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Archive: T-cam

The return of Hamilton's impatience

24 September 2008 01:15

Categories: Opinion

I have been so busy that I have not yet properly turned my attention to many of the notable events of the Italian Grand Prix.

Apart from Sebastian Vettel, the star of the show was probably Lewis Hamilton. He was severely compromised by  yet another odd McLaren tyre strategy call. Hamilton took a risk that he certainly did not need to take. In Q2, you only need to finish in the top ten to progress. Goodness only knows why in this situation Hamilton and his engineer decided to take a risk to put on intermediates when it was far from clear that the circuit  was dry enough.

Hamilton was trundling around on inters while everyone else was setting the fastest times of the session on extreme wet tyres. By the time Hamilton managed to get onto the desirable extreme wets (and after losing a lot of time by being randomly called to get weighed), the track had become wetter and he was no longer in a position to set a fast time. Game over. 15th on the grid.

Not that that was an excuse, mind you. Even while he was on wets, there were people setting faster times than him. But clearly for some reason — brake temperatures, whatever — his car just wasn’t coping well enough with the conditions. At least Kimi Räikkönen was just one position ahead of him.

It promised to be a mouthwatering midfield battle, with two of F1′s biggest stars making their way through the field in wet conditions. In the event, Raikkonen yet again disappointed. He did climb a few places, but Hamilton made a few more and made those passes with more style and bravery. Kimi seemed his (nowadays) usual sleepy self. Up until the last few laps, that is. Ho hum.

But while many of Hamilton’s overtaking manoeuvres were damned impressive, yet again Hamilton’s driving came under the spotlight. I have been critical in the past of Hamilton’s overly-aggressive driving style and the Italian Grand Prix brought up three major examples of this nasty side of Hamilton’s character.

First of all, there was an incident during his move on Fernando Alonso which the Spaniard complained about after the race. I have to admit that I saw little wrong with Hamilton’s move on Alonso. What concerned me more was the other two major incidents.

Towards the end of the race Hamilton made a breathtaking blocking move while Mark Webber was lining up to pass him in the run-up to the first chicane. At first I thought that Webber was being too optimistic. But when I saw the replay from Webber’s on-board T-cam, I found myself becoming much more concerned about the way Hamilton appeared to barge Webber straight onto the grass. Hamilton says he was just going for the better line into the corner, but that doesn’t matter. Barging someone off the track — especially when conditions are as damp as they were — is a big no-no in my book.

But it was his swipe on Timo Glock earlier on in the race that really took the biscuit for me. Hamilton’s initial move (again, into the first chicane) on Glock was brilliant, but the Toyota driver got better traction coming out of the chicane. Glock was catching right back up to Hamilton and was just coming side-by-side with the Brit along Curva Grande when Hamilton swiped straight across and forced Glock onto the grass.

At that point of the race, conditions were still quite horrrific and Hamilton’s move seemed at best reckless and at worst downright dangerous. It was suggested at the time by ITV commentator Martin Brundle that Hamilton may have been unable to see Glock in his mirrors due to all the spray, and I can only hope that that was the case because it is not nice to see a driver playing dirty like that. I criticised Michael Schumacher for this sort of thing, and I will criticise Lewis Hamilton for it.

You can see a video of the controversial incidents over at Axis of Oversteer, with whom I agree on this matter. All-in-all I think Hamilton’s driving may even have been worthy of a punishment. Certainly, his incident with Glock could well have earned him a drive-through penalty if different stewards were in place. We can’t forget that all of this was happening in the immediate aftermath of the controversy surrounding Hamilton’s penalty at the Belgian Grand Prix.

No doubt the stewards were slightly wary of punishing Hamilton for fear of another backlash or yet more accusations of the FIA’s pro-Ferrari bias. For me, though, the fact that he escaped punishment for dangerous driving at Monza goes a long way towards making up for the injustice of his penalty in Belgium.

A lot of people have been talking recently about how Hamilton appears to have matured in recent races. He now knows when to settle for second rather than needlessly go for the win. But he has only matured to an extent. I have long argued that Hamilton’s greatest flaw is his impatience — his inability to pace himself and know when to hold back. His swipe on Glock was an instance where he could have done with relaxing a bit more and letting the situation unfold in its own time rather than forcing the issue.

Craig at Craigblog has speculated that Lewis Hamilton’s attitude could end up costing him the world championship. I certainly think this is an aspect of his racing that he needs to have a serious think about. If it doesn’t stop him from winning the championship, it will stop many fans from being able to support him. Reminds me of a certain M. Schumacher.

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Focus on Ferrari's pitstops

25 August 2008 17:45

Categories: Opinion, Report

In my previous post I concluded that Ferrari will have to look at their engines to bring a halt to their reliability woes. But following the European Grand Prix it is also clear that they will have to look at their pitstop procedures. There were two pitlane controversies surrounding Ferrari today.

First of all, Felipe Massa was released straight into the path of the Force India of Adrian Sutil. (Is it just me, or to Ferrari always seem desperate to dump on their client, Force India?) It always annoys me that this sort of thing is never penalised properly. The pitlane is the most dangerous section of the track, and lollipop men often have scant regard for the safety of their fellow mechanics in other teams.

The GP2 races this weekend saw a couple of drivers get penalised for being released into the path of oncoming cars. The pitlane in Valencia is especially narrow, perhaps among the narrowest all year, so it is more important than in most places that this rule is stuck to. So I was glad to see action taken to stop this sort of behaviour in GP2.

However, the race stewards completely bottled out of making a proper decision on Massa’s incident. They announced that they would investigate the incident, but elected to make their decision after the race. In short, the stewards bottled it because it involved a Ferrari.

In the end, Ferrari escaped with a reprimand and a €10,000 fine. I was glad that the race result wasn’t changed behind closed doors, which would have been the worst case scenario. But that only makes it all the more important that these decisions are made during the race, not after. Massa should have been given a drive-through penalty and that should have been the end of it. I certainly think that if it was Sutil who nearly ran over a cameraman and crashed into the safety car while being released in front of a Ferrari, the stewards would not have been so shy of making a decision during the race.

Ferrari’s defence was also absolutely bizarre. Their excuse was that “no sporting advantage was obtained” by releasing Massa too early. As Keith points out, the FIA have taken a dim view of this sort of explanation when it has come from other teams whose name is not Ferrari.

Moreover, not only is it doubtful that Ferrari did not gain an advantage by releasing Massa early, whether or not he gained an advantage is not even the point. The point is whether or not Ferrari created the potential for there to be a dangerous situation in the pitlane. In my view there is no doubt that they did create that potential.

Article 23.1 i) of the sporting regualtions states:

It is the responsibility of the competitor to release his car after a pit stop only when it is safe to do so.

There is nothing there about whether or not a sporting advantage is obtained — only if the situation was safe or not. The FIA should not accept Ferrari’s explanation as a mitigating factor.

The FIA know that they have an image problem. They know about the ‘Ferrari International Assistance’ problem. We have heard Max Mosley mentioning it. What gets me is that whenever the FIA has an opportunity to shed this image, they fail to take it! This can only mean that they actually are set out to please Ferrari all the time.

Massa’s pitlane exit was particularly dangerous. The onboard footage from his car shows that Massa passed a cameraman who was kneeling in the ‘inner lane’ of the pitlane. Further down the road, Massa was sandwiched between Sutil and the Safety Car and Medical Car — presumably with driver Bernd Mayländer and the medics sitting in them. If Massa had crashed into Sutil here, I shudder to think what the other consequences could have been.

Felipe Massa’s “explanation” during the press conference was as low as it gets.

I think it wasn’t very clever from his [Adrian Sutil's] side as even if he went out in front of me he needed to let me by. It was a shame to fight with him in the pit lane as we were very close and I needed to back off and I lost a lot of time but fortunately the gap was enough…

I stopped behind him in the pit stop and we leave together. When he was passing me by I was leaving the garage, so we were side-by-side. But I was the leader and he was lapping.

I don’t remember ever reading the rule whereby cars that are about to be lapped are supposed to wait in their pit box until the precious Ferrari has left the pitlane. The fact is that Adrian Sutil was exiting the pitlane minding his own business just as he does after every single pitstop he has ever done. Then all of a sudden this red car is released straight towards his sidepod! I struggle to see how this can be anyone’s fault other than the ‘lollipop’ man’s.

Which brings us on to the talking point of Ferrari’s pitstops. A relatively recent innovation, from the past couple of years or so, is Ferrari’s decision to dispense entirely with a lollipop and instead use a traffic light system. Each mechanic working on the car is given a button which he presses when he is finished. Once all the buttons have been pressed the traffic light turns green and away the car goes.

ITV made a lot of Ferrari’s ‘semi-automatic’ system. But my understanding is that the chief mechanic plays the role that used to be played by the lollipop man — i.e. he doesn’t press his button until he is certain it is safe for the car to be released. In Massa’s case, the lollipop man simply didn’t do his job properly. This would have been the case whether he had a lollipop or a traffic light system.

Ferrari had another problematic pitstop that quickly focussed on the traffic light system. Kimi Räikkönen attempted to leave his pit box while the fuel hose was still attached. Pictures from Räikkönen’s T-cam show that he left the box when the lights turned amber — not green.

I don’t know exactly how Ferrari’s traffic light system works, but my guess would be that when each of the mechanics has pressed their button the light turns amber, and only when the chief mechanic presses his button does the light turn green. Presumably 99% of the time when the light turns amber it almost immediately turns green. In this instance it didn’t because the fuel hose became stuck.

I guess the majority of the blame has to rest of Räikkönen’s shoulders for going when the light wasn’t green. But perhaps Ferrari can look at their system to make sure there is no chance of such confusion in the future.

What I haven’t seen noticed anywhere else is the fact that this was essentially another fuel rig failure on the back of the four or five fuel rig failures we saw in Hungary. It’s not unusual to see a fuel hose become stuck on a car and for the mechanics to struggle to remove it, but it’s worth noting that this incident came so soon after the high-profile incidents in Budapest.

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Bluffer's guide — Part 3: teams and drivers

15 June 2008 21:07

Categories: Bluffer's guide

At last, bluffer’s guide makes its return. For the past couple of months I’ve been too busy to continue the series, but now I have some more free time. Previous bluffer’s guides have looked at the rules and aspects of strategy. This guide will look at issues around teams and drivers: how they enter, why they enter and what their job is.

Entry requirements

At present there are ten constructors (the posh word for teams) in Formula 1. Each team enters two cars, meaning that 20 cars are entered into each event. There is nothing set in stone about these numbers. It is thought that according to the Concorde Agreement (which will be covered in a future bluffer’s guide) a minimum of 20 may enter. According to the FIA Sporting Regulations, a maximum of 24 cars may start a race.

Teams normally stick with the same two drivers throughout the season. However they may use up to four different drivers in one season, or more at the FIA’s approval.

In addition to the two race drivers, every team employs test drivers. These test drivers may be used during the Friday Practice sessions, although each team is still limited to running two cars. For this reason, teams tend to use their race drivers anyway.

A driver must be awarded an FIA Super License before he may compete in Formula 1. To achieve this, a driver must show consistent form in a lower category. Failing that, a driver may get a Super License with the unanimous approval of… whoever makes that decision — provided he has tested for at least 300km at racing speeds in a current car.

This is basically to prevent rubbish but rich drivers from paying loads of money to achieve his childhood dream of entering a Grand Prix. However, it hasn’t stopped the occasional bad egg from slipping through the net!

The decision to enter

Unlike some other sports, there is no promotion or relegation in F1. The decision to enter Formula 1 is essentially little more than a business decision. Once a team has met the FIA’s requirements, all a team has to do is be able to fund itself in order to keep going.

The huge costs involved in running an F1 team are enough to keep the list of potential entrants low. There is space for 12 teams in the Championship and only ten of them are taken. One of those teams is currently up for sale. There is little point in setting up a new team if you can easily buy an existing one.

This season began with 11 constructors. But when Super Aguri ran out of funding it had to pull out.

Similarly, drivers have few requirements to meet. They must have a Super License (as outlined in the section above). But apart from that, all they have to do to get a drive is basically to persuade a team to give them a drive.

This does not depend on talent alone, although that is of course a huge factor. Many drivers get a slot at a poorly-funded team by bringing sponsorship money. Such drivers are known as ‘pay drivers’ because they effectively pay for their drive at a team.

Some pay drivers have gone down in history as being notoriously awful. Ricardo Rosset had lots of cash as he was the heir to an underwear business. Fittingly enough, his performances in F1 were, indeed, pants.

The 2008 season is said to be the first year for a very long time (perhaps ever) when the grid did not contain any pay drivers. However, it is also thought that Nelsinho Piquet and Adrian Sutil bring substantial sponsorship moneys to their respective teams.

A team sport or an individual sport?

Formula 1 (along with most other forms of motor racing) is rather unique among sports because it is both a team sport and an individual sport. A good driver would be nowhere were it not for a team of hundreds working tirelessly to provide him with a good car. On the day of the race, an army of people analyse the race as it happens to try and come up with the best strategy for the conditions. And the efforts of the pit crew cannot go unnoticed, as they must be relied upon to ensure that pitstops are carried out smoothly.

In this sense, you can say that Formula 1 is a team sport, but one that places a huge amount of the responsibility on one individual. Once the driver is on the track, there is not much more the team can do to help him, and it is up to the driver not to make a mistake. For this reason, there are two championships in F1 — one for drivers and one for constructors.

Each team enters two drivers and these are often referred to as “team mates”. However, often there is nothing “matey” about the relationship between these two individuals. Indeed, they might hate each other because the one person they want to beat more than anyone else is their team mate, who is usually racing with equal equipment. Comparing team mates with each other is an important barometer of a driver’s skill, so it is usually in a driver’s interest to undermine his team mate.

However, pragmatically a driver has to remember that he is an employee of his team. If a team decides that it is in their best interests to help one driver more than another, they are within their rights to do this. This is known as “team orders” and is part of racing. (Team orders will be discussed in more detail in a future bluffer’s guide.)

Testing

Teams spend a lot of time testing their cars to make sure that their developments work properly before racing with them. Such tests must be held at an FIA-sanctioned circuit. Testing is limited to 30,000km per team per calendar year. This limit excludes promotional events and young driver training. A young driver is defined as a driver who has not competed in a Formula 1 event for 24 months or has not tested an F1 car for more than four days in the past 24 months.

Teams often employ test drivers whose specific job is to test the car. Often race drivers are used at test sessions in addition to test drivers. Some drivers become highly regarded for their ability to give feedback to their engineers and for their knowledge of how to set up a car. Examples of such drivers include Pedro de la Rosa, Alexander Wurz and Anthony Davidson. These drivers are all highly regarded as test drivers but struggle to get a race drive.

Car development

F1 teams do not just launch a car at the beginning of the season and race with it all year. Teams work throughout the year to improve their performance and developments are made to the cars several times per year as the teams see fit. In most cases, the car at the end of the season is completely different to the car that began the season. Check out Formula1.com’s excellent technical section to keep up with the main car developments throughout the year.

Logically, though, the largest leaps are made over the winter when there is no racing going on. Usually each car is an evolution of the previous year’s car. Sometimes cars are re-designed almost from the ground up each year. This used to happen fairly often, but is increasingly rare these days — unless a team hires a new chief aerodynamicist or some other radical team structural change.

Every time there is a major change to a chassis, its name changes. Usually the name changes in a predictable way for the start of each season. For instance, in 2007 Ferrari’s chassis was the F2007 and McLaren’s was the MP4-22. This year those teams’ chassis are the F2008 and the MP4-23 respectively.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop a team from using the same chassis for two years in a row (although this usually doesn’t happen because the pace of development is such that running a two year old chassis would be a serious disadvantage to any team) or from running two different chassis in one season — just as long, of course, as the chassis met the technical regulations. It is quite common for a team to use their old chassis for the first few races of the year if the development of the new car has been delayed for some reason. This happened to Toro Rosso this year, whose new STR3 was not used until the Monaco Grand Prix, six races into the season.

Liveries

Historically, teams ran traditional liveries with each nationality having a traditional colour. Britain, of course, had British Racing Green, and Italian cars ran in the deep scarlet colour (‘Rosso Corsa’) made so famous by Ferrari. Of course, with the introduction of sponsorship in the late 1960s, this was never going to last and now teams appear in whatever colours take their fancy. But is it true that F1 cars are “glorified cigarette packets”?

The arrival of sponsorship does not mean that the history has gone forever. McLaren (Mercedes) run with a predominantly silver livery and red car numbers, a reflection of the Silver Arrows’ history. BMW run with their corporate colours of navy blue, though the majority of the car is white, Germany’s traditional racing colour.

Honda and Toyota have also run in Japan’s traditional white and red (although today Honda runs in a white, green and blue ‘Earth’ car to highlight environmental concerns). When tobacco sponsorship was still allowed in F1, Honda cleverly used the Lucky Strike logo to double up as the traditional ‘red sun’. Ferrari, of course, are famous for running their traditional ‘Rosso Corsa’ colour. However, in recent years this shade has become lighter, more similar to the shade of red used in Marlboro packets (Phillip Morris still heavily fund Ferrari even though tobacco sponsorship technically does not exist in F1).

Ligier / Prost used blue until the team’s demise in 2002. When Jaguar briefly participated in F1 at the start of this decade, it ran in a deep green. However, it was slightly lighter than British Racing Green, apparently to make sponsor logos stand out better on television. The team that Jaguar bought, the (Ford-powered) Stewart team ran in white and blue, the American racing colours.

Of course, there is nothing in F1′s rules that dictates that teams should use traditional colours. These rules were relaxed in 1970. But clearly many F1 teams still value their heritage enough to run colour schemes that are inspired by history.

Some aspects of the livery are restricted though. The two cars of each team must look “substantially” similar at every event in a year. In 1999, the new BAR team (owned by British American Tobacco) wanted to advertise two of its cigarette brands, one on each car. However, the FIA would not be moved. BAR’s compromise was to advertise one brand along the left side of the car and a different brand on the right. The resulting livery was a real mess and widely derided. From 2000 onwards, BAR’s ditched the ‘dual livery’ scheme.

Each car must display the badge of the car make on the front of the car. The name and national flag of the driver should be displayed on the side (usually just behind the driver’s helmet on the engine cover). The car number should also be visible from the front and the side. However, many spectators complain that the numbers are so small that you cannot see them.

Nowadays, a different way of telling apart the two cars of each team is to look at the ‘T-cam’ (the onboard camera that appears on top of the rollover structure just above and behind the driver’s head). For the lead driver, this is a fluorescent red. For a team’s second driver, it is fluorescent yellow.

Of course, another way to tell drivers apart is to look at their helmets. Traditionally, drivers design their own helmets although these days they are covered in sponsor logos just like the cars are. A good helmet design can become as famous as a historic car livery. Just think of Ayrton Senna’s yellow helmet, Graham Hill’s deep blue helmet with white tabs around the top (an adaptation of a London Rowing Club design, and also used by Graham’s son Damon) or Jackie Stewart’s white helmet with a tartan band around the top.

Car numbers

A minor, but interesting, point is how car numbers are allocated. Car numbers are published by the FIA before the start of each season and remain the same all season.

The current World Champion always races with the number 1. His team mate is allocated number 2. In instances when the World Champion is not participating in the race, it is probable that the Constructors Champion would use the numbers 0 and 2.

Under the old system of allocating car numbers (which ran until 1995), this happened in 1993 and 1994 when Damon Hill ran with the number 0 for two years running. The first time was because of the retirement of Nigel Mansell and the second time was due to the retirement of Alain Prost.

After the numbers 1 (or 0) and 2 are allocated, the following numbers are allocated according to the finishing position in the previous year’s Constructors Championship. So, ignoring the Constructor bearing numbers 1 (or 0) and 2, the highest-scoring constructor will carry the numbers 3 and 4, the next highest-scoring will carry the numbers 5 and 6, and so on. The number 13 is skipped for unclear reasons, though it’s safe to assume that this is due to superstition.

Not all superstitious numbers are removed though. In 2005 Japanese driver Takuma Sato was allocated the number 4 which is an unlucky number in Japanese culture (ominously being closely associated with death). True enough, his season was riddled with bad luck and strange mistakes.

This season McLaren are racing with the numbers 22 and 23 because they were excluded from last year’s Constructors Championship. Super Aguri were allocated numbers 20 and 21. Although Super Aguri no longer participates in F1, McLaren’s numbers remain 22 and 23 for consistency throughout the season.

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