Why McLaren now has what it 'badly needed'

What impact do you expect Andreas Seidl to have on McLaren now he's come in as team managing director?
Tom Martin, via email

McLaren badly needed someone on the upper management side that has the experience of Andreas. Yes, it's nice to be able to say you have a policy of promoting from within, but when you are in as much trouble as McLaren you can benefit from an outside opinion.

From what I have heard of him, he is good to work with, dedicated, and committed to success. I'm pretty sure that now the Porsche World Endurance Championship LMP1 programme is finished, there will be a few others who might just want to follow him.

McLaren will also have James Key as technical director (when he can start work), so basically there will be a new top-end structure to the racing side. Now all Zak Brown has to do is go off and get the sponsorship that McLaren will need.

It won't happen overnight and those two will not have much impact on the car for 2019. But I think they are the seeds of success for the future. Hopefully, before long, we will see McLaren back racing at the front where it belongs.

The DRS will open by a further 25mm in 2019 to enhance the likelihood of overtaking. Do you believe the enhanced effect [25-30% increase in drag reduction] will create more wheel-to-wheel racing, or will it be cars blasting past one another?
origingamma, via Instagram

It will create more motorway driving overtakes - or mirror, signal, manoeuvre as I call it - but that is really not racing.

Once again, the powers that be have missed the point of what we the enthusiasts and viewers want, which is, as you say, more wheel-to-wheel battles. If those battles end up in an overtake, then so be it, but if not we still want to see cars racing together with the chance of one driver outsmarting the other.

Increasing the effect of the DRS is Formula 1 rulemakers' way of admitting that the current regulations do not produce good racing. So they put in this artificial way of one car being able to pass another. You can see it is the only way to achieve what they think is better racing by the way they play with how many DRS areas there are on the track and their length.

You can probably guess from this that I am not a fan of DRS or anything artificial that creates more overtaking. But F1 does need a reset to bring it into line with what the enthusiast and viewer wants to see. Long gone are the days of the purist's sport being enough to capture the audience - now it also needs to be entertaining. But it needs to be entertaining within itself - not just glitz and glamour around the periphery, which is what new owner Liberty Media seems to think.

Do you think F1 has changed in any way with the ban on tobacco sponsorships?
Richard Mullen, via email

I'm pretty sure that if you spoke with any team that had tobacco sponsorship, it would say that the bank balance was not as good and that it is a bit tougher to find the sponsorship.

The days of James Hunt or Barry Sheene getting out their packets of Marlboro are long gone. That's not just because of the cigarettes, it's because they were real characters just living life to the full.

Ferrari still has the luxury of Phillip Morris backing it and a new livery introduced last year offers a little bit more of a hint of the Marlboro brand without breaking the advertising rules.

That's what all the Jordan liveries were about" trying to create an identity that would outlast the days of being able to just put the name of a tobacco company on the side of your car.

Every successful company has a good advertising campaign, but the one thing you can be assured of is that the companies that are involved in the big sponsorship deals in F1 are the companies that have very high profit margins. Yes, their expenditure has to justify itself against income and it is a way of reaching out to a bigger world market, but still it has to be paid for and in the end that comes out of our pockets.

Making an engine last seven races makes sense but we all hate the modes and them being turned down. What stops the FIA, through the control ECU, making each engine have two Q1/2/3 hot laps and seven race distances at a constant power setting for each one?
Phil Restas, via email

First of all, I completely disagree with this three-engine rule for the season. It is just not a practical solution for a formula that is supposed to be cutting edge in everything it does. The penalties for using extra parts are just too difficult to implement and, from an enthusiast and viewer's point of view, far too difficult to understand.

If they were only allowed one engine map for the dry and one for the wet that took into account the different tyre diameters, then at least that would be the same for every manufacturer and there would be no more of this 'happy hour mode' in qualifying for some and not for others. That way, we might just see the grid that little bit closer.

If this was implemented, we would still see drivers being sympathetic to their equipment and saving fuel but at least the drivers would have to do it as opposed to it happening within the mystery of the black box that controls the car.

At the moment, the engine manufacturer that puts the most effort into those extra modes that gives it that bit of extra power for qualifying or a couple of laps in the race is better off than the manufacturer that has a power unit with better average power over its life. It enables them to simply qualify better, and we all know if you qualify at the front it's pretty certain that's where you are going to finish. That's all wrong.

What's going on at the back of the sidepods on this Jordan 192 at Monaco in 1992?
Michael Smith, via email

There are good memories and then there are nightmares and the 1992 season with the Yamaha engine was the latter.

When we started running the car, the engine oil temperature was much higher than predicted so we were forced to do something fairly quickly. We adapted two oil coolers, one each side mounted on the floor. We needed to run them in Monaco because of the slow-speed nature of the circuit while we worked on creating a new cooling package.

It wasn't until later in the season that we discovered the real problem was actually that the engine oil scavenge system wasn't working as Yamaha had thought. Basically, the engine was filling up with oil in the corners and the extra heat was coming from the crankshaft etc beating the living daylights out of the oil that was trapped in the engine. Not knowing that this was happening, we also didn't know that it was also sapping the power output of the engine, especially coming out of the corner on acceleration when the engine was full of oil.

So not only did we not have the power we should have had, we were also forced to ruin the aerodynamics just to control the oil temperature. So it was a double hit, unfortunately both negative. But we made that decision because with points only to sixth place the only hope of scoring some in those days was to finish and hope others around you ran into trouble.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all Yamaha's fault as we also had our problems with the introduction of a mechanical sequential gearbox.

The gearbox worked very well most of the time, but suddenly we would break a gear or what is called a dog ring. It took us quite a while to discover that with just a little bit of flexing in the selector mechanism, the gearbox could just about go into two gears at once. And when it did that - bang.

The car itself wasn't too bad and when we got everything just about right we could just about qualify in the top 10. But I've had less stressful seasons.

With these current F1 cars, I can understand how rotational forces turn a shaft, which turns a generator, which produces electricity. But how on earth do you gather heat (from turbos, brakes etc) and turn heat into electricity in a race car?
Geoff Nicol, via email

The answer to your question is simple, they are not doing anything with heat. It is all a mechanical system that is driven when you have energy you want to dissipate.

As for the turbo and what is called the MGU-H, which is an electric motor mounted on a shaft driven by the turbo, you can do quite a few things.

One, you can use the battery power to drive that motor to get the turbo up to the required speed. This eliminates any turbo lag. Two, the exhaust gas flow drives the hot side of the turbo and this forces air under pressure into the engine from the compressor side of the turbo. When you don't need the engine power that is created by the turbo pressure you use that exhaust gas energy to drive the electric motor, which in turn charges up the battery.

When you see the red light on the back of the car flashing, it means that the harvesting system is working and the battery pack is being charged. Both the MGU-K, which is the electric motor that is mounted on the engine, and the MGU-H, which is the motor mounted on the turbo, will be working as generators and charging the battery pack as opposed to, in the case of the MGU-K, adding power to the engine.

The only heat you are trying to harness is within the exhaust system, as the more you can retain this the higher the exhaust gas energy is - so you have more energy to drive the turbo and in turn the MGU-H.

The brake recharge system is much simpler to explain. Imagine you have a normal braking system, but driven from the wheel is an electric motor. Under normal circumstances the motor is just free running, but when you press the brake pedal it works a bit like a light dimmer switch in that it switches the motor on and allows it to charge the battery.

The harder you press the brake pedal, the more charge you get - just like a dimmer switch and the brightness of the light. Some systems are a bit more elaborate than that, in that they also have a clutch disengagement that means you are not rotating the motor when you don't need it.

And then from all that you can use that motor to drive the wheel, but that's a whole other thing for another day.

Paddy Lowe recently said he felt he had fallen into the Williams trap of thinking a few problems could be solved and things would be OK. Is that something you have ever experienced or is that just an excuse?
Williams Brown, via email

When you arrive at a new team, you need to find the correct balance of what it is already good at and what you can bring to the show. If you just go in and implement your way of working, you will get a lot of opposition.

Paddy Lowe coming from senior positions at McLaren when it was very successful and Mercedes, which had just won three world championships at the time, should have had a lot of experience of how these teams worked and more importantly how Mercedes defined the specification and architecture of its car and the procedures used to achieve that specification.

These are the building blocks for any successful car. You need to define what you want before you go off and try to achieve it. I have often referred to it as knowing before you start whether you are designing a washing machine or a dishwasher - you shouldn't have to look inside after it's built to decide which it is.

It surprised me that Lowe didn't seem to come into Williams and take that approach of assessing things first. He seemed to just join the company that was there and work in the same way as they had been working for the last few years, and then on the way a couple of top people lost their jobs.

It is never one person that is at fault for failure or responsible for the glory. It is a team effort, and as the years have gone by the team responsible for either failure or glory has just got bigger. But there has to be someone at the helm steering the ship. Their main job is to get the best out of everyone involved, but before anyone can be tasked with achieving anything they need to know what they are supposed to achieve.

Presumably, the bigger the downforce and the higher tyre temperature the bigger the contact patch. But how much, percentage-wise, does this vary from one car to another? I would expect this to mean all cars have really stiff suspension in order to make the tyres perform well, but I hear of some cars using softer suspension set-ups going well, which is counter-intuitive. Can you shed some light on how the cars are set up?
mcmw, via email

In reality, there is no substitute for downforce. The more you have, the more grip you will have, and the less sliding the tyre will do. But it's a bit more difficult than that.

It doesn't matter if the car is stiffly or softly sprung, the actual aerodynamic load on the tyre contact patch at a given speed will be the same. There will be a difference transiently because with the stiff set-up the load will go into the tyre faster, but this is not always a good thing as you can instantly overload it.

An example of this is locking the brakes. If the car is stiff, it is easier to lock the brakes, if it is softer there is a little more compliance giving the driver more feedback.

What you really need is consistency in downforce so it is with you at all times. If you have peaky downforce that comes and goes with car attitude, then it will spook the driver. At the top of the peaks you will have more downforce, but at the bottom of the troughs you will have less.

If we look at both conditions, with peaky downforce the only way to minimise its negative impact on the consistency of the aerodynamic performance is to increase the stiffness of the car. In other words, you are trying to minimise the movement of the car and make sure it doesn't go outside of its working window. This means that the car doesn't give the driver as much feedback and the car is more difficult under braking and over kerbs etc.

The other way is to have a consistent aerodynamic platform that is not critical to movement and allows the car to be set up with some compliance. This way the driver will get more feedback as the car moves while the loads are building up, and this will then give them more confidence to push to the limit and use that extra bit of kerb if it's available.

There is not a big difference between the stiffness of both, but one can be very driver friendly. The other usually gets more TV time as drivers are locking up or running off the road much more often.

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