How bright is McLaren's future?

Is Stoffel Vandoorne really the future for McLaren? Surely losing a world champion like Jenson Button and replacing him with a rookie is a net loss for the team?
Henry Fraser, via email

Vandoorne certainly appears to have the speed and his record shows he knows how to win championships. His only outing in a McLaren Formula 1 car in Bahrain in April resulted in a point, a commodity that was very thin on the ground for McLaren at that time.

What Fernando Alonso meant when he talked up Vandoorne back then was that he is not going to keep driving forever. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to see him hang up his helmet at the end of 2017. So McLaren has to invest in the future and both Alonso and Button recognise Vandoorne could just be that long-term driver.

To be successful at anything, you must be fully confident in your talents. For Vandoorne, especially amid the major chassis regulation changes, it is better to have your first year in F1 measured against Alonso than with an unproven driver.

As far as the net loss to the team, with Jenson becoming the most expensive reserve driver in F1, I'm not so sure there is one.

Remember, Jenson won the F1 title seven years ago and to expect that to happen again this far on is a bit unrealistic. Button will be a topline mentor for Vandoorne and when McLaren and Honda have got their programme back on track Vandoorne will be ready to challenge for the championship.

Can you imagine what it would be like if Max Verstappen and Vandoorne were battling it out for a drivers' championship?

Do you have a view on mirrors in F1? I can't help but wonder whether they should be removed entirely. Mirrors are defensive tools, but without them drivers would not be able to weave/block/change line in a calculated manner, eliminating the need for the one-move rule. Cars being lapped could be solved by team radio. Motorbikes run perfectly well without mirrors, so why not F1 cars?
Roger Hick, via email

This question certainly puts forward another viewpoint on how spectators and viewers look at the problems in F1.

It's also a different way of fixing a problem, but I believe mirrors are necessary for the reasons they are used beyond defensive decisions. For example, generally in practice sessions when a driver is on a warm-up lap or traveling slower than other cars for whatever reason.

On a bike you often see the rider sitting up and looking behind him to see if anyone is coming up quickly or even just to check where the opposition is. Not so easy in a car.

Other than policing these overly-aggressive blocking moves more consistently, I would be looking at doing something electronically. It could be a bit like a parking sensor but it would be a red or green light and come up each side of the gear display in the cockpit of the leading car to warn of another car.

As a brief to my engineers, I would be setting the following initial specification:

1) Each car would have three sensors, one on the top of the nose and one each side of the rear light.

2) If a following car comes within three car lengths (this figure could be variable) and is directly behind, then both red lights would come on to warn the leading driver there is a car closely behind.

3) If the following car is offset to the leading car by more than half a car's length (variable), then the light on that side would be red and the other one green meaning that a driver could not pull across on another car that is attempting an overtake.

4) It should have a speed input to allow it to be switched off at lower speeds when a bit of ducking and diving is what makes the racing exciting. It could basically only be used when travelling at high speed on parts of the track like the Kemmel Straight at Spa.

Something similar is basically available in parking sensors and driverless cars, so it is not like you are reinventing the wheel. But if F1 was to adopt such a system, I'm sure it would speed up its robust development, which would contribute to the road car world.

Other than that, just let them get on with it.

We saw Ducati trying out a rear wheel cover at the Misano MotoGP round last weekend - what would that be for? These were used in F1 regularly a few years ago, so is the basic idea the same? There's a suggestion these are a response to the MotoGP winglet ban - given the escalation of aero in F1 over the years, does it make sense for bike racing to crack down on it early?
Adam Scott, via email

On an F1 car, the front hub cap was to help extract the hot, turbulent brake-cooling airflow through the wheel and out via the outside of the rim so that it didn't affect the airflow to the leading edge of the underfloor.

The rear one was for the opposite effect, since it helped keep the brake-cooling airflow from going through the rear wheel, so it effectively made the car narrower.

So on the front, it was used to improve the underfloor downforce performance. On the rear it was used as a drag reduction.

On a motorbike, as with any vehicle, it is most efficient aerodynamically when the cross-sectional area increases or decreases as consistently as possible. Just think of the shape of a dolphin - the fairing with the rider tucked in is trying to achieve this as much as possible.

The rear wheel of a MotoGP bike has a very wide tyre structure. Because of this, the rim creates a circular low pressure area that the airflow is trying to fill up, but not very successfully. By adding this fairing, it fills that void and allows the airflow to pass around the sides of the rim and tyre more efficiently.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could also make it create a little bit of downforce directly on the rear tyre when the rear of the bike is sliding under braking and/or acceleration. I believe that in the bike world they call this 'dirt tracking'.

I don't think you will see it on the front wheel, since it is very sensitive to steering angle and can create more problems than it fixes.

As for the winglet ban, I'm not sure banning engineering technology is the right way to go. You are correct in saying that it will increase costs, but where would we be now if the powers to be banned everything that came up 20 or 30 years ago?

With the current state of F1 technology, how would the great 'professors' such as Jackie Stewart and Alain Prost fare? Wouldn't their skills at set-up and race management be almost entirely undercut by the teams' computer systems?
Al Gordon, via email

Al, it's always very difficult to compare the different eras of competition. Jackie and Alain were successful in what they did in their time because they were clever enough to recognise what was required to give them that success. They also had inherent natural talent, which is the first thing you need to be successful in motorsport.

From that, I can only assume they would be clever enough to recognise what the current formula requires to be successful and then adapt their skills to suit. From that, I would think they would be heavily involved with the engineers on how the car data was interpreted and how potential performance improvements could be recognised, or tyre degradation reduced, or to find a way that would allow the driver to drive the car faster for longer.

Success in anything is about recognising the individual components that make up the whole and addressing all of them to get the best overall result. So many teams are very good at half of it but don't recognise or don't put enough effort into the rest of it to get the result they are capable of.

Jackie or Alain would not have allowed that to happen.

Do you know the meaning of the lights around the cockpit of an F1 car?
Esau Hernandez, via Twitter

The blue light on the top of the chassis in front of the driver is the medical warning light and it is fitted to all cars.

It slowly ramps up and down in brightness continuously to show the system is working. If an impact is detected that could lead to delayed-brain-trauma, the light flashes rapidly and very brightly.

The light status is also sent via telemetry to the medical car, so the doctor knows how severe the impact was before they arrive at the scene.

If the system is triggered, the driver is required to go to the medical centre. If they don't do this, the driver receives a penalty.

It is powered by the system data recorder, so it will work even if all the other electrical systems go down. It is similar in that to the black box on an aeroplane, and it can only be reset by the FIA.

There is also an ERS warning light on the front of the roll-over bar. Red means stay well away, yellow that it might be OK, green that it is definitely OK.

Have you ever felt a beautifully designed car was ruined by a bad livery, and does a car designer have much sway in it?
Alex Ware, via Twitter

Many times, a graphic artist has ruined the actual car's inherent design lines. I have always stuck my nose in, but not always been listened to.

Ian Hutchinson is the guy who did the livery for the Jordan 191 and I think together with highlighting the actual car's feature lines, the result brought out the best of the car. Most people would say it was a fairly nice-looking F1 car.

It can be fairly difficult for a graphic designer to achieve this, especially if the sponsors are after their own logo identification. Big square billboards don't fit very well on aesthetically pleasing racing cars.

We had an example of this in 1998 at Jordan. We had a ramp on the outside of the front wing end plate, and it actually gave quite a lot of downforce - turned into lap time it would be around 0.15 seconds, so it was well worth running.

But the sponsor who had paid for that area complained that they couldn't see their logo well enough, so we were forced to remove it.

However, give me a challenge and hopefully I will find a solution - we made a transparent one out of Perspex. The sponsor was happy, money in the bank and downforce achieved.

Did teams used to under-fill cars for the start of the race in the previous no-refuelling era? Or was that something that only became apparent as a benefit in 2010 when teams were much more on top of finding every little gain? How do you go about working out the trade-off?
Gary Debenham, via email

You always tried to make sure you didn't overfill the cars. On an average circuit, 10kg weight - which is around 13 litres of fuel - equates to around three tenths of a second. So the lighter the better.

The problem was that in those days before refueling, the fuel-usage data was not quite good enough to stake your whole race result on.

If you need confirmation of how close you went with the fuel load, just look at Andrea De Cesaris trying to push his Jordan 191 across the finish line on his way to fourth in Mexico in 1991.

When refuelling was introduced, everyone started to put a lot of effort into how much fuel went into the car and how much the car used. That has now continued into the current no-refuelling era.

If you consider that 0.3s/lap time loss for 10kg of fuel over 50 laps, it's vitally important for the engineers to work out the fastest race relative to a power reduction to fuel load.

People take about suspension softness and stiffness, but what exactly does that mean in real terms and what different characteristics and aims are there for the two approaches? Is there much of a gap between a 'stiff' and a 'soft' set-up?
David Mason, via email

Suspension stiffness can vary dramatically from car to car, and for very different reasons.

The overall stiffness of the car needs to more or less match the stiffness of the tyre. You can't have a car that is solid and allow the tyre to do all the work, or vice versa.

When we hear drivers complain about the stupidly-high tyre pressures that Pirelli is insisting on, part of the problem is that higher tyre pressures increase the tyre stiffness, which is why there is a loss of grip. So the suspension set-up needs to be adjusted to compensate, but the overall result will still be a loss of grip.

So part one of working out what the car stiffness should be is matching the front-car vertical stiffness to the front-tyre vertical stiffness. Get the two working as one and you will get the best out of the tyre. Then it's down to getting the front-to-rear stiffness.

The aerodynamic platform is the biggest driving force when it comes to deciding the front-to-rear stiffness on a current F1 car. You can see that Red Bull runs a very high rear ride height. This is called rake.

As long as you can create a system of vortices that helps stop the airflow from leaking under the sides of the floor, this will then increase the potential overall underbody downforce. It also improves the front wing performance at low speed by making it lower, which makes it work more in ground effect.

If you are running the car like this then you need a stable aerodynamic centre of pressure. In other words, as the car moves from its low-speed high ride height you want the centre of pressure (the point where the aerodynamic forces push on the car) to stay stable or move rearwards slightly. This then gives you increased rear-end stability in faster corners, when the car is closer to the ground.

I have always liked to try to get an aero platform that allows for a front-to-rear stiffness of three-to-one. In other words, the rear of the car is a third of the vertical stiffness of the front. With this type of set-up you can get good traction and good braking stability.

You can then do smallish percentage steps, probably a maximum of 10% stiffer or softer front-to-rear to improve the balance, or 10% stiffer or softer both front and rear, depending on the circuit requirements.

If you have to go closer to a two-to-one stiffness to keep control of the aero platform, then you start to compromise something - either traction or braking stability. If you head towards a one-to-one ratio, then you have a real dog on your hands.

You can control the point where you want to reduce the car's vertical movement by using the centre spring mechanism, which doesn't really compromise the car's in-corner vertical stiffness.

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