156 replies to this topic

[Myrvold]

Mansell was smoking sigarettes and hardly did any endurance sports.

Modern F1 drivers can do triatlons competitively. Which driver from Mansell’s era could do this?

Problaby very few!

Not that smoking cigarettes seems to be any issue really.

Edited by Myrvold, 24 July 2019 - 20:06.

[pdac]

I don't quite get your comparisons. I think whether the car is easier or harder they both require a degree of finesse to get the best out of them, but I would prefer a car that is a bit of a handful for the driver. But the conquering of fear and a car which can survive almost any crash? Those would be the same in either scenario, not a choice between a safe car and a less safe one.

 

Finessing, in my book, is about dealing with the fact that the very smallest difference in input can have a huge impact on the output. If you have to start by making a huge input, then there is little in the way of finesse there.

[Clatter]

Finessing, in my book, is about dealing with the fact that the very smallest difference in input can have a huge impact on the output. If you have to start by making a huge input, then there is little in the way of finesse there.

I disagree. Just because the effort required increases doesn't mean they cant control the car to the same degree. If they can't then it just shows that powersteering makes things too easy for them.

Edited by Clatter, 24 July 2019 - 22:32.

[revmeister]

Finessing, in my book, is about dealing with the fact that the very smallest difference in input can have a huge impact on the output. If you have to start by making a huge input, then there is little in the way of finesse there.

Whether there is power steering or not is really just a small part of all the things a driver needs to finess. Things like tire management, fuel, applying calculated pressure on the driver in front, etc., are part of race craft. Lack of power steering doesn't reduce finess, if anything it enhances it as the driver has a more direct connection from the steering wheel to the front wheels. He just gets tired more quickly.

As it stands these days with all the coaching over the radio, torque maps for each corner, just get the braking point right and hit the apex and you're good. The designers and race engineers have the rest. Courage isn't really that important because the safety measures and manicured tracks have taken care of that too. It was a lot different in Lauda's day, you could die, and that changes everything. Just as power steering aids the weaker driver, so does not having to live on the edge of death lap after lap.

Now I don't want to see drivers getting killed, but mental toughness is taken to a whole other level when you can crash and burn.

So making it easy for kids to take part in a sport that was dominated by men in the past has not made it more interesting for me. Lose the driver aids, but keep the safety please.

Not surprisingly, F1 is in crisis these days because it is predicable and boring. Moto GP and it's lack of driver aids doesn't seem to have this problem. Man and machine!

Edited by revmeister, 25 July 2019 - 00:10.

[shure]

Been,  done that, complete bloody failure.  It hit the buffers when the TV audience missed hearing the messages and wanted to know what was going on.

It was a failure only because it wasn't done properly and there were complaints about Mercedes not being able to tell Hamilton which mode he should engage to fix a software issue.

 

That's the problem with the majority of the FIA "fixes:" they are incredibly poorly thought out and more often than not are just knee-jerk responses to the issue of the day.

 

Current F1 cars are designed to be run with a NASA-style team of engineers in the background monitoring everything.  They aren't built to be trundled out onto the race track and then forgotten about. The mistake with the ban was in not taking that into account and treating them like cars from a lower series.  So of course it was doomed to fail.

 

These cars need telemetry.   So before you ban radio communications you need to ensure that the cars can handle it.  It'd be a bit like banning refueling without ensuring that the tank size was big enough to cope first!  It's not something that can be done in-season and it should be a long-term project. 

 

1. Design the regs so that the cars must be self sufficient once they leave the pits, which you can only do before those cars have been designed in the first place (i.e. not in-season).
2. Remove all the various "strat" modes and programmable combinations, or else restrict to a small number within the driver's control.  Let the driver determine when he should use them, instead of waiting for permission from the pit wall.
3. Then ban all telemetry during the race.  Have everything downloaded into a black box on the car instead, to be analysed in the factory after the race.  

If you do all the above, then you remove much of the need to ban radio communications.  You also go a long way to reducing cost, as teams won't need to have all of the support personnel monitoring all of the cars' life-support functions, or ones running real-time race simulations based on the race telemetry (Mercedes, and I'm sure others, have teams of people doing just that).  You still allow communication for strategy purposes, but you pass much of the responsibility and control back to the driver.  And you don't negatively impact the viewing experience as no-one really knows what all those technicians do anyway

 

But you can't do any of the above mid-season and it's essential the rules take car design in mind.  That's where they went wrong last time and why it was such a fiasco.

[Pimpwerx]

Whether there is power steering or not is really just a small part of all the things a driver needs to finess. Things like tire management, fuel, applying calculated pressure on the driver in front, etc., are part of race craft. Lack of power steering doesn't reduce finess, if anything it enhances it as the driver has a more direct connection from the steering wheel to the front wheels. He just gets tired more quickly.

As it stands these days with all the coaching over the radio, torque maps for each corner, just get the braking point right and hit the apex and you're good. The designers and race engineers have the rest. Courage isn't really that important because the safety measures and manicured tracks have taken care of that too. It was a lot different in Lauda's day, you could die, and that changes everything. Just as power steering aids the weaker driver, so does not having to live on the edge of death lap after lap.

Now I don't want to see drivers getting killed, but mental toughness is taken to a whole other level when you can crash and burn.

So making it easy for kids to take part in a sport that was dominated by men in the past has not made it more interesting for me. Lose the driver aids, but keep the safety please.

Not surprisingly, F1 is in crisis these days because it is predicable and boring. Moto GP and it's lack of driver aids doesn't seem to have this problem. Man and machine!

The best and most-talented drivers on the grid today are Seb, Lewis, and the youth you're ironically revolting against. That suggests that you're theory is wrong.

 

You could find high school freshmen who could wrestle the cars around the track for hours on end, but would absolutely suck at it. Physical strength has never been at the core of this sport, as evidenced by some of the stringbeans who found success in the sport. Unless we've forgotten, F1 was a playboy's sport for much of its existence. Training and preparation are at the point now that there's no point in ditching driver aids. You don't think Max, Charles, George, Lando, Alex, and others can't be prepped to handle car management without assistance via hours of training simulation? 

 

I think it's nice to listen to the Brundles of the world wax romantic about their time in the car, but I don't actually take anything they say seriously. Drop Max into Senna's McLaren, and you think he'd struggle? Taking away power steering would impact the car and team more than the driver, as they'd end up having to redesign the front ends on those things to not require Herculean effort to control. Even then, didn't Max get his car home without power steering in Silverstone? Rack and peanut steering seems like a real menace, but that's in 2 situations, when stationary, and when going through sharp corners. Once you have enough speed, there's little difference between power steering and no power steering, as the momentum of the wheels eases the amount of force needed for inputs. I mean, you have old people driving cars back before power steering, and even my MRS had no power steering, and as a mid-engine car, it rotated better and more easily than any car I've ever owned. I don't doubt it's why teens succeed at all levels of open-wheel racing already, because driving a car isn't the monumental effort that old drivers want us to believe. Driving them fast is. That comes from an ability that's very much not rooted in strength and endurance. Those 2 things you can train easily, feel is much much harder.

Edited by Pimpwerx, 25 July 2019 - 12:05.

[KongKurs]

I stopped at "Should any 17 year old be capable of.." and the answer was no!

Edited by KongKurs, 25 July 2019 - 16:03.