42 replies to this topic

[Bruce]

I apologise if this subject has already been discussed - if it has, I missed it while on holiday...

From that oh-so-venerable motor racing mag - F1 racing;

Ferrari swing traction control vote - for now.

Traction control will remain illegal in Formula One next year - but possibly only until the Spanish GP on 29 April. In wat was described as a "stormy" meeting of the F1 commission, Ferrari, Sauber, Prost and minardi voted against the return of traction control. A unanimous agreement of all teams was needed for it to be reinstated. However the commission has agreed to incorporate traction control into a package of measures meant to "improve safety in F1", but only if the teams can "absolutely guarantee there can be no no additional use of electronics as a driving aidto competitive driving in F1". The deal is subjest to a meeting bewtween the team pricipals on 14 February - and must be confirmed by 1 March - three days before the start of the F1 season!

Ferrari originally pulled in favours from those running theri engines, Prost and Sauber arguing that a veto of traction control was good for F1. Their actions infuriated other teams. Minardi's involvement is not surprising - they've always sided with the Scuderia.

There have been rumblings for some time that certain teams are using traction control illegally. By maintaining the ban yeams with technology available could carry on using such systems which the FIA have said are difficult to police.

At Jerez every team (bar, interestingly, Sauber) were out to find the most effective form of traction control, experitmenting between throttle modulation and cutting cylinders, and at least 2, Bar and Benetton tried out differentials which were adjustable from the cockpit.

Jaguar Boss Bobby Rahal said "As a driver traction control is better not to have, but I understand why the teams want it. The FIA should effectively police any ban.

I'm unsure of any further developments on this as I've seen nothing in the news section at Atlas regarding this, but it brings up some interesting points;

1) Why would ferrari want a continued ban on traction control, especially when it is apparent that SOME teams are using it reagrdless, unless ferrari is one of THOSE teams?

2) Why would ferrari feel the need to enlist the help of Sauber and prost if one vote was enough to block reinstatement?

3) Are Sauber not testing traction control because they already have TC or because they don't see it becoming legal or because they can't afford it?

4) Why would ferrari take this stand knowing that it would make it look very much like they have been using TC?

Let me make it clear - I have no idea whether or not Ferrari have been using tracction control. However, there stance in this matter is suggestive. Without making this a pissing match, why do you guys think that Ferrari would temporarily have blocked the return to traction control?

[Todd]

Ferrari spend well over 30 million US dollars a year on the best driver in the world. Taking throttle control away from the drivers makes his contribution less important. Keep in mind that Michael's own throttle control is so good that he was competitive in '92 and most of '93 when his top competitors had TC and he didn't, as Benetton couldn't make it work until late in the '93 season.

[RedFever]

I my mind, Ferrari, McLaren, Jordan, Williams and Stewart all used TC already in 99. In 2000, also BAR used it, and so did Bennetton.

I don't know why Ferrari has this stand. Maybe because their drivers need less assistance (2 excellent drivers also in the wet, when TC is more effective), maybe because they feel that now that McLaren's chief software developer joined the team, nobody will be able to have better TC than they do illegally. It's a good question but there are no answers, only speculations. Considering the smaller tire wear and the cornering of the McLarens last year, it makes you wonder why Ron Dennis wants it back, since the one his cars had was already excellent. He also has his agenda and again we have no answers.

[Bruce]

I'd thought of that, Todd, but if TC confers an advantage to the team using it, and it is able to be used illegally (which it apparently is) wouldn't Ferrari adopting the use of legal traction control merely consolidate the advantages they enjoy with MS? Surely, continuing a ban on TC and not using it themselves would be counter productive, especially if the teams that are cheating by using it are or become the teams competing with Ferrari at the pointy end of the grid - So, if someone is going to have it illegally, wouldn't it be better for everybody - including Ferrari - to have it legally?

[Bruce]

RedF - it is a wierd one isn't it? It's why I posted this - Ferrari took the last course of action I would have expected and McLaren have did too...

[Todd]

When the rules changed for Silverstone, it took McLaren some time to find a substitute for their previous systems. The results were still there, but Mika's form took a severe blow when they reattached his gas pedal to the engine. Perhaps Ferrari think they have hired away the right McLaren programmer?

[Bruce]

Could be...

[RedFever]

other question: do Sauber and Prost support Ferrari because they fear Ferrari will take the engines away from them or because they think Ferrari will "share" their knowledge since these two teams are running their old engines??? that would explain why Sauber is not testing TC, it will get it from Ferrari already developed. At this point, maybe only a couple of teams won't have TC come Aussie 2001.

[Todd]

Speaking of Silverstone and traction control, I just have to ask a question. I've seen all sorts of baseless attacks on MS/SF. Why didn't anyone ask important questions after Siverstone '99? Bashers so wanted the accident to be Michael's fault that they ignored the most damning evidence against Ferrari since Schumacher joined the Scuderia. The rear brakes failed on the #3 Ferrari F399 AND the throttle stuck open. Doesn't that reek of a connection between what should have been two unrelated systems? It made me want to make all sorts of unflattering generalizations about the antibrigade. They'll doctor photos as 'evidence,' but they don't know the real thing when it is staring them in the face.

[AyePirate]

I admire your honesty, Todd.

[Bruce]

Actually, Todd, I seem to remember Frans suggesting that the accident and how the car reacted in it was proof of Ferrari using traction control - he was lambasted for suggesting it of course...

[Todd]

Bruce,

Do the archives go back that far? I never saw Frans try to bring it out, but I was blasted for trying to 'cover up Michael's mistake' by bringing it up. It is possible that it was just too soon after the green glowing discs, and that was why NOBODY would take anything he said seriously.

[AyePirate]

About the "glowing green disc"episode, what happened?
I think the whole debacle happened shortly
before I started posting. All I've been able
to infer is that Frans used photoshop to
tint Michael's brake discs green as some
sort of proof of TC use. Why would the
discs glow a different color anyway?

[Ross Stonefeld]

I dont recall any stories of stuck throttles. Not too many people beleive mechanical failure either.

As for Mika/Mclaren, technical rules changing would have hampered both Mclaren drivers, unles you think DC is better than Hakkinen

TC wont get anyone closer to anyone else, the cream still rises to the top.

[Todd]

AyePirate,

F1-Racing ran pictures of McLarens accelerating out of corners late in 1997. The rear brake discs glowed brightly, which gave away that McLaren was using their rear brakes to control wheelspin. Frans wanted to substantiate his claims that Ferrari used traction control. In order to do this, he doctored some photos so that Michael's car looked like Mika's had in the F1-Racing Magazine pictures. Unfortunately for Frans, he is color blind. Because of this, he died the rear discs on Michael's car bright green. Then he swore up and down that he didn't doctor the photos. It was very funny.

Ross,

Get yourself a clip of the incident. It is obvious that Schumachers rear tires are spinning while the fronts are locked. Not too many people you surround yourself with would seem to have any integrity.

Mika was effected differently by the rule change than DC because he has a different set of strengths and a different driving style. Why do you suppose their performance relative to one another changes from time to time?

[Ursus]

IIRC Frans was going on about some sort of McLaren-style 'fiddle brake'.


Ross, locked fronts and spinning rears across a graveltrap doesn't indicate brake probs. to you?

[Todd]

Originally posted by Ursus
IIRC Frans was going on about some sort of McLaren-style 'fiddle brake'.


Ross, locked fronts and spinning rears across a graveltrap doesn't indicate brake probs. to you?

No. It doesn't indicate this to Ross.

[Ross Stonefeld]

With front brake bias the front tires will lock and the rears will continue to rotate, and thats under normal operating conditions.

Lets assume for a moment that you have a stuck throttle. Again with front bias the fronts will lock and the rears will continue to rotate and/or spin. This does not indicate rear brake problem. Ever seen a drag race? Ever seen Alex Zanardi do his post race spins?

[Todd]

Loose gravel doesn't provide much grip compared to pavement. The rears would have locked in the gravel trap, even if the brake bias was set to the front. Unless, the brakes failed and/or the throttle stuck. Either way, there was a mechanical failure on Michael's car.

[Ross Stonefeld]

Yeah, in the link between his brain and extremities

[AyePirate]

I don't get it.

Why is there even a debate about this?
So Schumacher drove a perfectly
good car more or less straight
into a tire barrier:rolleyes:!

[Simioni]

When Hill went off in Nurburgring 95, his rear wheels kept spinning all the way into the barrier and it kept going until he shut the engine off. That wasn't a case of stucked throttle however.

The thing that convinced me that MS had a problem was watching the onboard sequence with audio. You can hear his engine revving quite highly while the front wheels are long locked.

[SlateGray]

What was the official reason given by Ferrari?

[Ross Stonefeld]

Im having troubles finding a good video that isnt overridden by some spastic announcer

[Todd]

The official reason was a loose rear brake fitting that caused a loss of rear hydraulic pressure.

[Bruce]

It seems to me that they originally blamed it on the brakes - until Brembo flashed them the look of death and they amended it to a small nipple on a brake line er, that we, er made ourselves...;););)

[Ross Stonefeld]

That explanation always troubled me. Thats the kind of system I worked on when I wrenched Formula Fords that had been built in the 80's. Its shocking to think brake systems havent advanced

it seems odd to me that suddenly going down hangar straight he lost all (or most) brake fluid to the rear system

[RedFever]

Ross, will you stop making up scenarios every other post???

I have to admit I had a doubt myself when I saw Michael fly out of the track, maybe it was mechanical, maybe it was his attempt to outbrake Eddie. However, I than changed my mind:

1) Eddie would have let him by anyway given the team orders, no need to risk it

2) on board video and audio. Michael is desperately trying to stop the damn thing, yet the engine is on high revs. Now even you Ross and your luck of respect for Schumi should recognize that if MS made a mistake in outbraking Eddie, his experience (actually even an F. Ford driver would know...) would suggest he takes his foot of the accelerator is he wants to slow the car, wouldn't you agree?????

3) Clearly Ferrari was not going to say what happened if that involved TC (as McLaren, Stewart, Ferrari and Jordan clearly already had such systems on board), so they blamed a little piece of metal that "got lose" in the braking system. Nobody ever talked of lost breaking fluid before you just did.

4) Interestingly, the front breakes functioned perfectly, the problem was clearly in the rear. What Ross suggested, a brake bias, is ridiculous. To be so, the dynamic of the accident would suggest a bias of 99% in front, 1% in the back, clearly unreal. In fact, the front wheels were so locked that one of the front tires already came off the wheel before Schumi even left the tarmac, as documented well at the time on tifosi-club.com, with a nice series of pics (for once they published something useful). Instead, the rear wheels kept turning even on the gravel, when even a low bias in the rear would have been more than enough to lock a free spinning wheel with little friction on the ground.


It is indeed funny that people retouch pictures with green colors, when McLaren, Ferrari and Jordan all had incidents that suggest they had already TC in 99. The problem is....prove it!!!!

[Ross Stonefeld]

I saw a report that said brake fluid, for some reason it stuck in my mind.

Have you ever been through a gravel trap? I have Fronts were on fire but the rears didnt lock as I went through, had they the engine would have died.

Like I said, im still trying to find a video with good audio, its been a while since I had one

The two things that surprised me most were Schumacher trying to pass his teammate during a red flag so late, and that he locked up both fronts. I figure'd he'd have relaxed pressure and tried to steer it. Yeah it was obvious he was going off, but you wouldnt want to go STRAIGHT off

[RedFever]

clearly he didn't see the red flag.....;)

[Dudley]

2) on board video and audio. Michael is desperately trying to stop the damn thing, yet the engine is on high revs. Now even you Ross and your luck of respect for Schumi should recognize that if MS made a mistake in outbraking Eddie, his experience (actually even an F. Ford driver would know...) would suggest he takes his foot of the accelerator is he wants to slow the car, wouldn't you agree?????

Actually personally I wouldn't be accelerating, but I damn well would be shifting down gears like a mad-man, almost certinally redlining in the process.

[Ross Stonefeld]

How they didnt see the red or werent told of it is beyond me. I think its pretty safe to say there wouldnt have been an injury had they known

[RedFever]

because between the red flag being exposed and Schumi's crash there was less than a 5 seconds gap!!!! he certainly didn't see any flag. His team might have radioed in something, I doubt it given the little time, but maybe, but it is possible that in the excitement of the start/first lap, Schumi didn't hear it

[baddog]

at the instant michaels car left the track, ross brawn was actually on the radio calling a red.. 2 seconds earlier and it might have stopped it.. ironic or what?

The details of the mechanical failure might be debatable, but the failure is NOT.. only the mean minded or chronically jealous would think otherwise.

Shaun

[rayt]

what gets me about these things is why don't the team princples put the matter to rest by giving the facts?

The Senna tragety lasted for many years because very little info was given out to the public (everything kept under raps by everyone involved.) If a simple mechanical failure causes such events shouldn't that be made public in a definitive way?

[RedFever]

rayt, because if Ferrari was using a TC system, they would hate for you to know......what happened to Senna's black box? why was it smashed? why was all the information erased? common sense suggests that most teams run some illegal gadget on their cars, historically it has always been the case. So, they are pretty secretive about their little toys when something goes wrong. Schumi had a failure, what happened really to the car, we will never know. Another example: what happened to Mika in Imola last year? as DC comes out, suddenly Mika's car is affected and his engine is dead for a few seconds, enough to lose any chance for the race. Do you believe in a mysterious shut-down that cured itself and never showed up again? I don't, but we will never know for sure what happened. This is F1.

[Bell]

Yes, its intersting cos hakkinen's engine also shut down for a few seconds at Interlagos in 1999, when DC came out of the pits.

[Thunder]

What were you waiting from Ferrari? If you look at past years from 96 you can clearly see that ms was wdc contender only because of wet races, and his competitors , jv and mh, are pathetic in the rain. Rewatch reviews and put aside wet races. You shouldnt even remember there was a champ named MS.

[rayt]

I find FIA extremely duplictious in these matters - They talk about safety and improving standards, (and even organize road safety campains with star F1 drivers) yet when it comes to F1 accidents they are totally mute. In any other transport industry (aircraft, train, shipping and trucking) there are independant investigations into cause of the accidents so that lessons can be learned and improvements are made to the regulations and technology (ie learn from mistakes) No rock is ever left unturned and even if it causes liability or embarrasement to the manufacturer, they still release the facts to the public. In most countries this is law for all these industries.

F1 is very different and seems to be above any such laws - no such investigation exists, the public never learns of the facts, and the teams continue to race, possibly with defective design/construction in the car. What I find very ironic is F1 has the ability to fully investigate the cause of serious accidents. FIA can easily do it because they have the best tools in the world to do it with: telemetry; in-car communications; HDTV cameras recording every possible angle; thousands (and billions) of eyewitnesses; and computer accident simulation. There is no excuse available to FIA/the team principles to say "we don't know what happened" and leave the public to speculate for years on end.

This really bothers me and makes me wonder why they think the can get away with it. A likely answer is coverup for some reason (The truth is too damaging to the F1 show) So every time a controversial accident happens, and the facts are not given (or sometimes purposely made unclear) it becomes open season on FIA/the teams to charges of coverup.

[Dr.Raj]

Hai I'm new here. I'm sorry, but I have a few questions. How exactly does traction control work? How much control does the driver have when there's TC? Why can't the use of TC be proven? When was TC first used? Since when has it been banned and why was it banned?
Thanks.

[Nomad]

Originally posted by rayt
I find FIA extremely duplictious in these matters - They talk about safety and improving standards, (and even organize road safety campains with star F1 drivers) yet when it comes to F1 accidents they are totally mute. In any other transport industry (aircraft, train, shipping and trucking) there are independant investigations ........
F1 is very different and seems to be above any such laws - the public never learns of the facts,.....leave the public to speculate for years on end.

Since when was F1 a transport industry!!!
All those involved are fully aware of the dangers.
F1 is very different and as a collection of limited private companies does not have a duty to inform the public on the full facts of all events.
Leaving the public to speculate forever is good publicity as it gets F1 is talked about more.

[pRy]

Keep in mind that the last time traction control was debated , McLaren where the team who didnt want it brought back.

Its possible to impliment certain systems that are legal. I think McLaren did that quite early on, then last year Ferrari did a better system that was really good, so good it was impossible to check for etc. So the FIA decide to make TC legal because they realised there was no way they could possibly police it now. Ferrari vetos, imagine if the FIA had said "Ok, no TC" , they would have been accused of giving Ferrari favours. For all those people who accuse the FIA of being pro ferrari, this traction control debate is deffianatly Ferrari -v- FIA. A veto by McLaren last time, and now Ferrari, is just an indication that the teams involved do not want their hard work wasted and legal advantage destroyed.

[Williams]

I have to go along with Ross on the rear-brake-nipple. That is the reports I read at the time, and I later read that Brembo had in fact re-engineered their brakes to make a failsafe brake bleed nipple. Also, the comment that "Brembo flashed Ferrari the look of death" for blaming them after the incident doesn't make sense. Why would Ferrari make a comment deliberately blaming a supplier when in fact it wasn't true ? In fact it usually goes the other way, with the team tending to cover up for a supplier. I think there are a few too many overactive imaginations at work in this thread.