Pat Fry Candid Interview

Great interview, thanks for the translation!


I think what is most interesting in it is this quote: "do you want to gain 25 milliseconds by running the front of your car lower, or half a second by conventional development work and fixing errors? "

Some designers/engineers seem to be of that "try to get a big difference" - like apparently Fry, Gasgoyne - but appreciation for the accumulation of solid milliseconds, ala Newey, perhaps, maybe the more successful approach in F1?

If you're further away, you have to go for the Big Difference. You have no choice. Small gains won't do you much good...

Edited by flatlander48, 20 January 2013 - 17:40.

No, but unless Fry is himself a psychologist he would not have known how much of Filipe's performance was being impacted by his psychological problems.

For the record, I agree with you here (and with Fry) that it was all Alonso in Malaysia, but your line of argument is poor.

My argument is for those who insist the Ferrari car was a good car since the start of the season and it was just Massa performing badly. Massa may have had his confidence issues, but the car was not perfect and it had some serious design problems as Fry describes in his interview.

It is quite possible the having so many design flaws and not fitting Massa's driving style and Alonso winning with it turned his confidence problems into a down spiral to the point of needing a psychologist.

Great interview, thanks for the translation!


I think what is most interesting in it is this quote: "do you want to gain 25 milliseconds by running the front of your car lower, or half a second by conventional development work and fixing errors? "

Some designers/engineers seem to be of that "try to get a big difference" - like apparently Fry, Gasgoyne - but appreciation for the accumulation of solid milliseconds, ala Newey, perhaps, maybe the more successful approach in F1?

I don't think that has anything to do with it. The context is a car with fundamental known (edit: rather easily fixable) flaws (costing big chunks of time). It makes no sense to perform detail work if your car is fundamentally wrong. This is the same everywhere in life: when you develop a computer program, you don't optimize performance as long as half of your features are still missing; when you perform house work you don't wipe fine dust as long as the carpenter isn't done; etc. Edit: He clearly says that the DDRS would have brought something like 0.025, fixing the flaws they already knew about promised 0.5 Obviously you invest your time in the latter.

Edited by KnucklesAgain, 20 January 2013 - 18:35.

you would run more forward brake bias when running more harvesting, perhaps you could run full harvesting when you didnt really need too, so the rears run cooler, and the fronts get heated abit more perhaps, or you get better balance and just drive harder, or not run the normal % split, but comprimise braking performance by whacking it to 70/30 %, so the extra front braking heats up the tyre

The front wheels will lock if you try to apply too much braking force. This will damage the tyres, heating them but not in a good way.

It's the grip available from the tyres which determines how much energy you can put into the front brakes, and this won't change just because you put the brake bias forward.

Great questions, great answers.

So much to talk about, really. The pitstop stuff at the end was interesting, for example. I was extremely impressed by Mclaren's pitstop times, but there's no doubting it didn't come consistently.

Exactly - the pit stops, the pull rod question, the double DRS - pure quality, that interview. Thanks, KnucklesAgain, for translating such a major chunk of words!

Alonso is such a genius at bringing the car to the front if its not working right, obviously when the car is working really well his teammate can often match him but if there's an issue with the handling him and Hamilton are simply in a different league. those are the Senna elements not necessarily the ultimate speed in a fast car (like Schumacher)

Very well put - also hinting that Alonso and Hamilton are closer to Senna, Vettel is closer to Schumacher (as we have seen in 2012)...

those are the Senna elements not necessarily the ultimate speed in a fast car (like Schumacher)

Oops, somebody obviously hasn't seen Schuey in the 90's

Oops, somebody obviously hasn't seen Schuey in the 90's

Indeed Schuey in the 90's was a different story, people often remember him for his full grip on the WDC from 2000-2004 when indeed the Ferrari was a car on a different planet but they also forget that from 1996-2000 Schuey had some brilliant F1 seasons, always fighting for the championship always winning races but not always with the best car.

In that period it was McLaren & Williams who enjoyed the supremacy in performance but he somehow managed to level the playing field most of the times.

For anybody sneering at Massa for seeing a psychologist, this recent tweet from Alain de Botton seems quite apposite:

"Mind-body issue: people are so proud to go to the gym; so ashamed to go to a therapist."

Very well put - also hinting that Alonso and Hamilton are closer to Senna, Vettel is closer to Schumacher (as we have seen in 2012)...

No, sorry but no. Especially Alonso is good at digging deeper in the car, like Schumacher. Hamilton can also drive around problems very well in poor(er) machinery, just like Senna. Vettel is the only one who I suspect is not in those groups (yet) in the dry, in the wet it's a different story.

No, sorry but no. Especially Alonso is good at digging deeper in the car, like Schumacher. Hamilton can also drive around problems very well in poor(er) machinery, just like Senna. Vettel is the only one who I suspect is not in those groups (yet) in the dry, in the wet it's a different story.

No, sorry but no.
Senna was more like Schumacher or Alonso. He was very technical and knew how to extract every bit of performance from car trough fine tuning of setup. He was pioneer of modern driver's philosophy, and Schuey mastered it later. Today every driver is more or less like that. Driving around around problems is more Mansell/Kimi style driving. Hamilton is somewhere between these two styles/philosophies.

I think not all the true is being told.
While Ferrari had windtunnel correlation problems, I beleive their biggest problem was the inneficcient use of exhaust blowing and that isn't something you test in the wind tunnel, you can't.
For that you need state of the art CFD, some great minds doing 'black magic' with it and to collect as much on track data you can. Remember all those sensors McLaren and Red Bull use in tests and some fridays?

I think not all the true is being told.
While Ferrari had windtunnel correlation problems, I beleive their biggest problem was the inneficcient use of exhaust blowing and that isn't something you test in the wind tunnel, you can't.
For that you need state of the art CFD, some great minds doing 'black magic' with it and to collect as much on track data you can. Remember all those sensors McLaren and Red Bull use in tests and some fridays?

Fry talked about the exhaust gone wrong (at the beginning, but also the fact that they recovered pretty quickly from that particular problem). As for the CFD in general, unfortunately AMuS did not ask the question. But nevertheless, we have known for a long time that Ferrari has deficiencies in this department, that one of Fry's briefs is to bring them up to date, and that much has happened but more needs to be done.

Edited by KnucklesAgain, 21 January 2013 - 13:34.

A nice interview by Fry