15 replies to this topic

[6Addict]

...at least I thought so. MM's quite a character!

This interview covers a lot of the issues often talked about in this forum: Ron Dennis, grooved tyres, technical regulations, driver skill, overtaking... in lot's of colorful language too!

From F1-Live:


Q
Ron Dennis has suggested that there are loopholes in technical regulations; are you bracing yourself for further problems here?

A
He's always saying that. He was one of the ones telling everybody that we couldn't check traction control, and in the end, such a body of opinion built up saying that we couldn't check traction control that we felt bound to let it in and then the quid pro quo was getting rid of electronics in other parts. Well, once traction control and launch control and all these technologies became legal whose cars were sitting on the grid? Ron Dennis's, because the systems having become legal, he wasn't able to make them work, and it does lead us to believe that he would also not have been able to make a secret system, which we couldn't detect, that worked.

And it also makes us think that if he has the biggest electronics department of any team in Formula One, probably nobody else could either. Probably all that proved was that the whole of that business about we couldn't check the traction control was rubbish and a smokescreen. Dear old Ron, to his dying day, when he's long retired and in his bathchair, will still be saying people are bending the rules. When he says this, we say to him ‘tell us what?' and he can't. Then he says the problem is that the rules are not clear. The rules are clear, they are alright for everybody. We then say to him ‘Ron, tell you what, you and your very expensive lawyers, write a set of specific clear rules and we'll have a look at them.' That was seven years ago and I'm still waiting. I'm very fond of Ron, but I don't take too much notice of him any more. The question was: are people bending the rules? No, we do not believe they are and we are checking very carefully and there are certain controversial things being discussed for Melbourne at this very moment, things we know about, but the only thing we think is illegal, we have told the people concerned it's illegal and I hope they won't turn up with it in Melbourne.

Q
Can you tell us what it is?

A
There is supposed to be a new tyre, with asymmetric grooves which is not allowed. The grooves have to be uniform, which we think means they have to be same whichever way you look at them. Some people think that if one of the shoulders slopes more than the other it will be alright and we don't think it will. That's just one example of thousands of things. I probably should never have mentioned it.

Q
You haven't long to sort it out…

A
Well you see, what happens is that generally speaking a team has a new development or whatever, they have a new twin clutch gearbox, let's say. We will ask them to give us details and we will give them an opinion. If they disagree with our opinion, there is nothing to stop them making their gearbox and turning up at a race with it. If they turn up at a race with it and it's illegal, then they can't run it. So we give them an opinion and they usually follow it. Since we started that system, there have been about five hundred enquiries. I think we got two of them wrong. One of them was the famous McLaren differential and I can't remember what the other one was. On the whole we get it right, but it is an opinion.

Q
Could you not just say ‘no' to things?

A
We could do, but it would mean changing the sporting code and if the teams wanted us to do that, we would do it, but at the moment the way it works is that Charlie gives his opinion and then it goes through the classic system which is the stewards and the court of appeal, which they have every right to pursue. But generally speaking people don't try it.

Q
I thought that there was controversy going on about gearbox systems?

A
There's a little bit of controversy about twin clutch gearboxes. Cars these days have seven forward gears, and obviously the more forward gears you are allowed, the narrower the torque band for the engine can be and therefore the greater the power – you can have a really peaky engine – particularly now it's all done by computer. You couldn't have a seven speed box if you had to do it manually. But they can't have more than seven speeds so if you then narrow this right down, what you really need is CVT. Now that's illegal, but maybe if you have seven gears… with these twin plates clutches, what happens is that one set of gears is engaged while the other one is driving the car, so the gearchange becomes almost instant. You just swap clutches, instead of having to engage different gears. Now you could arrange it that the clutches worked in such a way that on that particularly awkward corner where fifth was too short and sixth was too long, it just got you over that little bit. It would generate a bit of heat and so on, but it would just get you over that bit. I've explained that very badly and crudely, but you can see the essence of it. Well, we make it clear that you can't do that and of course we will be looking at the software to see that it doesn't do it. But that's in essence, as I understand it, the danger with the twin clutch system. I think there is more than one team that have these and they've existed for a long time. If they are just used as a means of speeding up the gearchange, it is unobjectionable. It's only if it is used to expand the range of the gearbox.

Q
This is not clear, something about a previous stance by MM about his philosophy of a driver's skill.

A
To me, there still remain three big areas of skill: steering the car, braking the car and using the accelerator. In a Formula One car, using the accelerator is extremely tricky. Obviously in a road-going Fiat Panda it's less of an issue. And it is a pity and it's a pity that the gearboxes are fully automatic in a way, but then the other side of that is, suppose we went to the opposite extreme and we said we will allow total electronic control of everything, including the steering, the brakes, the lot? Would the best drivers still be winning the races? And the answer, I think is that he would. And in a way that's what it's all about because, what traction control or current electronics do is they enable me or Niki Lauda to drive the car, where previously that would have been difficult, but when you get to the difference between Verstappen and Frentzen… what's the difference, if any, between Coulthard and Schumacher? We would find it very hard to define, but you've got your computer programmer sitting there, how's he going to programme that difference into whatever system you've got? I don't think he can. Certainly the top drivers seem to think – and Schumacher certainly thinks – even if you had a totally electronic car, he would still have an edge, if he had an edge at all. It's still a pity.

Q
It's still a shame that a driver isn't penalized for missing a gear, for instance.

A
It's absolutely true. The old fashioned Hewland with clutch and gearbox provided opportunities for overtaking. The downside, of course, is that it blew up engines, particularly on the down change. But the reason that they originally talked us into the sem-automatic gearchange was you can avoid overrevving on the upchange because you just have a rev limiter. But on the downchange, if somebody engages a gear that is too low too soon, it pushes the engine right round beyond its limits. And so we said, OK to semi-automatic. But now of course, the technology exists that you could have a completely ordinary gearchange and still have a device that disengaged the clutch if you did what we've just mentioned. But it's too late now, you can't go back. A pity.

Q
Yet it allows the young drivers to come in and drive a Formula One car very well…

A
Well the other side of that is that all the formulae they come through and in which they are successful all have manual gearchanges, including Formula 3000, Formula Renault, all these things, so the chances are, if you had those sort of gearchanges, they would do it just as well if not better. The trouble is now that so much is understood about the cars that even the worst car today isn't that difficult to drive if you're that level of racing driver. It's a little bit like road cars. There are fewer and fewer really bad road cars.

Q
The absolutely last priority for teams is drivers. They are almost immaterial…

A
Absolutely right. The other side of that is that, if we ever achieved our dream of having regulations that, no matter how much money you spend, you don't get any advantage, so it's much fairer, all the money would go to the drivers, because that would be the only way…


Q
Niki Lauda said that driving grooved tyres on the limit was much harder than the tyres in his day.

A
He explained all that to me on the basis that therefore we shouldn't have grooved tyres, and I was mentally picturing more grooves and more grooves! Grooved tyres may be a bit controversial this year when they start wearing but they did achieve their objective, they did keep speeds under control for a long time. We had that big leap in speed last year with the tyre war but actually if you go back to the start of my presidency, go back to '92, when they had big slicks, the full automatic suspension and all the rest of it, and you look at Mansell's time around Magny Cours, which I think was only broken last year by a tenth or two, but only a few tenths in ten years, so we did succeed to some extent. Do you remember when we went from 18 inch slicks at the rear to 15 inch? Patrese said that it was going to kill all the drivers but now we have 15 inches with bloody great grooves in them. In the end, there are problems now. By not changing the bodywork, everybody is iterating down onto little tiny things, and they are working 24 hours a day in the wind tunnel on some tiny advantage, and also they are taking liberties, like those, what they call brake ducts. They are super sophisticated aerodynamic devices which have a knock-on effect; it's all tuned, you know, the turning vane, the so-called brake duct, the underneath, the this, the that. They are all massively important but unfortunately I can't think of any way to attack them. I would if I could. All the things you do with the aerodynamics they can negate. What they can't do is, if you put the thing on bicycle tyres and give it 10,000 horsepower, you can't get the power on the road. I can't see us giving up the grooves in the near future.

Q
All this money, all these developments, and the public still doesn't get much of a show, how do you get around that? There's no denying that!

A
Well, I'm now about to deny it. The thing is that you've got a huge television audience. There are two views to this. At the moment, you do get overtaking on occasions, but you don't get much because most people don't want to take the risk. If they are at the back of the grid, they will do it to come through thefield, but once they are in the points, it's generally speaking not worth risking a collision for the sake of a point unless it's special circumstances. But the overtaking is a whole manoeuvre now. You get two people, one in front of the other. One of them goes into the pits, the other goes like hell to try and make up time. This one comes out of the pits, he goes like hell. He goes into the pits and then there's a complete drama about which one's going to be first when he come out of the pits. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. It's intensely exciting. To me that is a real drama of the race. You're waiting, provided they don't screw up the television shot which they often do, for the shot down the pit straight. There's one man in the pits as the other one comes around the corner, who's going to get there first? It's really really exciting, at least it is to me. You have the whole thing about did he pull in at the right moment? Did they put in the right amount of fuel? Was it right just to put in a bit of fuel so that he can do another one but he came out in front? All those questions, compared to let's say Monza 1971 where there were 114 overtaking manoeuvres which was completely boring and the only interesting question there was who comes out of the Parabolica second on the last lap because he was the one who traditionally won the race because he had a little bit of a slipstream. It's not a thing you can discuss really, because all the racers say overtaking is everything, but if that's true, why isn't oval racing a mega-world show, because they overtake constantly, television is available, anybody who wants to buy CART or IRL can do so. But they've got no audience. Formula One, with all its drama, has an audience. I think we've got it about right. But why does nobody watch CART? It's great, it's fantastic, but it doesn't grip a worldwide audience of non-racing enthusiasts. That's the secret. This is the problem that rally has got. It's one thing to present rallies so that the rally enthusiast sees it well on the television and thinks it's fantastic, but the challenge is to grab an audience that doesn't even know what a rally is. Where Formula One has succeeded is that it has grabbed an audience worldwide who ten years ago, certainly 15 ago, didn't know what motor sport was, witness the fact that total television receipts in the mid-eighties for everybody, was of the order of between one and two million dollars and now we've got all this Kirch-Murdoch and all the rest of it. That's a measure of the popularity. I think the fundamental error that we all tend to make is that we are basically racers and we judge it by our standards but the world that pays for Formula One now, which is the big wide world, they are not racers. All sport is available to them, they can chose football, horse racing, show jumping, skiing whatever they want.

Q

But surely if you just have one or two overtaking manoeuvres, like Schumacher and Montoya at Brazil last year…if there was a hundred overtaking manoeuvres, people wouldn't remember them.

A
I agree with that. It's like an amazing goal in football, like Beckham… That was a drama, because first of all he had the balls to do it himself, and secondly he did actually score. I'm not a Beckham – Posh fan, but it was a spectacular thing to do. As you say, you talk about it. The famous overtaking at Spa when they went either side of Zonta, that was an amazing thing to see.

Q
But it's much more exciting to see cars racing, if you don't want that, why not have them starting five minutes apart like rallying?

A
I'm not saying that one car behind another, racing, is not exciting, because it is, but there's nothing particularly magic about the actual overtaking manoeuvre. Very often, one catches the other and the one behind is significantly quicker. The one in front has a bit of a problem towards the end of the race. You're always wondering all the time if maybe if one might slip inside the other and then you've got the drama of the pit stop and who gets in and who gets out. It is the fact of them being together creates the whole thing. I think that is the weakness of rallying. They are going to have to rely on other things, like artificially running the cars together, and of course letting you drive the car down the stage, which is coming. You're going to be in the rally before long. In the end, you will have Virtual Formula One, you will have the whole thing computer- generated.

[bira]

If you want the full, unedited version (over 14,000 words!!!) - go to http://www.atlasf1.c...p/id/6436/.html

[Scoop]

Max calls f2002 a revolutionary car... ferrari calls it an evolution of f2001.
what is going on here...?

[Williams]

Max's statement about the brake ducts and barge boards being part of a tuned aerodynamic system is absolutely fascinating. Also his description of the twin clutch system and the possibility of cheating with it. And of course his opinion of Ron Dennis is priceless.

Max's interviews are always interesting, much more interesting than most driver interviews, because he constantly, and casually, tosses off the most amazing details that you don't hear anywhere else.

[Cociani]

Thanks 6Addict for the thread, very interesting interview. I have some sympathy for max, being a President or chairmen is an ardous task, it is difficlult to keep everybody happy and yet do what is right. I do however feel stlightly sickened by his quasi-orgasmic excitment about pit strategy, it is much in the mold of James Allen, (the prat), to borrow an Engish coloquialism. Sorry Max, I still like on track passing, just as still preffer real live sex, (rather than virtual sex). Some things cannot be replaced, good racing is one of them. Things could be worse, this season is shaping up to be very interesting, Max is thousands of times greater the man that his father was so I am optimistic.

The next way they will, (and should) slow down cars if they must, is aero regs.

P.S. If you do not understand what I meant about Max's father look up Sir Oswald Mosley on the internet.

[Hotwheels]

Very interesting read.

Reading between the lines one does get the feeling the FIA is biased - not to one particular team but to ensure that it does all it can to keep the business before the sport.

[100cc]

great stuff!! Thanks.

I think I agree with just about everything he said!!!

Its true, if we'd have passing every lap, all the time, it would get boring, there'd be nothing exciting about it.

[HSJ]

Mad Max's comments about RD and TC are just I mean MM is a physicist by education, he must understand better, it is just the politician in him that makes him stupid.

[bira]

HSJ I am sure you, with your vast experience and knowledge, know much better than Mosley

***

This part cracked me up laughing (although I'm sure some here will want to cry because of it ;)) :

Q: Niki Lauda said that driving grooved tyres on the limit was much harder than the tyres in his day.

Max Mosley: He explained all that to me on the basis that therefore we shouldn't have grooved tyres, and I was mentally picturing more grooves and more grooves!

The whole transcript was immensely fascinating. There's no doubt the man can talk and articulate his thoughts. Whether one agrees with him or not, he most certainly comes on this occasion as one worth listening to.

[HP]

Yep that's a good read. I said it elsewhere, MM knows what he is doing, but he is a wee bit to much on the safe side.

The point about overtaking was very well taken.

[Ghostrider]

Max Mosley is smarter than people think. The only thing I don't like about FIA is that their pursuit of safety has crippled many of the racetracks. In almost everything else I agree with Mosley.

[Janzen]

Hi,

If MM really thinks that none of the teams are bending the rules he is naive, but I can understand that his officiel position might be that. I am not defending Ron but I do agree with some of the points he has made and I think that a lot of posters on this board agrees that the governing body has been reluctant to come up with specific rules. Take for example the x-wings that sprouted up here and there and no one was sure if there was an advantage but suddenly they decided that they broke a safety rule. And then there are all the cases with a parts that have to be xx mm wide but of course the governing body cannot measure that so there is a tolerance. There are a lot of rules that can be interpeted in different ways (something has to be symmetrical, and so on....)
Just because Ron cannot come up with evidence does not mean nobody cheats, including McLaren.

I have never held it against the teams when they have bent the rules as long as the punishment is accepted, I think someone ones said.
Do whatever it takes to win, just do not get caught.

[Mickey]

One bit I really enjoyed about the interview, available in the unedited version on Atlas F1 News, is about going Rallying with Colin McRae

I once went for a ride with Colin McRae up in the forests and I must say, it was very very impressive, but at a certain point, to my surprise, he said 'why don't we swap seats?' So I found myself driving this World Rally car, and he was completely calm. I didn't really know the way so a lot of the time I was going at what the police would call an inappropriate speed and all he would say was 'I think this one's a bit tight', meaning ' you'd better slow down!' I thought I was going like hell, but then I watched the video afterwards and he was impressive, but then there was this pathetic old boy pootling along. And you suddenly realize what the difference is between…

The only difficult thing was starting. It's like starting a racing car, you forget what you're doing and you stall it. And everybody is standing around. So the second time you remember that it's got turbos and limiters and stuff; the thing to do is to wind it up and you drop the clutch and shower everyone with stones and take off like a rocket. Colin said afterwards 'if we go on like this there's going to be a big crash.' Of course, we didn't. After that, it's incredibly easy to drive, except the gearchange is funny because it's up on the dashboard, but the feel of the car, the way it slides around on the gravel, to drive it slowly is very easy. It's like all racing cars, what's difficult is driving them quickly.

The other thing they do is if they get into a big slide, all of us would lift off. They just floor it and rely on the four wheel drive to pull them out of it. It's extraordinary. I think they are amazing drivers.

I'd love being driven around (even on a normal car) by a professional racing driver - most accounts I've read tell me they are hair-raising experiences - but can you imagine driving them around? I'd put the car into the first available wall (or ditch - ) while trying to look good!

[HSJ]

Originally posted by bira
HSJ I am sure you, with your vast experience and knowledge, know much better than Mosley

***

Sorry but this is just too simple. You cannot reliably control software. RD is right, Max wrong, very simply. I actually think much more highly about Max than most people, but on this one he is just being plain silly.

BTW, are you familiar with the simple logical fact that the validity of an argument is not dependent on who presents it? In this case, it is totally irrelevant what my experience, IQ, or whatever is. My argument either is correct or it isn't. This is something that seems to espace 90% of people here, and 99% people in general.

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by HSJ

BTW, are you familiar with the simple logical fact that the validity of an argument is not dependent on who presents it?

In this case your "argument" consists of your mocking. The validity of mocking is directly related to the person doing the mocking (for example if you were Newey it would suffice) This fact seems to espace at least 24.87% of all McLaren fans and no less than 67.12% of all finns who own a speedboat and a degree in molucular science.

[Mickey]

Originally posted by Foxbat


In this case your "argument" consists of your mocking. The validity of mocking is directly related to the person doing the mocking (for example if you were Newey it would suffice) This fact seems to espace at least 24.87% of all McLaren fans and no less than 67.12% of all finns who own a speedboat and a degree in molucular science.