The other factor that helped to make an exciting Tuscan GP

The Tuscan Grand Prix at Mugello gave us an insight into how a high-speed corner with camber can improve Formula 1 drivers' overtaking prospects. Turn 1 in particular, the San Donato right-hander at the end of the start/finish straight, saw many passing moves during the weekend thanks to this positive camber effect.

Even though the cars were reaching speeds exceeding 300km/h on the main straight in the slipstream and with the benefit of DRS, the braking zone for Turn 1 was very short as the drivers could carry so much speed in. The reason for this is fairly simple - the height of the centre of gravity on a race car and the forces acting on it can determine its cornering ability.

Even in a road car, one can feel the effects of g-force when cornering. If you don't wear a seatbelt, you would probably slide sideways due to the lateral forces on your body (sideways g-force). It's the same in any vehicle, but the lower the centre of gravity to the road surface, the less roll will be induced due to the lateral force.

If the corner on a circuit is flat (in geometry, not speed) the lateral force is parallel to the road surface. On a corner with camber, the lateral force is in the same direction but because the car is at a slight angle, it helps to push the car downwards towards the road surface, meaning the car can carry more speed. The resultant vector is shown in the diagram below.

Of course, this is not unique to Mugello. Many old circuits no longer in use, such as Brooklands and AVUS, incorporated high-speed banking - which is just an extreme form of camber - and it was a similar story at Monza until 1961.

On some more modern circuits you will often see adverse camber, where the road slopes the opposite way, which can cause oversteer if the driver tries to carry too much speed. This is often used to help with water drainage but as Sebastian Vettel explained in Mugello, drivers tend prefer the positive camber as it feels like they have more grip.

The great thing about a highly cambered corner is that there are many lines the driver can choose to take

"As a driver, you like cambered corners and you hate off-camber," Vettel said. "This track wasn't designed by [Hermann] Tilke, so there is not so much off-camber here."

The great thing about a highly cambered corner is that there are many lines the driver can choose to take, which means they don't have to rely on a particular part that has been rubbered in. Most of the overtaking at Mugello - including Alex Albon's move on Daniel Ricciardo for third place - was achieved on the 'high side' or outer part of the corner. This is because the driver can carry more speed, as noted by Carlos Sainz Jr before the race.

"If you watch the F3 and F2 races, you can see cars trying very different lines in very long corners," the McLaren driver observed. "The only way that that is happening is because of the camber, which allows you to go up in the corner, or be lower in the corner, and have the same amount of grip on the inside and on the outside of the corner."

Sure enough, one of the most famous overtakes in F1's history was also aided by positive camber, plus a fair bit of bravery. In 1990, I was engineering Gerhard Berger at McLaren and he managed to take pole for the Mexican Grand Prix. After Ayrton Senna's tyre failure, Gerhard was running second to Alain Prost but had Nigel Mansell's Ferrari right behind him. The old iteration of the Mexico City track had the 180-degree, high camber Peraltada sweep leading onto the pit straight and Mansell somehow managed to drive around the outside.

The downside of cambered corners is that due to the high loads involved, tyre wear is increased. Also, the car set-up would have to be optimised to deal with the higher loads, meaning spring and roll stiffness would be altered to suit and perhaps compromise other parts of the circuit. However, due to the high number of fast corners at Mugello, this didn't seem to be the case.

Sainz even suggested that F1 should consider adding more camber to future track designs.

"I don't know why F1 went away from cambered corners in the new philosophy of tracks, which I'm not a big fan of," he added. "If you see Abu Dhabi, Russia, you see off-cambered corners that create pretty boring racing.

"It allows everyone to just offset the car aerodynamically to the car in front, and it creates a much better show, and much better racing.

"So, something to learn here, I think. I think in F1 it's still very difficult to follow, but the camber definitely helps."

I expect the drivers are going to like the Algarve Circuit when they visit for Portugal's return to the world championship next month because, like Mugello, it too has some corners with positive camber, big changes in altitude and blind crests leading into fast corners.

I've engineered Formula 3 cars there and it can produce some good racing. However, although it's also preceded by a long, undulating straight, Turn 1 in Portugal is a very different sort of corner to Mugello. It's a much shorter 120-degree bend with only a small amount of camber, so overtaking there will involve some brave late-braking. Turn 5 is a slow-speed cambered corner, whereas Turns 8 and 13 are medium-speed.

It was refreshing last weekend to see the drivers having to tackle a different circuit, which Lewis Hamilton praised as "one of the toughest tracks to drive", with track limits denoted by gravel traps that punished mistakes. F1 should be praised for its decision to race there and, just maybe, it might have learned something too.