MPH: Mark Hughes on...

There was a great piece of in-car TV from Silverstone. "The rain will be light and brief," said the engineer's voice over Nick Heidfeld's radio. At that very moment an enormous deluge deposited itself all across the track. It was another illustration of no matter how great the technology, you still need to allow the instinctual to override it if necessary.

There'd been another example on the dummy grid, where Lewis Hamilton had practiced his start technique and the engineer, monitoring the live data, suggested he modify how he did it for the start proper. "No, the start was good," replied Lewis calmly but adamantly. He repeated it as the lights changed and made a blinder, vying for the lead into Copse from fourth on the grid.

Staggering depth of data

The data should be there to guide, but too often it dictates. Gary Anderson gives a great example from his time at Stewart Grand Prix. The venue was Montreal and Johnny Herbert was complaining that the turn-one kerb was upsetting the car too much, throwing it wildly off line. Gary couldn't quite understand why this might be and so in the next session took a walk down there.

What he saw was that most of the others were placing their cars further onto the kerb, using its flat top to hold the car in, whereas Johnny was using just the sloping side of the kerb and the car was veering off it. Next session he tried taking a chunk more, as Gary had suggested - and the problem disappeared.

It would have been so easy in that situation to have attacked the reported problem with the data, tried to make all kinds of suspension adjustments and gone down a blind alley. It's all too easy for the staggering depth of data that is available to teams to overwhelm the human aspects of the process of getting the car around the track as fast as possible.

To distinguish between when to be guided by it and when to ignore or take it with a pinch of salt requires experience, clarity, detachment and communication.

The problem of communication

It is a complex enough sport, even without being overwhelmed by data. It is mentally and psychologically complex, and it's already easy to find yourself below your potential for no reason you can readily understand.

Ex-F1 and Indycar racer Derek Daly has recently released a book, Race To Win, and it makes fascinating reading without even delving into the technical aspects of the racing driver's job. He concentrates wholly on the psychology and mental preparation, categorising different personality types and what each needs to get the best from themselves and what teams need to do to get the best from them.

Daly uses moments from his own career to bring insight - particularly in looking back at where things went wrong for him. He cites a great example of the British Grand Prix of 1981, where an error in fixing the gearknob ruined what would have been a likely third place. When arriving back at the garage his cutting reaction to the chief mechanic destroyed their working relationship.

"Harmony brings speed," Daly asserts. Good communication is essential in bringing harmony. At one point in Sunday's race Heidfeld was told, "You need to find a second." A retired former world champion heard it and said: "I hate that intrusion into the driver's world. The guy's probably absolutely flat-out in there and someone with no experience or understanding of racing a car on the ragged edge is telling him he needs to go faster. It would do my head in."

But right there is the problem of communication. It's absolutely natural for a driver to react emotionally to a request for him to try harder when he's already at his maximum. It implies a lack of respect, understanding and belief. But it isn't meant to. The engineer is probably only meaning, 'The target to make the place up at the stops is to find another second. I realise you're probably flat-out already, but that's the data for guidance if you need it.'

The best driver/engineer partnerships have their own understanding of what they each need and what they mean when they speak, but not all engineers have great communication skills. It's too easy for them to live in a vacuum where they come to believe that information is reality and therefore communication is just about telling people the data, whereas in reality there are all sorts of emotional and psychological elements that the data does not cover and in how that data is communicated.

Jackie Stewart recently made a typically insightful point when talking of Lewis Hamilton's Montreal pitlane incident being a result of an overwhelmed brain with too much information being thrown at it. He suggested it would probably be a good idea to take race team engineers to see how data is communicated in air traffic control towers. There you have a situation where a lot of data is having to be processed at a time of high stress and great care is taken in how and when that information is imparted.

A less formal approach

In the way of modern F1, the temptation would then be to formalise this approach, write it down, incorporate it into company systems - thereby creating yet another layer of data, more formalisation. What is needed is just a good human understanding and a less formal approach.

A driver is a delicate instrument and unknowingly he's carrying far more complex information around with him than can ever be recorded on data-logging equipment and transmitted by telemetry. The best teams are only just starting to get to grips with this.