There was a while when I thought Nico Rosberg should have gone there, but as he seems - and I say that world loosely - to be staying at Mercedes, why not have a go at Valtteri Bottas? He has lots of experience and when he has had the tools, he's brought home the results.

I've nothing against Raikkonen, but to make the decisions they have, I can only assume they must have someone lined up for 2018 that wasn't available next year.

The question is, who?

We all think F1 looks a bit stupid when the best drivers in the world can't race in the wet, and part of the cause is the lack of adjustment in the ride height. Surely this is a technical problem that could be solved, so that through the McLaren ECU, when rain mode is selected, a part of the suspension can be expanded to create the necessary ride-height gap?
Phil Restas, via email

There are many ways of eliminating this problem. In the short term when the FIA decides that it will allow cooling changes for a climatic condition change, it could just allow the teams to also change the ride heights and rear roll stiffness.

With these two altered from a dry setting, the cars would be a lot more drivable in the wet.

It would not be compulsory, but giving the teams the opportunity means the onus on safety in these circumstances is on the teams and not the FIA.

As you said, later you could introduce a simple actuator that can only have a certain travel that all cars have to use. Or, even better, do so for 2017 when the tyres are changing sizes anyway. Make the intermediate and wet tyre a bigger step-change on diameter, so everyone can design their cars to suit.

Yes, the wet tyres could pump more water and this would also help. But as we saw with Lewis Hamilton in Monaco, he went direct from wets to slicks while others went to intermediates for a middle stint. If we had more water pumping, it would probably take away this strategy option.

F1 cars can rev up to 15,000rpm but never do; would six gears instead of eight help this and would they sound louder?
Nick Hipkin, via Twitter

Nick, with the compulsory fuel-flow valve only allowing a peak fuel-flow rate of 100kg/hour, this is not enough to run to 15k.

What happens is that the engine gets to near the maximum rpm that it can run on the 100 kilograms per hour fuel flow - that's about 11, maybe 12,000. At that point, the MGU-H starts to hold the turbo back, and because there is no more fuel and air available, the engine doesn't want to rev any higher.

In doing this, the MGU-H is acting like a big alternator creating electrical energy, which is either used to charge up the battery pack or, if that's not required, go directly to the MGU-K to increase the overall power level from the internal combustion engine and the ERS.

To accommodate the extra power, the driver then changes into the longer gears, which allows the car to increase its speed.

It's the turbo being held back by the MGU-H that reduces the engine noise as it acts like a big silencer.

That said, I went to Silverstone for practice and I didn't think the noise was that bad - it was certainly better than last year.

How open is the door to new materials in F1 and motorsport in general? Any restriction?
@Curva130R, via Twitter

There is a restriction on materials and it's in place to save money, otherwise everyone would be out there looking for 'unobtanium', regardless of the cost.

This would just drive a bigger wedge between the haves and the have-nots. That gap is already big enough.

If a new material is researched that can be proven to be more cost effective than what's currently in use, then I'm sure the FIA will be open-minded to allowing its use.

I always wondered when and if you ever went through very difficult times, was there ever a point where you felt like giving up? What was your motivation to keep pushing the limits?
James Carrell, via Facebook

James, I've felt like giving up on many occasions and for various reasons.

It's the outside influences that would really piss me off - people interfering that really didn't have a clue what they were talking about and you just couldn't do anything about it. In the end that's what drove me to packing in the design and engineering side of my career in F1.

If it was just the simple problem of having built a car that wasn't as competitive as it should have been, then it could be frustrating.

But, in reality, it was the challenge of the job. You knew, by the time you had sorted out why the package wasn't performing as well as it should, that you would be able to tick the box on what caused it and not make that mistake again.

As far as motivation is concerned I've always had plenty of this, but I believe the main motivation that drives us comes from the people just above us in the management structure.

I have never hidden from responsibility and I've always tried my hardest to motivate the people that worked for me. I would try to draw my motivation from my bosses - some of them were good at it, like Jackie Stewart - and some were really bad at it.

There were some examples of that in the Jaguar team that Stewart became.

At Jordan it was a bit different. Eddie and myself both motivated each other, but Eddie was highly influenced by our financial director who was a penny-pincher.

Because of this, his word was the final say that influenced where the company was going.

Who were the people who were most influential on you and your way of doing things in your career - and why?
Henry Jones, via email

I started in motorsport in 1972 working at the Brabham factory building Formula 3 and Formula 2 cars. A job came up on the F1 team for 1973 and I thought about it for about two nanoseconds before accepting it.

The job initially was working with one of the best and most experienced mechanics in F1, Bob Dance. We worked together building the first articulated F1 car transporter in motorsport, so on the mechanical side he was a great influence.

When I eventually started working on the car, Gordon Murray was the young chief designer and I was this very inexperienced Irish mechanic who had aspirations to become a designer.

Gordon was there to answer my questions, which were many. I've never liked doing anything unless I understood why it was being done, and if I had a different way of doing it I would always put it forward.

I've never been frightened of appearing like a bit of an idiot by voicing my opinion.

Gordon was always there to bump ideas off, and if you look at the cars he designed, who better is there to influence a career?

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