Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Jerez. The final hairpin. Last Wednesday afternoon. A drying but still- damp track, no rubber build-up, tight braking into a hairpin leading onto the pit straight. Ideal conditions for evaluating if there's anything visibly different about the behaviour of the cars now that they're bereft of their electronic driver aids. Software-controlled engine-braking modulation has gone the same way as traction control and corner-by-corner tuning of the diff. The good news is, yes, the naked eye and ear can tell the difference.

As far as braking into the corner is concerned, the visible differences between a great driver and a good one have been amplified. Felipe Massa was struggling to make the braking and turn-in one smooth operation, in stark contrast to Kimi Raikkonen. Massa, looking like he was trying to drive the car as if it still had all its tricks, would lock up and run wide more often than not, regularly missing the apex. It was the unloaded rear wheel that was giving him the problems, the tyre locking and jinking him off line. By contrast, Raikkonen would roll the car into the corner, keeping the momentum up and making hardly any inputs.

He would make a much wider arc into the turn than in the electronics days - his line much more classical. He'd get the car fully loaded up at the apex and, from the way the power then came smoothly in, it was apparent that he had a very progressive torque curve. He would do it exactly the same lap after lap, the Ferrari's grip and traction - in his hands - looking deeply impressive.

The shape of the engine's torque curve is still tuneable - but manually, in the garages, not automatically by pre- set electronic parameters. "Engine tuning is much more important than before," explains Honda's Jacky Eeckelaert.

"The torque, the pedal maps: these things all need setting up constantly now. Before, even if you had a very peaky torque curve, the software would smooth it out. Previously you'd arrive and the electronics automatically adjusted everything - high or low pressure, temperature etc. But not any more. Engine set-up has become like chassis set-up and the trimming of the torque becomes a tuning parameter, with an optimum that varies as a function of the grip and the track, just as with chassis set-up."

In the Renault garages, Fernando Alonso was in and out, constantly asking the engine guys for a yet gentler low-rev response from the throttle. Still in the old R27, the car would get out of the corner well enough, but was still losing traction as it came 'on cam' before the exit was over. Alonso was trying to anticipate this with his throttle foot. Team-mate Nelson Piquet would just let the revs flare - a sound long missing from F1, and much more satisfying than the hack of electronic strangulation.

The Ferrari had the best traction, the McLaren not far behind. Both were helped by the apparent friendliness of their engines, gentle at first and coming on song at just the same rate as the danger point of wheelspin was reducing.

Lewis Hamilton was maintaining similar entry speed to Raikkonen, and managing to keep it on line most of the time, but it looked a little more nervous, a little less repeatable. A couple of times Lewis was responsible for red flags as he lost it around the back of the circuit. Each time it was on corner entry. This has been the pattern all winter - drivers losing it on entry.

"Yes, it's true," says Mark Webber. "There have been a lot more red flags this winter as we all get used to not having the toys. But we're not seeing guys losing it on the exits, it's always on the entry. The loss of TC isn't as significant as the engine braking - in the dry at least. But once we get some standing water, then you're going to see guys losing it on the exits."

Webber himself looked exceptional at the hairpin. On its first day of running, the new Red Bull RB4 was still a long way from sorted and appeared less willing than a Ferrari or McLaren to make the direction change. Instead, Webber was turning in earlier but maintaining a very high entry speed, getting a shallow oversteer slide going even before he reached the turn-in point proper. It looked more rally than racing, but impressively it was the same each lap, and he nailed that apex pretty much every time.

Watching how great a job he was doing in an unsorted car and seeing Massa struggle in the Ferrari, it was difficult not to ponder how they might each get on if they swapped cockpits. I read an opinion somewhere recently to the effect that 'Webber would be as good as Massa, given the car'. On the evidence of Jerez, I'd say Mark's in a different league now that the toys have been turned off. Felipe has a lot of adapting to do before Melbourne.

"The big thing we're all trying to achieve," says Webber, "is keeping lateral load off the car when we're on the power." That way you're less likely to induce the dreaded wheelspin. Webber's attempts at getting some oversteer into the car before the apex, before he needed to be on the power, was to do with that. That way, he could be pointed straight at his exit kerb without much steering lock and he'd be less likely to break traction.

Previously the pre-load of the diff could be electronically varied from corner to corner. Now it is set in the garage and remains set throughout the lap. That setting will be a compromise between the different demands of each corner. Consequently there's less diff help for the turn-in to slow corners such as the Jerez hairpin. So if the driver wants to induce some yaw in the car, he has to do it himself. Some are better at this than others.

Some get more help from their cars than others too. The Toyota was presenting its drivers with two key problems here: it didn't want to turn in and then it didn't want to put its power down. Timo Glock was wrestling a direction change into it, but was then having to exit on a far earlier part of the kerb in order not to ask too much of the rear wheels when he got on the power. You could almost see the tenths ticking away.

A couple of times in half an hour of watching, a driver would get wildly out of line under power for a fraction of a second, hands correcting the folly of a right foot extended a little too much, a little too early. But otherwise the exits look much as they did before traction control was banished - as they were always going to. It's clear that the loss of electronically-variable diffs and engine braking is much more significant than that of traction control. It's also clear that this is indeed a change for the better.