Should Ferrari give up on error-prone Vettel?

Sebastian Vettel made a mistake in Montreal even before he got the penalty. What do you do if you have a driver like that who keeps making errors? Do Ferrari have to look at replacing him or can they find a way to stop these mistakes?

Joao Costa, via email

He has made a lot of mistakes and I have said on a few occasions that he doesn't seem to be learning from them. But I do think Canada was a bit of an exception.

The corner where he went over the grass has a blind entry up until the inside clipping point and with a slower car in front of him he probably suffered from the loss of downforce created by that car's turbulence. If you go a metre wider than you should, you are on the dirty part of the track and suddenly on the grass, which is what happened to Vettel.

I am against the penalty he received because, at the moment, there is no real incentive for a driver to stick their neck out and 'have a go'. If they do, the regulations are too draconian and they all know in the end they will suffer for it.

The regulations are what they are and I suppose the stewards were just doing their job, but if it is going to be as simple as just applying the regulations because that's what they say then why do we have any stewards? I thought they could take a view of any situation and alter the penalty as they saw fit, but from what I saw in Montreal that is not the way it is.

That said, Vettel is a professional racing driver. He has won four world championships but above all he should know that that part of the Montreal track is not where any driver would try to pull off an overtaking manoeuvre. You just need to attack the entry, making sure you place the car correctly and then concentrate on the exit.

As a Ferrari driver, you are always under pressure and I don't think that will ever change. But Vettel doesn't seem to learn from these errors.

I'm pretty sure a run of good luck with a few poles and race wins would reduce that pressure. But with the performance of Mercedes so far this year I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon.

There's been lots of talk about the complexity of the bargeboards, which on some cars seem to be ridiculous. Why are these so fragmented? Wouldn't an old-fashioned single piece bargeboard be more powerful and have a bigger impact on the air?

David Russell, via email

In my opinion, they are just ridiculous on all cars and on top of that I would add the brakes ducts are basically out of control.

The bargeboards and the airflow characteristics that they instigate around the car are probably now responsible for something like 20% of a car's overall downforce. Just get a tape measure out, measure up the area that everyone is using for their bargeboards, average it out, and make that a no-go area right through to the trailing edge of the front wing.

As for the brake ducts, Montreal is one of the highest-braking circuits on the calendar. So I would have done the same thing there - take a tape measure, measure the size of the brake duct inlet on all the cars, average that opening size out and that would be the maximum size of the brake ducts allowable.

Then they would become brake ducts again and all the brake duct turning vanes that are - especially on the rear, which we never see - responsible for a large percentage of the overall downforce would be gone.

If these two components were reduced in complexity, I'm pretty sure all teams would save at least 2-3% of their budget spend, which for a small team would be two to three million dollars. You could treble that for a top team.

From my point of view, these are the easy things to address and it would be a win-win situation for everyone.

With outwash being the main reason cars can't get close, can the FIA not put a limit on total outwash or just ban actively sought outwash altogether? At the moment, they just find new ways to create outwash when one avenue is closed.

Antony O'Brien, via email

It's not the outwash that is the big problem, it's the fact that the cars are using the airflow to generate huge levels of downforce. The outwash is just one of the tools that is used to achieve this.

It's just like flying along in an aeroplane. You are doing something like 500mph, the aerodynamic lift is adequate to carry the weight of the plane and its passengers and all is fine and dandy. Then you hit a storm, clouds, crosswind, turbulence or whatever, and all hell breaks loose. The plane doesn't produce the required lift so it drops, the pilot has to react by increasing wing lift and we all hope that it will stabilise soon or you will spill your gin and tonic. Did you ever notice it really only happens when you have a drink in your hand?

It's really the same in a racing car, the driver is using whatever aerodynamic load they have on hand to get around the corners, the cars have all been developed to work best in that condition because all the teams, especially the front running ones, know that speed is the most important factor and if you can qualify on pole, make a good start that's your work done for the Sunday afternoon. Very seldom will a slower car pass a faster car on the track - it will need to happen because of strategy.

But in a race when a fast car that has qualified out of place comes up to try to pass a slower car it lose something like 25-30% of downforce. That makes a fast car into a slow car very quickly, so unless you carry the momentum and stick your nose in before you lose your confidence, then it might never happen. And if you do that you stand a very good chance of getting a similar penalty to Vettel in Montreal.

So, summing up, it's not just the outwash. It's a bit of everything that needs to change. One of the first things that I would do is do away with the blue flags. If they weren't waved at cars that are being lapped and the drivers had to find their own way past it would start to force the teams to design cars that were just that bit more robust in turbulent air.

There were lots of cars with brake temperature problems in Montreal - why is this? What sort of operating parameters do the brakes work to and which different parts have problems? Given the brakes are partly exposed, surely the airflow to them is good enough for cooling?

Michael Davies, via email

Montreal is one of the toughest circuits on brakes and the teams always push the cooling of everything right to the limit. It's very similar to the aerodynamics package, everything is developed to work at its best in clean airflow so if you get behind another car the turbulence from that car effects everything.

The teams optimise the cooling because any airflow that is used for cooling is wasted on producing downforce, so a car's performance is better if the cooling system is pushed to the limit.

The brakes are housed in a brake drum. This basically covers everything and allows the teams to manage the airflow in terms of where and which part of the brake system it is going to. To help with tyre warm-up and consistency, they also manage how much of the hot air gets distributed around the inner surface of the rims.

The brake cooling within the ducts is split into four sections. One is for the disc internal cooling, one is for the disc face cooling, one is for the pad cooling and one is for the caliper.

Getting all these balanced is quite a feat. If the disc gets too hot it will wear very quickly, hit somewhere in the region of 1200C and you are in serious trouble. The same is true of the pads.

As for the caliper, if it gets too hot the brake fluid will start to boil and the brake pedal will get longer and longer. This is actually the critical part because once it starts to happen that's it - your Sunday afternoon drive in the park is all over.

Combine this with the fact that the majority of braking on the rear of the car is done by energy harvesting to charge the battery pack under braking and that the actual rear brakes are not big enough to do the job on their own. Then there's the fact that as the tyres degrade the driver can adjust how much harvesting they are using and they can also adjust the front to rear brake balance as the tyres lose their grip. If you add all that up there are a lot of things to get right, otherwise one part of it will start to run away as far as temperature is concerned.

Would mandating a Monza spec type rear wing help the racing? Less downforce at the rear, meaning less at the front to balance the car leading to higher top speeds and longer braking distances (as well as a reduced DRS effect). Would this increase overtaking do you think? I'd love to see F1 cars slithering around Monaco with Monza downforce levels!

Andrew Brown, via email

With less wing downforce, the cars would lose less downforce in traffic. So, in theory, this should improve things. But I'm not sure the longer braking distances would help because you would still be on the limit of the braking potential.

I would love to see an F1 car around Monaco with Monza downforce levels but I think the drivers we have today have been too spoiled with these high-downforce, high-grip cars. If you go back, let's say to the 1990s, at that stage the downforce the cars were producing in Monaco was then probably similar to what the current cars would produce with a Monza rear wing fitted in Monaco. So, you can drive to whatever downforce level you have at any circuit.

If all the cars are to the same regulations, in the end it will just alter the lap time. It's a bit like driving in the wet with less grip - everyone manages it, it's just the lap time changes.

A couple of years ago it was decided that higher downforce levels would be a better spectacle as the cars would be faster. But I think most normal people would have questioned that and, more importantly, why would a higher grip, faster, wider car produce more overtaking?

Downforce needs to be reduced and the downforce the cars do produce needs to be more robust and work more consistently in turbulence. A controlled ground effect car will achieve this, but as with anything it needs to be controlled.

Why can the FIA not tune the DRS in Montreal so that cars are level into the braking zone of the last chicane, and not well past by halfway down the preceding straight? Every year it seems to be the same; can these things not be accurately predicted?

Andrew Rae, via email

They can be accurately predicted, but what car speed differential do they use? If you take a Ferrari leading with a Mercedes following then the distance would be 'x', but if you swap them around the distance would be much shorter as the Ferrari was quite a bit faster on the straight without the use of DRS.

It's the same all the way down the field, so really it's impossible to get it much more accurate than it is. The only other way is to do away with it altogether and let the drivers get on with it. That way, the teams would have to put much more emphasis into the car design and set-up.

It is about the most artificial thing that you could have in a competitive sport. Can you imagine if in golf one player was catching another and as soon as he got within one hole they were able to use a bigger hole on the next green? Basically, that's about how stupid it is.

There are plenty of things that could be used to assist overtaking, but if it has to be the dreaded DRS then one way to improve it would be to allow a driver to use it to catch up to within a second of the car in front. Once you have done that then you are on your own.

That way, perhaps the bunch would be able to stay closer together, which will put more pressure on the leading car, which could potentially lead to more mistakes. It would also mean that being able to follow another car for longer was more critical in the car's aerodynamic design.

What route would you like F1 to go down with powertrain rules - regular combustion engine with bio fuel, electric power, hydrogen or something else?

Daniel Ford, via Twitter

Personally, I think what we now have is reasonable. The noise is acceptable and the challenges created with the hybrid part of the equation, especially the MGU-H, has potential for future road car usage.

But my main change going forward would be to reduce the normally-aspirated engine size and, along with that, the fuel allowed to be used. In line with that, harvest the braking energy from all four wheels. There is a huge amount of wasted energy during braking from the front axle, so if that was harvested - or at least some of it was - then you could maintain the current power levels as there would be more available from the battery pack.

With all the governments now going down the route of banning fossil fuels in cities and, as some have stated, completely by the middle of the century, F1 needs to keep pushing the boundaries. At the moment, that seems to be electric cars but in the meantime hybrid is a good step in the right direction.

Going back to a fully fossil-fuelled car is not really an option. Hydrogen is still a little bit too far away.