Why Mercedes should supply Red Bull

If you were in charge of Mercedes, would you supply Red Bull with power units?
Martin Clapham, via Twitter

Yes I would and I really hope Mercedes goes ahead with Red Bull's engine supply.

If you have confidence in yourself, then being successful is about beating the best, and Mercedes supplying Red Bull with engines puts it against what has arguably been the best chassis design group of the past 10 years.

Beating Red Bull, knowing that it can't hide behind the performance of an inferior power unit, would be what I would be pushing for. If you can't beat Red Bull then you need to react, and that will only serve to make you better in the future.

McLaren, one of the so-called big four, had Mercedes engines in 2014 and Mercedes wiped the floor with it. As for Williams, Force India and now Lotus, they don't yet have the infrastructure and budget to be expected to challenge Mercedes.

Williams is doing a great job but it's just not consistent enough. In supplying Red Bull, Mercedes now has the opportunity to show that it is the best.

Why have there been more accidents involving drivers' heads in open-wheel racing in the past six or seven years? Is it because of lighter parts, and the carbonfibre that shatters more easily? Before it was wheels, but they have been secured.
Markus Arnsten, via Facebook

Markus, I don't really think it has got worse in the past few years. If I look back to the article about Mark Donohue in AUTOSPORT last month, he died of a head injury and that's 40 years ago.

When I started in Formula 1 in 1973, a driver being killed was something that was almost expected, and through the years we have lost many drivers to injuries involving blows to the head: Donohue, Helmuth Koinigg, Tom Pryce, Ayrton Senna, Henry Surtees, Markus Hottinger, Roland Ratzenberger, Marco Campos, Greg Moore and Jeff Krosnoff are among the victims. Now we have lost Justin Wilson.

These were all at least very competent drivers who suffered terrible head injuries. And that's not to mention those who suffered serious injuries, such as Felipe Massa, who was struck in the head by a spring, and Cristiano da Matta, who hit a deer at Road America.

F1 is an open-wheeled, open-cockpit formula, and as chassis structures have got stronger and stronger they now stand up to enormous forces. But the head, the most vulnerable part of the body, still sticks out of the top of the survival cell.

As long as the powers that be decide that F1 has to remain an open cockpit formula, these accidents will continue to happen.

What I get a little frustrated by is that drivers want action, but in the next breath they say they are worried about being trapped in the cockpit.

If that is so, let's look at the World Endurance Championship. We have closed and open cockpits in this category, and we get people of the single-seater pedigree of Mark Webber and Nico Hulkenberg driving these closed-cockpit cars without expressing any worries at all about being trapped.

Does something need to be done to reduce the risk of head injuries? The answer to that is yes.

Can it be done? The answer to that is also yes, but no matter what is done it will not completely eliminate the risk of head injuries.

An example of this is Jules Bianchi's accident, where it wasn't so much a head injury as a brain injury caused by the massive deceleration.

How about a standard safety cell for F1? This may also reduce costs and could also be extended into other formulas.
Rob Harland, via email

Rob, a standard safety cell is a good idea, and as you say, it would save all the teams a lot of money.

We already have standard-specification side-impact structures on the cars and I have long campaigned for a standard front and rear crash structure.

All the teams come up with their own designs and go through the pressures of individual crash tests, which is very expensive and runs the risk of actually losing a £150,000 chassis.

In the past, the regulations meant there was a little bit of an opening for something that looked a bit different, but currently that is not so.

If you were to take all the teams' 3D survival cell models and merged them all together to come up with one set of surfaces, you would basically have a definitive spec chassis.

Add to that spec front, rear and side crash structures that the teams could then clothe in their own bodywork to put their own aerodynamic stamp on the car, and I am pretty sure it would not detract too much from the formula. Personally, I would much rather see this than customer cars.

But Rob, you can rest assured something as sensible as this will never happen.

Why is F1 emotionally attached to open-wheeled cars? Enclosing the wheels would make the cars safer. F1 already seems to be moving towards closed cockpits, why not go the whole hog? This could also remove the need for complex front wings.
Jim Holden, via email

Jim, I think I have covered the open-cockpit question in sufficient length above, but the open-wheel one opens up a much more philosophical area of debate.

It is not only F1 that is an open-wheeled formula, so we cannot look at it in isolation and say we need to change it while leaving the rest as is. Safety needs to be addressed across all the different formulas.

To be honest, all the way through the junior formulas, open wheels are the norm.

Covering the wheels correctly with a reasonable structure would, as you say, reduce the risk of interlocking wheels, but then we may as well do away with F1 and all the other open-wheel formulas and introduce a stepladder of different levels of LMP cars.

According to Lotus, Pastor Maldonado broke the clutch-control system at Raidillon but there aren't big kerbs there. How is this possible?
Bas van der Wiel, via Twitter

I am sure if you look around enough at Raidillon you would find something that Pastor Maldonado could hit! It might be a long way off the road but it will be there somewhere.

Seriously, Lotus says he had a 17g vertical impact and that caused whatever failed in the clutch system to fail. The big question is, should that component have failed with those forces?

They are pretty high, but I have seen forces like this in the past, and other than a bit of chassis damage and the driver losing a filling out of a tooth, the car has survived.

I am sure for the future they will address this and make it a little more robust. Hindsight is 20/20 and you learn something every time the car leaves the garage.

Is there really a need for teams to have a whole mission control centre on the pitwall?
Fik Geuens, via Facebook

From my point of view, mission control on the pitwall should stay and it is the sending of data back to base and receiving set-up or pitstop instructions from base that should be reduced or eliminated.

Being part of a race team is like going out to battle. You should have every requirement covered before you set off, and be able to cope with anything that is thrown at you from any direction.

Thinking on your feet and pulling something out of the bag is what the satisfaction of going racing is, or should be, all about.

Having a bunch of people sitting back at base thinking through things in a cool and calm environment isn't what I call being on the cliff-face.

If you take the last race that one of my cars won, in Brazil 2003, it was in terrible conditions. There wasn't one of our team, including me, that wasn't soaked to the skin before we even went to the grid.

We were all very wet and pretty fed up with life when the race actually got under way, but everyone did their job with the same efficiency as if it had been a sunny day in paradise. That is what I call a team pulling together against all the odds.

If we'd had a team of people sitting back at base, in the dry, with a cup of coffee at hand, we would not have won that race. You needed to be there making decisions with every increasing or decreasing raindrop.

Will we ever have a car as pretty as the Jordan 191 in F1 again?
Niall O'Toole, via Facebook

Niall, I hope not! Just joking...

I think the prettiness of a car, if that's the right word, needs to be judged with each set of regulations. Performance has to be the prime mover in a car's design, but personally I never saw the point in making a car ugly just for the sake of it.

The regulations, and how you can get the best performance out of a set of regulations, can dictate what a car looks like.

When the step in the nose was introduced, the FIA was made aware by the teams that the cars were going to look ugly. But nothing was done.

Would you use jet driers in F1, like NASCAR does, for a very wet track?
@Dan1Ra1kkonen, via Twitter

NASCAR is a very different formula to F1. The vast majority of the racing is done on ovals and they only use slick tyres, so a dry track is essential. Even a light shower means they can't race.

When they go to a road circuit then they do race in the wet, but because they have the blowers they will use them as well.

F1 is very different in that nearly all of the circuits are state of the art and have, or should have, excellent drainage. But if not then we have intermediate and wet tyres and they should cope with most circumstances.

With the schedule traveling through the far east, you do get some very heavy thunderstorms, which as we have seen can disrupt a race event, but I would doubt very much that a jet blower would have much impact on this.