Why is Ferrari's engine legality always being questioned?

What's your take on the teams questioning the Ferrari's engine legality? Why is the Ferrari power unit questioned so often while Mercedes' dominance goes without legal challenge?

Sasha Selipanov, via Facebook

This continuous innuendo about Ferrari and its power unit also annoys me.

Mercedes had without doubt the best power unit in 2014 and '15 and then Ferrari started to catch up, but Ferrari never really made much noise about it.

• Ferrari engine under scrutiny
• Rivals raise questions with FIA

It seems that now rivals are asking questions, but sometimes that is just to clarify a grey area. If it is a grey area and the FIA says 'no, you can't go there' then they will clarify it and Ferrari may have to back off a bit.

But I don't believe Ferrari would be doing anything deliberately outside what is allowed. It will be pushing the regulations to the limit, but then that is what all the power unit manufacturers should be doing.

I wrote an article after Sochi comparing sector times and speeds, and for me the Ferrari was very similar to 2018 and the Mercedes performance had dropped off a little bit. But taking all that into account, Mercedes, and especially Lewis Hamilton, have done an exceptional job over the last six years.

How did Racing Point find out about the automatic brake bias adjustment system at the centre of its Renault protest without some kind of insider informant, especially with the amount of detail supposedly contained in the 12-page dossier? Without naming names, have you ever had anyone do something similar to you?

Craig Wollaston, via email

Mechanics, engineers and designers always move around, so it wouldn't surprise me if that is what's happened.

I don't think anyone will have just changed jobs and come into Racing Point and said, 'Did you know my ex-employer is running this automatic brake bias system?' It would have come out during discussions on how Racing Point might be able to optimise its own system.

If possible, it is always better to retain your staff, but on the other hand it's also good if you can bring in people from other teams. Racing Point, with its new investment, is increasing its staffing levels so I'm pretty sure it will be making some decent offers to other teams' designers and engineers. This way, you strengthen your structure as well as weakening other teams - so a double plus for Racing Point.

People who leave or come into a company will always bring another way of doing or looking at things. This is true of any company and is why some people are on longer contracts than others. These contracts are put in place to protect a company's IP. They can work out to be expensive because if someone wants to leave, a team will normally put them on paid gardening leave for a reasonable period. During that time, technology will have moved on to the extent that the influence of what they know will have diminished.

I don't know if any of the people that worked for me took with them anything other than what was in their heads when they moved on, but I know that some people who came to us wanted to bring more than they knew. I made sure that could never happen, since bringing computer files or drawings to another company was always a no-no for me.

We still don't know if Renault contravened the technical regulations and I doubt very much if an individual did bring the information to Racing Point. Sometimes systems can just increase in complexity, and before you know it you're sailing pretty close to the wind as far as compliance is concerned.

If it was designed in from 'stage one', then that is a very different matter. We need to wait to see what the FIA investigation comes up with.

If Charles Leclerc can pull 0.3-0.5s more out of the Ferrari than Sebastian Vettel, doesn't that mean the Ferrari should have beaten Mercedes over the past couple of years? And doesn't it mean that Vettel isn't good enough to develop the Ferrari in a way that suits him? If so, should that be part of the criteria when judging how good a driver is?

Soren Normann Rasmussen, via email

Ifs and buts don't win you anything - it's all about points on the table. Sebastian Vettel, on his day, is as quick a driver as the best, but the car just doesn't quite suit his driving style.

In Edd Straw's interview with Jenson Button last week, the 2009 champion goes into that in detail and says that he never really realised it until he was up against Hamilton at McLaren. Well, he should have listened to some of the more eagle-eyed observers earlier on in his career, as from his early days with BAR/Honda you could see he was a mid-corner speed driver. Any oversteer on entry and he would be off the pace - he needed a car with a perfect balance otherwise he just couldn't drag a lap time out.

Button isn't the only one that struggles when the balance isn't quite to his liking, but the real stars - such as Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Hamilton - knew that what they had at 14:00 on a Sunday afternoon was what they had, and they just needed to get on with it.

Vettel was at his best in the exhaust-blown diffuser days. The characteristics of those cars were that you had a little oversteer on corner entry to get the car to rotate, but when you came back on the throttle the rear gripped and propelled you off the corner.

After that, the teams found a way to use the engine as a compressor. Just cutting the spark and fuel when the driver lifted a certain percentage meant the engine would stop producing power, but by keeping the throttle open the engine would pump air through it to help rear grip.

If all this was working and the driver adapted to it, this was powerful tool and in his Red Bull days it was one of the things that made Vettel stand out from Mark Webber.

I don't think Vettel has done a bad job in giving Ferrari the direction it needs to go in. We must remember that Ferrari has lost quite a few races through driver errors, team decisions and reliability - if they had not happened then Ferrari would have given Mercedes a little bit of a harder time. But I don't think that would have been enough - Ferrari needs to have a quicker car more consistently.

As for Leclerc, every now and again someone special - as is also the case with Max Verstappen - comes along. Neither of them has any preconceived ideas of what an F1 car should be like, they just push what they have to the limit of the car's grip and their talent.

We hear a lot about how for an ideal wet set-up you want a softer suspension - more grip, etc. But how does the water in the air affect the actual aerodynamics, rather than just the set-up the teams want to run? Does the moisture significantly increase drag?

Matt Buck, via email

In the wet, the car doesn't produce the braking or cornering forces it does in the dry so a softer car will allow the driver to feel the grip level better. When you look at these cars braking or cornering, they may look completely steady but to the driver it feels like the car is about to flip over. It's this compliance which gives them the feeling in the seat of the pants that makes it possible push to the limit. A softer car allows a small percentage more compliance.

Moisture in the air actually means that for a given speed the car will be producing a bit more downforce, and with it drag. But that is negated by the fact that, relative to dry conditions in a given corner, the car will be traveling slower, so producing less downforce.

On the straights, that increased drag does mean the cars are a bit slower, but the main difference in speed is because the cars are coming off the corners slower. That's because the reduced grip means the driver can't get on the throttle as early.

When testing it's always good to go for a lap time early in the morning, when the track is dry and the air is cool, since this represents ideal conditions for both the downforce and the engine. After that, you could drive around all day and not better the lap time you had set at 09:00.

You mentioned 10kg was equal to 0.3s per lap on average and that F1 cars need to lose 140kg to get to the levels of 20 years ago. So how could they go about losing 140kg? Michael Schumacher's F2000 was 4.4m long and 1.8m wide, while a typical car in 2019 is 5.7m long and 2m wide, so lopping 110cm off the car makes it 81% of the current length. So if 81% of 740kg is 60kg - could F1 get designing on that basis?

Nicholas Hudson, via email

It's not just the longer and wider cars, it's a bit of everything that makes that possible - wider tyres, wider wheels, stronger suspension to cope with the extra loads from the bigger tyres, and extra aero. Plus wider front wings, wider rear wings, and extra weight in the chassis to cope with the increased crash and deflection tests and the halo. The FIA now defines the gear centres and gear widths - so basically heavier gears - and that's without taking into account the power unit.

Twenty years ago this was simply called an engine and the one we were using in the Stewart SF3 in 1999 weighed 98kg all up. The equivalent bits of kit making up what is now called the power unit, including the engine, battery pack, turbo, intercooler, MGU-K and MGU-H (plus all the cooling required to keep the temperature of those components under control) probably weighs in at more than 150kg.

It would take a complete philosophy change to go back to anything like the car weight of 20 years ago, so I wouldn't expect that to happen any time soon.

Have this year's front wing changes favoured cars with higher or lower rake? Do you expect the rake of next year's cars to reflect lessons learned this year?

Phil Bishop, via email

The wider front wings for this year have fewer components on them, so in effect they're not quite as powerful as they were in the past. When trying to get the performance back, it should be that the higher-rake cars can make them work just that little bit better - especially in medium- and slower-speed corners.

That said, it's all about getting everything working at the maximum and working as one complete package. No single downforce-producing component will make up for a loss in other areas.

From one year to another, every team will learn some lessons from their concept that they can't really put into place for the current season and that will be part of the initial concept for the next season's car. It doesn't really matter if, as a team, you were running high or low rake; you tend to keep going down the same path until you run out of performance improvements from windtunnel testing.

Then it might be time to change direction and look at something else, but you don't want to spend all your new-car research time just getting back to where you were before you changing.

I would think that the potential major changes for 2021 will mean that most teams will build on the knowledge they've gained from what they're running in '19 to optimise their '20 cars. Going off the beaten track too far will only add to the confusion of how you will deploy your efforts for '21.

Can the Australian GP at Melbourne be moved to Bathurst 1000 circuit Mount Panorama? It's a better track and would be a much more interesting season opener.

@tillythetree, via Twitter

I don't know if the venue could be changed - it's normally down to who pays for the race to stipulate where they want to run it, and if a circuit meets the FIA's safety requirements. But McLaren did run there in 2011 with Button and Australian Supercars legend Craig Lowndes, so it is possible to take an F1 car around there. I suspect the ride heights were a little extreme, though.

But realistically, you would have to change so much about the track to make it suitable for F1 that it would not only cost a lot, but also change the character of the circuit.

I always liked the end-of-season race in Adelaide - it was a good place to finish off. But with Melbourne opening the season, it has always carried more pressure as the first race and with new cars there is always something unexpected that pops up, so there's no real time to enjoy the city.

Driving standards still show no signs of respect between drivers, and the 'let them race' policy is leading to crashes. Your thoughts?

Leigh and Jen Edwards, via email

You're right and I agree with you - it's the drivers that need to respect each other. But I think it really boils down to the fact that these cars are so bad when they're trying to follow each other; the drivers think they have to pull off any opportunity they get, otherwise they might not get a second chance.

If a solution could be found to improve the cars' potential to overtake then I think we would see drivers thinking twice about those risky manoeuvres.

The FIA has difficult task on its hands. What's fair and what's not is always going to be controversial, and with different stewards at each grand prix they will make different decisions when all we or the teams and drivers want is consistency.

Short term, the same three or five stewards should sit in the quiet and calm surroundings of an office in Paris or wherever and review incidents that affect race penalties from there. After all, if the teams can utilise current technology to allow their back at base personnel to contribute to the race weekend performance, it shouldn't be outside the capability of the FIA to do the same with its team of stewards.

Any practice or post-race reviews of incidents or penalties can be done in exactly the same way.

Gary Anderson will be answering your questions again after the United States Grand Prix. Send your questions to askgary@autosport.com, use #askgaryF1 on Twitter or look out for our posts on Facebook and Instagram giving you the chance to have your question answered