“Unless you have a big advantage to the guy in front, you get within a second and you just lose downforce and there’s no way of getting any closer.”
So said Lewis Hamilton after the Brazilian race late last season. He knew – indeed had predicted the day before should that scenario come to pass – that once he was beaten for the lead off the line by his team-mate Nico Rosberg his day was going to be a long one. Sure enough 91 minutes later he still was circulating a respectful distance behind in second. This too at Interlagos long viewed as one of the tracks most presentable for overtaking. And with Lewis long viewed as about the sport’s most willing racer.
Nico sitting next to him may have afforded himself an inward wry smile, given when he’d raised the same point essentially in China earlier in the year there was rather a round of mirth in response. But by now nearing the end of a season of mostly processional fare the general problem was glaring. And the drivers made no effort to sugar the pill we all had to swallow.
“Something's got to change y’know?” Hamilton went on. “I guess for fans it’s probably not too exciting to watch. Of course, it’s always nice when you’re at the front, as we have been for some time now – but still… That’s probably a change that would be looked positively on.”
Sebastian Vettel next to him thought he knew how to bring about that change too: “I think in general what we need to follow another car closer in medium speed, high speed, slow speed corners is more mechanical grip” he said. “So shift the percentage between aero – towards more mechanical. How to do that? I think we need better tyres that allow us to go quicker. Drivers want to be quicker. So, I think the solution is very simple.”
The modern F1 tyres as provided by Pirelli indeed are a common bugbear. They are seen to militate against racing as Seb explained by limiting the mechanical grip. But additionally in that most common of modern F1 complaints they are viewed also to require driving within the limits in races, rather striking against most senses of what racing is.
Something's got to change y’know? I guess for fans it’s probably not too exciting to watch – Lewis Hamilton
Fernando Alonso indeed last year likened the challenge of F1 driving in 2015 to that of an airline pilot. “You have to control everything in the best way possible or most efficient way, that’s your challenge. Like aeroplane pilots, probably, they just have to control that everything is working fine”, said the Spaniard in Montreal, his frustrations plain. “If you lose half a second for five laps because you are not pushing, maybe it is not even a bad idea because your tyres will be in perfect condition for the next coming laps and you will gain one second a lap. This kind of driving is a little bit strange.”
It’s a matter of heat degradation rather than usual wear, part of what Pirelli’s Paul Hembery called “an inherent part of the tyre [that] was designed to fulfil the original brief we were given by the promoter…to create unpredictable races”. As the ever-authoritative Mark Hughes explained for Motorsport magazine recently:
“It’s necessary to properly understand the distinction between deliberately engineered heat-degrading tyres and a normal racing tyre. Including heat-degrading composites (essentially plastics) into the compound means that, at most tracks, driving flat out for three or four laps would destroy the tyre even while it still retains plenty of tread. The ‘plastics’ permanently change their chemical structure once beyond a certain temperature threshold – and will not return to their original form. The ‘fried’ plastics lose the tyre much of its elasticity, making it dramatically slower and no matter how gently it’s treated subsequently it will not recover. Driving it one or two seconds off the pace (depending upon track layout, compound softness, track temperature etc) keeps it below that temperature threshold and allows reasonable stint lengths. Thus at most tracks the drivers are well below their own limits and those of the car for big stretches of the race, typically only letting rip just before the pit stops.
“A conventional racing tyre with none of these heat-degrading materials inside still loses performance as it becomes more worn but can be driven flat out for the duration of its tread life. As the tread becomes thinner it loses some of its elasticity (albeit nowhere near as dramatically as a ‘fried’ Pirelli) and therefore performance, but the performance loss is nowhere near as dramatic or sudden.”
And fans and drivers alike have noticed. The two problems – tyres not allowing a driver to push nor to follow another car closely – you’d have thought are related too; presumably increased sliding in another’s turbulence contributes to heat degradation. A thin tread tyre is to be used in 2016 that’s intended to degrade through tread wear rather than heat degradation (still with a ‘cliff’ but aiming for there to be less need to nurse them), but it remains to be seen the extent that it’s a solution.
Grand Prix Drivers’ Association chairman Alex Wurz told the BBC recently: “If we get sticky tyres, we will have happy drivers, and happy drivers means authentic and honest performance, pure message for the product and driving the cars to the maximum. That's what we want and, according to the fan survey we did last year, what all the fans expect.”
And there appears to be movement, with a delegation of seven drivers meeting Pirelli in the last couple of weeks to ask for the sort of tyres Wurz described, and the BBC reports too that insiders say Pirelli is happy to comply from 2017 onwards. It’s a reminder that whatever else you think of Pirelli the company has been rather unideological in all of this, willing so far as we can tell to do what it’s told by the sport.
If we get sticky tyres, we will have happy drivers, and happy drivers means authentic and honest performance – Alex Wurz
Hughes for one was happy, as he tweeted in response: “With proper ‘flat-out’ tyres agreed in principle for 2017, a cost cap on engines and ditching tokens, F1 finally [is] moving in [the] right direction.”
The problem of an F1 car not being able to follow in another’s wake wasn’t new of course. It was one wrestled with for upwards of a decade and a half, to the point that in 2011 we got a desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures response of the notorious DRS as well as the about as notorious deliberately-designed-to-degrade Pirellis.
In apparent vindication of the latter move we did get madcap races and (sometimes) results initially, but as is usually F1’s way the variation disappeared in time as all worked out the same least worst solution. The sticking plasters did what all sticking plasters do and only served to hide the wound rather than heal it. As well as eventually lost their stick.
The topline finding of the GPDA survey last year was that fans had rather had their fill of such gimmickry. The growing popularity of WEC suggests this too.
So, good news that F1 is looking again? Yes, though with a condition. Some of you may have noticed a small flaw in the plan, that with this change in isolation at least we will in effect go full circle, back to where roughly the sport was in 2010 – when all were in a state of despair about the chronic lack of overtaking which is why we got those now derided drastic measures in the first place. Lewis’s words at the outset could have been transported directly from then indeed, or from any point between then and the mid-1990s. Neatly too, according to the Clip the Apex annual overtaking stats, at the current rate of year-on-year decline since 2011 the average number of overtakes will this season hit the 2010 average of around 20 per dry Grand Prix.
With this change in isolation at least we will in effect go full circle, back to where roughly the sport was in 2010 – when all were in a state of despair about the chronic lack of overtaking
It has never been easy to unpick the stand-alone effect of the degrading Pirelli tyres on the racing given as mentioned they were introduced at the same time as the other drastic measure of DRS. Even, say, overtakes outside of DRS zones may have been aided by the pursuer getting closer in a previous DRS zone. But we can at least construct a theoretical case.
One can hardly deny that refuelling was associated with less on-track passing. That again according to Clip the Apex the average number of passes per race doubled between 2009 and 2010 – when refuelling was banned but not a great deal else changed – indicates as much. This was for a few reasons but significant among them was that refuelling almost entirely eliminated variation of pace within a race by turning them into a series of flat-out sprints. And even when refuelling was banned unlike before that tyres now could easily last a distance – as could engines, gearboxes etc etc – meant that in 2010 strategy variation was very rare and the sprints in large part continued. One line of defence that can be made of the gumball Pirellis is that they came from a conscious effort to alleviate that. So with this, that Pirelli essentially is doing what it’s told, plus the auxiliary problems of the sport struggling to agree on tyre testing or to unite on what it wants from the tyres, we can again have some sympathy for the Italian supplier.
And the typically-acerbic Hembery hasn’t been shy to remind us of this. “If the drivers want to push on, we can do that” he said. “Then the next interview we do will be: ‘Oh, it’s really good this processional racing’… We can take the tyre equation out, no problem, but you will go back to the years when I think Barcelona had three or four years of about five overtaking manoeuvres. You get to a situation where you are driving on rails. Which from one point of view would be very nice, but unfortunately you’re driving flat-out and so is the guy in front of you and you are taking out a variable”.
He has a point. But there’s a solution too. And this time it’s not a fresh application of another sticking plaster. It’s surgery on the root cause.
Starting again with something not unlike 2010 spec is fine so long as we also at the same time tackle the modern preponderance of aerodynamics. The same preponderance and its effect on cars pursuing another that was a lot of the reason we needed the ‘variable’, or sticking plasters, in the first place. As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure.
There’s a solution. And this time it’s not a fresh application of another sticking plaster. It’s surgery on the root cause.
In the Russian race last season when Valtteri Bottas’s pit stop featured a team member cleaning the Williams’ rear wing slot gaps of pieces of rubber, Martin Brundle in his TV commentary explained that “any pieces of rubber really dramatically affects the aerodynamic performance, so surprise surprise, they can’t follow each other!”
“I wonder what we could do about that” he added with layers of irony.
“Look at the front wing on that” Brundle said of Hamilton’s W06 on screen, “it looks beautiful but it also looks like a Christmas tree. It’s bound to be affected by turbulent air.”
You might be thinking though at this point that solving F1’s aero problem is a little like what once was solving the longitude problem. Many efforts have been made over the last two decades near enough at removing the many manifestations of ‘dirty air’ and all have flopped. Indeed I recall the first F1 think tank being set up to solve the problem as long ago as 1996.
But is it not so much that there isn’t a solution, rather that the sport is for whatever reason ignoring the solution? Brundle thinks so. “The obvious answer is to unload the upper surfaces, the front and rear wings” he went on in Sochi. “Give them some front wing endfences for starters so we can keep the front wing working all through the range of behind another car, and put some downforce underneath the car and make the downforce relative to the road…Let’s load the underneath of the car and make the downforce more consistent. Look at a World Series car or a GP2 car, it’s [the answer is] staring us right in the face, but I can’t get anyone to agree with me on that.”
Ground effect is often cited as the way out, and while there is some division of opinion (Pat Symonds for one says the evidence is that it wouldn’t help) plenty – especially among those with experience of driving the things in anger it seems – back the idea. Bruno Senna explained that in a skirted/ground effect Formula Renault 3.5 car “you could sit right on the gearbox of the car ahead even through the fast corners; it was brilliant. As soon as they took the skirts off that disappeared”.
Yet Brundle’s final point of his diatribe pin-points the main cause to worry. The sport’s legendary dysfunctionality wherein the teams’ vested interests get in the way of sensible changes. Quintessentially indeed the latest Strategy Group attempts to frame chassis changes for 2017 have descended into a farcical epic. Furthermore what work they had done was in fact for more downforce to be dumped on 2017 cars.
Since the responsible people, the teams, whoever, can’t agree on something, it will be difficult to make progress. Unfortunately the people who literally are paying for that are sitting on the grandstands – Sebastian Vettel
Symonds pointed out what really should have been obvious: “My belief is that the more downforce you have on a car, the harder it is to follow. And this [2017] car has more downforce”. Hamilton concurred: “For me it’s the worst idea; it just shows for me that they don’t really know what they’re trying to solve. From the drivers’ point of view we want more grip from our tyres, we want less wake coming from the car in front so therefore we can get closer…we need more mechanical grip”.
But the drivers are about the only significant group not getting an input into this. I mean, they’re only sat behind the wheel with the best sense of all of what lets them follow closely and what doesn’t…
“At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what we [as drivers] say because it can’t happen” said Lewis indeed in that Interlagos press conference. “The big bosses make the decisions and whether or not they make the right ones for many years, who knows.” Seb agreed: “Unfortunately the sport is very political with different interests from different people. But since the responsible people, the teams, whoever, can’t agree on something, it will be difficult to make progress. Unfortunately the people who literally are paying for that are sitting on the grandstands.”
Quite. Some cynics note that F1 teams have massive investments in aero departments, which may be influencing their thinking. Once again the conflicts of interest of letting the competitors influence the formula. There also was a fixation with reducing the cars’ lap times when it should have been a secondary consideration after the quality of the racing.
But one point that may give room for optimism is that as Hembery noted also the tyre spec cannot be finalised until the chassis is, given the influence the latter has on the former. So these concepts either live or die together and this hopefully concentrates minds. Hembery has warned though that “we need it very soon because we would have to have these tyres out testing by November of this year. Time’s running out.”
Yet right now in F1, even F1, there is a healthy sense that things cannot carry on as they are that should be exploited before it inevitably dissolves. We’re seeing changes elsewhere as noted. And even the longitude problem was solved eventually.