What midfield F1 teams are feeling in January

Father Christmas has long disappeared up the road, leaving everyone in his dust - a bit like Lewis Hamilton did during the 2018 Formula 1 season. So now let's fast-forward to Sunday March 17.

It's 2pm and we're sitting in the pit-straight grandstand at Melbourne's Albert Park. The red lights for the start of the race have just started to come on.

George Russell in his Williams is sitting proudly in pole position, but as the lights go out Lando Norris in the McLaren gets the jump and takes the lead.

After an hour-and-a-half of a titanic battle with 15 different leaders, it is Lance Stroll in the Stroll Special who nips past four cars on the last lap to take the win.

It's the first race that a driver has won in a car of their own name since Jack Brabham back in the 1970 South African Grand Prix. The cars all finished within 20 seconds of each other and as a treat to the spectators they all performed synchronised donuts on the pit straight. Formula 1 had arrived.

Instead of the drivers going up onto the podium, the team principals and drivers decided that for their outstanding contributions to F1, FOM head honchos Chase Carey, Ross Brawn and Sean Batches - in that order - should proudly be presented with the trophies and the bubbly by none other than Bernie Ecclestone.

And then I woke up.

All teams have to treat this off-season period as a chance to make a leap forward

Well it could happen, I suppose. It's a new season, new cars and some subtle changes to the aerodynamic regulations mean that everyone will believe they have a chance. But it says a lot about F1 today that we know there's no real chance of the form book being rewritten so spectacularly.

Still, all teams have to treat this off-season period as a chance to make a leap forward. If you don't believe, you won't succeed, but there is a long way to go and many hurdles to get over before they'll know if that dream, or even part of it, actually comes true.

Producing a new F1 car is mainly about component production time. With around 4000 drawings making up a car, that means there are 4000 components to manufacture.

Some of them, like the chassis and gearbox housing, take in excess of a month to manufacture, so this means it's all about releasing drawings to suit the manufacturing times. This is where the teams that build everything in-house have the upper hand.

To set that schedule you start from when the finished project needs to begin testing and work backwards. The first of this year's two pre-season tests starts on February 18, so to allow for the car's release and transportation to Barcelona it will need to be sitting on its wheels around February 14.

The serious design of the car will kick off around six months before that. I always thought that a season was split into two halves - six months from when the car hits the track you would focus on developments of that package and then six months in you would move your focus onto the new car. Any development that you couldn't incorporate in the current package would automatically become part of the new car's concept.

Six months is not a long time and that's why the big teams have so many people. It allows them to research for longer before committing to manufacturing. Once a component is released for manufacture it's out of date so the longer you can keep fiddling with it the more you'll get from it.

This year, with the changes to the regulations, it will be a little different. The front wing is probably the most critical component on the car, it is highly influenced by the fact that it's working close to the ground and also by car roll and steering angle. If there's an unforeseen airflow separation problem, that turbulent airflow will have a major effect on the performance of the rest of the car downstream.

I would think that during the pre-season tests, and even at the first race, we will be seeing front wing updates from most teams. The initial package will be the simplest version to allow the team to make sure its circuit characteristics are in line with windtunnel and CFD prediction. It's also nice not to show off your trick stuff to the other teams too early.

Personally, I have always liked rule changes. I looked at it as giving the small teams that I worked for such as Jordan or Stewart the chance to do something different. But it doesn't always work out and you can get it badly wrong.

Going way back to 1993, when the overall width of the car was made narrower, to keep the same aspect ratio we opted for a short wheelbase with the Jordan 193. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we paid the price because it overworked the rear tyres, we couldn't get the correct weight distribution and the car just didn't make sense.

It took to just before the Portuguese Grand Prix late in the season before we bit the bullet and machined up a 15cm spacer to fit between the engine and gearbox. It was that length because we had some clutch shafts from a previous season that were just the correct length to allow us to do it.

We did it over a weekend and I was there myself working away as we had to extend the underfloors, sidepods and engine cover. So it was a total team commitment to try to finish the season on a high. After that the car started to make sense, it looked after the tyres much better and in the penultimate race of the season at Suzuka Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine scored our first points of the year.

But those modifications were more important than just those points. They gave us a much better understanding of what to do with the 1994 car, and seeing Rubens on the podium in the Pacific Grand Prix that year beside Michael Schumacher and Gerhard Berger was proof of that.

In more recent memory, looking back at the major aerodynamic regulation changes in 2009, it was Brawn that came out with all guns blazing. Along with Williams and Toyota, the team found the loophole to allow the double diffuser.

I don't think there will be any loopholes of that level in the new regulations, but I'm pretty sure there will be some areas of controversy and interpretation, so if a team can find them then it might just get that initial advantage while everyone else catches up.

I had been looking at the new car in my mind for the past three months so it was not new to me and the stopwatch would determine how happy I was

Every new car brings with it expectations. For a team in the midfield, you always want to improve. Over the years it has got more and more difficult, but you can never give up, you have to keep pushing on with the belief that if you put enough into it you will move up that extra step on the ladder of performance. And who knows, others might just take a step backwards...

Getting back to the new car design and build process, with the manpower that all the teams now have every component will be modelled long before the car sits on the ground. That model will be assembled so any problems will show up long before the mechanics start assembly on the shop floor.

It hasn't always been like this and in the past many of the components - such as water pipes, wiring looms, body fitting, etc - would all be finalised during car build. I have on more than one occasion discovered bits sticking through body surfaces requiring someone to burn the midnight oil to rectify the problems.

I remember many times when Eddie Jordan on seeing the new car would always say how good it looked and ask if I was happy with it. My answer was simple: I had been looking at it in my mind for the past three months so it's not new to me and when we started testing, the stopwatch would determine how happy I was.

An example of the kinds of problems you can have came in 1995, when we went to start up the Jordan 195 for the first time. We had just moved from using the Hart V8 to a Peugeot V10, and everything seemed to be going fine.

But when we fired the car up, we couldn't get any hydraulic pressure. As this was used to operate the throttle, clutch, gearchange, differential and power steering, it was a fairly important part of the jigsaw!

We scratched our heads for quite a few hours. We could get pressure from the off-car rig, but not when the engine was running.

At that time, and in 1994, we used a gear pump driven off the rear end of the camshaft with a pressure-relief valve to regulate the maximum pressure. We changed the pump a few times but, still, nothing.

After another bout of head scratching, we asked Peugeot which direction the camshafts rotated in. Lo and behold, they rotated in the opposite direction to the Hart engine.

This was not an easy problem to solve. New pumps would take about a month to get, so again we scratched the old noggins and after dissecting a pump discovered that there was a very small bleed hole that allowed the back pressure to dissipate. In our case, it was the whole pressure as opposed to the back pressure that was being lost.

A few hours later, with that hole blocked off and a new one drilled - and as the sun came up - we had hydraulic pressure and everything working as planned!

During January, February and well into March the midnight oil will still be burned, but for a very different reason. It isn't only to rectify problems, it's to improve the performance of the car with updates.

All the teams will have a production plan that will allow them to run the initial package at the pre-season tests and get all the potential reliability problems out of the way. Every day something new will be arriving and that will continue right up until qualifying in Melbourne. It is the team that manages this the best that will get the initial upper hand.

Autosport will be at those tests providing comprehensive coverage and analysis, and will hopefully be able to bring some indication of who is hot and who is not. But as I said earlier, the real car performance won't emerge until qualifying in Melbourne.

I wonder if we can pick up where I left off on that dream?