Formula 1 Analysis by Rosehillpilot

These days I am able to watch the BBC coverage of practice and the race whether I am in the French Alps or back at home base in the UK. The new team at the BBC have delivered outstanding comment and coverage of the season so far and I feel that they have managed to find an almost perfect balance between popular entertainment and serious reporting. The downside of all this excellence is that I find that there is less and less for me to add. Unless I have something straight from the (generally prancing) horse's mouth, most of the issues that I used to write about have already been covered by one or other of the broadcast team. So this blogsite has become very much more an occasional commentary on the scene, and this contribution is simply a series of notes on what I see as the core issues of the season so far.

Diffuser difficulties are not simply secret but hidden in the dark
After the WMC ruling that the rear underbodies could be perforated and yet remain within the wording of the rules (which say “impermeable”), the season really started all over again for the teams that had complied with what was generally accepted to be the intention of the bodywork rules. The minority view had prevailed and everyone else has been forced to re-package the rear ends of their cars to allow additional venting to be fitted above the existing diffusers. Although all the big players have now introduced these aero features none of them has yet produced anything like the definitive package that they are aiming for.

The underbody panels are always given a matt-black finish and the purpose of this is to make it difficult to see exactly what the layout is within the diffuser area in particular. For this reason it is hard to spot the big changes that have been made as McLaren, Renault, Red Bull and Ferrari battle to take advantage of the huge liberalisation of the rules that was mandated by the appeal hearing in Paris. It is frustrating not to be able to see what exactly is going on in this all-important technical fightback, but there is one thing that is quite obvious. Nobody at all has managed to open up the central area of the diffuser exit to match the layout of the Brawn machines.

To gain the amount of space that Brawn have found here probably requires a completely new gearbox and certainly a difficult redesign of the central crash structure. Whether the limitations of both time and money will allow anyone to introduce an equally elegant solution much before the end of the season is a moot point. But I will continue to stare into the dark whenever there is a rear-end shot of the cars in an effort to see exactly what the chasing teams are doing to catch up.

Overtaking in 2009
Meanwhile the BBC team has made the comment that this year's cars seem able to follow each other through fast corners only a little more closely than before. Apart from the fact that some circuits (like Barcelona for example) seem to be configured in a way that makes overtaking as unlikely as it is at Monaco, there is a very important point that seems to have been missed. The diffusers are the most important element in the management of the underbody flow, and the underbody flow is the most powerful downforce generator on the cars.

The new-style diffusers allow the generation of much more downforce that the Overtaking Working Group intended for 2009, and they greatly increase the upwash behind the cars and the vortices that trail on either side of this stream. This increases the adverse affect on the following cars' aero grip, thus making it impossible to follow closely in fast corners, and reduces the slipstream tow that can aid a following car on the straights. The abandonment of the principal of impermeable surfaces in the diffuser area has more than undone the changes that were introduced to make overtaking easier.

If the cars are presently able to follow each any more closely than was possible last season, it is purely as a result of the changes to the front wings. At the rear the affect of the raised and narrowed wing is more than offset by the increased power of the venturi flow that the new diffusers make possible.

The political posturing
A feature of 21st century life is that we live in such a distracting media environment that we are bombarded with information whether we like it or not. I could certainly live without a blow by blow account of everything that is being said or not said in the meetings between the FOTA teams and the FIA. But you have to laugh at the basic situation.

On the one side is the governing body of motorsport trying to reduce the cost of Formula One. Their intention is to reduce the basic budget required to put a car on the grid to the relative levels that existed before the major car manufacturers became involved. Their motive is to keep most of the manufacturers' teams in the sport by making it possible for them to compete on an equal budget, and to set this budget at a level that makes it economically possible for smaller businesses to field cars on a sound commercial basis. Whatever happens the economy will force change: everybody is going to have less money, commercial revenues are certain to fall, and we are on the brink of a domino cascade of team withdrawals from the sport which already has empty slots on the grid.

Apparently united in their opposition to the proposed reduction of budgets to sensible levels are the teams that stand almost to a man on the brink of a financial abyss. None of them trust each other on any level and they can never agree about anything except their desire to write the rules themselves in a way that gives them an edge over their rivals. The fact that three teams interpreted the FIA rules in a way that would obviously disadvantage everyone else at the start of this year can not have improved the likelihood of any genuine solidarity within FOTA. The most charitable interpretation of the members of FOTA and their motives is that as competitors they could only be united in a push for better revenues. Why then do they seem to be arguing that they should be allowed to spend, and therefore lose, as much money as possible?

The big motor-manufacturer backed teams are facing a recession of such magnitude that they will not be able to justify their present levels of F1 involvement. Before they are forced to leave the sport they each believe that they can win, so long as they can spend all their remaining money in one last push for glory. Yet if we look at Toyota as a model of where this thinking takes you, there has been poor correlation between its huge budget and its success on the track.

Toyota, BMW, Renault, and Mercedes all want to use the last of their resources to win the drivers' or manufacturers' championships. Then they would withdraw from the sport until world economic conditions might allow them to return. Meanwhile the privateer teams are on the verge of extinction themselves, largely because of the strain of having to compete as best they can in this war of financial attrition. Looking around the paddock at the conspicuous wealth of the team facilities it is hard to accept this reality. But the hard fact is that F1 could fail quite suddenly and completely when the big teams follow Honda out of the sport, unless it is by then an attractive proposition for newcomers who simply want to race at the top level on a realistic budget.

This new drama has produced a new cast of heroes and villains. I trust that I am not alone in feeling that a fresh figure has stepped forward to replace Ron Dennis. Toyota's John Howett bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Ron, in particular the way he talks from the side of his mouth. His tactic of trying to stop any of the other team bosses even discussing the FIA budget-cap proposal was a breathtaking own-goal from a man who possibly knows that his team will be gone before next season starts whatever happens, and is simply trying to save face for his Japanese masters. Meanwhile Luca di Montezemolo is presumably using all of his bullying style to herd FOTA towards endless confrontation. Ferrari is traditionally a race team first and foremost, but it has so transformed itself into a global brand that perhaps Luca sees no good reason to reduce costs when it has such a secure revenue stream. But he is probably wrong to be so confident.

McLaren's new leader, Martin Whitmarsh, is at least making conciliatory noises, but the heroes of the hour must be the Williams team. As Sir Frank said so succinctly, they are a formula 1 race team and they have therefore broken ranks with FOTA and made an unconditional entry for next year. With large numbers of new teams applying for an entry in 2010 it is hard to see what the bulk of the FOTA members are trying to achieve. Unless, like Toyota, they have to stop racing anyway and hope to blame somebody else for their departure. But don't lose any sleep at all over this storm in a motor-home. Almost all the big players will be back next year (thankful for the imposition of capped budgets) and any gaps will be filled by interesting newcomers. Let the journalists get excited about all this but don’t let it spoil the races.

This week's winners and losers
There has been a tremendous ebb and flow of fortunes so far this season, and the race in Turkey will show us who is rising and who is sinking this weekend. Brawn will most likely remain on top. They still have the only fully optimised new-style diffuser and this will give them a big advantage. Besides which the whole package is neat, well balanced, and reliable. One thing that Ross must have brought from Benetton and Ferrari is Rory Byrne's strong belief that you have to take risks to gain an edge at this level. I think that Brawn swept away the corporate conservatism that Honda was imposing on the team and encouraged the designers to risk an altogether more innovative approach. Because of the consequences that flowed from it I am sorry that they produced their diffuser. But this was not cheating. It was at the very limit of what they would have believed might be accepted. It was a gamble, but it was accepted by the FIA and they are reaping the reward. The Brawn team are also enjoying the benefit of having had Honda's huge budget to develop the car coupled with the possibly more drivable Mercedes engine. Søren had a perfect crystal ball when he predicted this success at the start of the season. At the time I was completely unaware of the nature of the radical diffuser layout and the huge aero advantage that it gave. I could only explain the pre-season speed of the Brawn by assuming that they were running underweight.

There seems no end to McLaren's pain. Their car is still too slow and I think that they have a big problem in gaining space for a new-style diffuser at the rear of the car. It is going to be a very long haul for them this season and the traumas that resulted in Dennis leaving the race team must have been an unwanted distraction.

But what on earth explains Toyota's fall to the tail end of the field in Monaco? They have their trick diffuser, they were near the pace of the Brawns when the season began, and they have slumped like BMW. But BMW seem to have produced yet another knife-edge car, and are struggling to get consistency from race to race just as they did last year. Having started with an old-school diffuser layout they have an excuse for not running at the front but Toyota would seem to have none. I have a hunch that Toyota must have been told to remove something from their car that we have not heard about. Whatever it was it must have been giving them quite a performance gain....

Williams continue to disappoint themselves with good speed somehow never translating into good results. They seem overdue for a good finish but things will be getting harder for them at every race as the “compliant-diffuser seven” progressively develop their new aero freedom.

However, the team that really is on the move up the field is Ferrari. The team thought that they had a good package before testing began. They found that they could not compete with the perforated-diffuser teams at the start of the season, and were behind the Red Bulls, but poor reliability and all sorts of errors made things look worse than they really were. The turnaround has been very impressive and they have a lot of development still to exploit. It will be very interesting to see how much speed the cars have in Turkey after they ran so strongly at the low-energy circuit in Monaco. I feel that they could be right up at the front in another race or two.

The team that seems to have lost the most is Red Bull, and they are the ones who least deserve to struggle like this. They were way ahead of the other “impermeable-diffuser” cars when the season started. They seemed to have good underbody downforce with their old layout which must have been very well thought out. The potential advantages of the “perforated” system are so clear that they had to develop a new rear end, and they set about what was a particularly difficult spacial re-design. At Monaco at least it was not working well. It looked as if they would have been at least as fast with the old car. Certainly we should all watch the team closely from first practice tomorrow to see if they have the same trouble at the very high-energy circuit of Istanbul. Every one of the seven teams that made the failed protest against the perforated-diffusers can feel aggrieved by the way this compromised their seasons and wrecked their budgets, but Red Bull must be the most upset. Their pace at Monaco with their re-configured car must have been a big disappointment and a worry.

The drivers championship
Jenson Button must be as dissatisfied with the points system as I am. Based on finishing positions he would have a commanding lead in the drivers' championship with Sebastien Vettel well behind him in second place. Rubens Barrichello on the other hand must be relieved to have a points system with such a small differential between first and second places. Without safety car interventions Jenson would have had easier runs in several races while Rubens would not have done as well as he did. Jenson may be the man who is winning but Rubens seems to be having a lot of luck. The only thing that may bring this to an end is Rubens desperation to beat Jenson. It now rages just as fiercely as his desire to beat Michael Schumacher during his Ferrari days. That led him to try odd set-ups and unconventional strategies. More often than not these moves dropped him even further behind Michael in the races. But do not imagine that there will be any peace between the Brawn garages.

Button has already won the same number of races this season as the last two world champions in their winning years. But he must worry that last year Felipe Massa won the most races and still lost on points, and it was only a lucky break at the last race that prevented the same thing happening to Kimi Räikkönen in 2007.

Ciao

The race in Shanghai:
Everyone could see that the Chinese GP was wet. More crucial perhaps was that it was cold. Just as happened so many times last season, the low temperatures prevailing for this race, now that it has been re-scheduled for the early spring, led to marginal tyre and brake temperatures. Some cars failed to maintain tyre-temperature, brake temperature, or both during the stormy conditions. If you want to understand what was going on in this race you should look at last year's race at Monza where the same problems generally hit the same teams. Here in Chamonix we are still skiing, though the afternoons are very warm if the sky is clear. As for China there are ski areas just outside Beijing although they rely on man made snow as the icy winds that sweep out of the Gobi desert are very dry. Shanghai may be well to the South but it can be surprisingly cold at this time of year when cyclonic conditions pull the polar front down towards the region. In Hong Kong fur coats can actually be needed rather than merely flaunted if a North wind blows at this time of year.

Anyway, this was a cold race and the torrential rain contributed to the cooling of the tyres and the brakes. If the race had been run without safety car periods it is possible that Button would have held on to the lead he was building in his long first stint. As things turned out he lost all of his advantage when the safety car was deployed, forcing him to pit early, and afterwards never regained full tyre temperature in the wetter conditions.

What can one say about Sebastian Vettel? This was a second excellent drive to victory from a man I am sure will become one of the biggest names in the sport over the coming years. Red Bull have produced strong wet weather performance (in both the 'works' and Torro Rosso editions) in these conditions in the past. Their car is certainly very strong this season but here I suspect the advantage lay in set-up on the day. It is possible that they may have a quick fix to reduce brake cooling in difficult conditions like these, and I also wonder whether they may be running unusual tyre pressures as well. In aviation there is very little concern about tread pattern with regard to aquaplaning, which is a very big problem for large jets on landing. Vulnerability to the phenomenon is considered to be proportional to tyre pressure. If any of the teams was prepared to run pressures well above those recommended by Bridgestone they might have a considerable advantage on a partially flooded track. The crown of the tyres would also be raised and the central band of rubber would be doing most of the work and would become hotter. If a team got this just right they might be very quick in the wet.....

This was yet another exciting race to watch in what is clearly going to be a classic season. But many of the cars that were chasing the leaders were completely out of their normal performance envelope. Whether or not you were running an old-school or a new-wave diffuser was less important in this race than the basic problem of getting the tyre and brake temperature up into the working range. For the last two years I have been constantly returning to this issue and I had hoped that this season would see an end to these problems. Hope is one thing and reality is another. It was obvious that many of the drivers in Shanghai were struggling with cars that were virtually impossible to control. Whether you have wet or dry tyres, unless the temperatures come up into the working range the car will have little grip. But much worse than this there will be a lack of feel. The driver will not be able to sense where the limit of adhesion lies because the tyre response will be so abrupt when the rubber is cold. The same will be true of the brakes. This is a huge problem with these cars because of the difference in the energy put into the tyres in fast and slow corners. It is the downforce that produces this affect: if there were no aero aids at all (neither wings nor underbody shapes) the tyres would work no harder in fast corners than in slow hairpins. This adverse side-effect of downforce brings me neatly to my second topic.

The race in Paris:
The decision of the International Court of Appeal in Paris was correct in a strictly legal sense. It has to be said that this is a legal hearing and this is the sort of judgement it is designed to make. This whole issue should have been sorted out before the season began by the simple expedient of banning all of the disputed diffuser layouts and issuing clarifications. Now that the ICA has released its full decision the cat is out of the bag. Everyone must now follow this development path regardless of the expense and the unwelcome increase of downforce that will result. In view of the effort involved for all the teams that believed that they understood the rules it will be very hard for the FIA to outlaw this development path next season. I feel certain that the regulations will be re-written to express more clearly what is intended, but there will be great resistance to closing off this unintended loophole now that everyone has been forced to spend huge amounts of money to exploit it.

To put it simply, everyone knew that the intention of the regulations was to define the underbody. The central reference plane is lower than the underbody on either side: under the sidepods in other words. These flat surfaces were then intended to continue rearwards until they reached the mid-line of the rear wheels and then sweep upwards to a maximum height of 175mm above the reference plane. This was all intended by the rulemakers and understood by the teams to be a single impermeable surface. Sadly an excruciatingly complex form of words was used to define the way the reference plane (the plank) is connected to the step planes, how holes might be allowed if they were merely for bolting the thing onto the car or accessing ancillaries, and how the whole surface could be assembled from several pieces joined together for practical reasons. The way the rules are written doesn't even make it clear that they cover only the rear of the car: the flat underfloor leading into the divergent diffuser. The Ferrari council was forced to concede that everyone ran configurations at the front of the car that did not conform. Of course everyone 'knew' that these particular rules were not meant to apply to the front end, but the judges pointed out that there were no words in the regulations that made this clear. What a mess.

So the ICA has approved Venetian blinds. In spite of the absurdity of the concept they have decided that if dimensionally non-compliant parts of the diffuser are hidden “when viewed from below” by extra vanes they are freed from the height limit. This is the only objectively weak area of the judgement because it makes a rather particular interpretation of the wording of the regulations. Viewed from below has been taken to mean viewed vertically from below in spite of the fact that this is not stated probably because it was quite correctly not intended. When viewed from below the car in the general sense, as if the car was lifted up onto stands and you got onto your knees and looked at it, all the dimensionally non-compliant parts are clearly visible. Worse still the ICA ruled that the ambiguity of the actual wording of the regulations can also justify the whole slotted Venetian blind diffuser starting forward of the rear-wheel centre line. Another very big cat sprinting out of the bag.

So pretty well all of the intended limitations that were meant to be placed on the rear underbody dimensions have gone out of the window. The open window is not a hole. There are slots between the slats of the Venetian blind that covers it, but because the slats of that half open blind are themselves made of solid material the wording of the rules is met. And because you cannot see through that Venetian blind when you look at it from one particular angle it is fair to say that the window is not open. All I can do is repeat the angry observation from Maranello that “This is what you get when a lorry driver writes the rules!”

What will the angry seven teams do next?
It may be an expensive debacle, and it may have been a much better start to the season if everyone had built cars that conformed to the same rules from the start, but this is going to be a fascinating few months. The increase in downforce available under the new ICA-mandated interpretation of the rules may be undesirable but the race to exploit this layout to the full will be fascinating. The whole understanding of what was allowed has been so blown away that almost anything may happen. The sad thing is that these fascinating and clever developments will be out of sight (unless one of the cars ends up upside down) and beyond the ken of the media. This is a technical sport and the fans deserve some real technical insight.

I notice that Mike Gascoigne is hoping to get a consultancy job (possibly in an aero department possibly with Ferrari, Mike is quoted as saying) if he fails to replace Eddie Jordan on the BBC commentary team. Now I have never met Mike and I can only wish that I was about to be dragged from the ski slopes to work in Maranello, but I would like to point out a glaring shortcoming in Mike's understanding of the basic principles of F1 aerodynamics. During the BBC coverage of the race in Shanghai he tried to explain the diffuser issue. He said that “The diffuser accelerates the air from the underbody”. I have to point out that Mike is absolutely wrong about this. The air is slowing down in the diffuser, having been accelerated as it flowed into the flat section of the underbody, and as it does so it returns to ambient pressure (and temperature). The tricky thing with the diffuser is to maintain laminar flow as the air is forced to travel from a low pressure area to a higher pressure area. If the air stagnates in the diffuser the whole venturi effect is compromised.

Anyway, I have no idea what the seven teams will come up with as they respond to the new interpretation of the rules. I can only say what I would be looking for if I was lucky enough to lead one of the talented groups who will be working hard on this. I would want to clean up the rear of the car and get the suspension, all ancillaries, and clutter out of the way so that there is full scope for an enlarged diffuser above the Venetian blind visual screens (which do also have an aero contribution as well). I would be aware that most teams are struggling to get the centre of gravity of the car far enough forward to match the changed ratio of tyre contact patch sizes front to rear on this season's slicks. Pushing the rear wheels further to the rear with a new gearbox layout would achieve both ends. You will have to trust me on this when I say that the longer wheelbase would be no handicap at Monaco so long as the rotational inertia of the car was little changed. And KERS will be essential sometime soon. With the additional weight of the system there is less ballast to play with and the optimum c of g has to be obtained by moving the rear wheels backwards. The extra space gained in the gearbox area might allow the Venetian blind ducts to start quite far forward, increasing the underbody downforce and pushing its centre of (low) pressure forward along with the centre of mass. While I was at it I would make sure that the brakes were marginal. I would be prepared to see them overheat in the warmest race of the season in order to ensure they got up to temperature in all the cold ones, and I would want my clever boffins to come up with some new and radical ways of adjusting the brake balance to give my drivers good feel with the KERS system installed. How much will all this cost? I don't care: in my imagination I have an unlimited budget.
Ciao

PS: The Bahrain weekend starts tomorrow. As I said last season Bahrain is the new Zandvoort with desert winds replacing sea breezes but having the same effect as sand blows onto the track. Stay on line or slide off on the tiny marbles. I presume that it will not rain and that the Brawns will win. Ferrari will still be fighting on without aero changes of significance, but may perform much better in warmer conditions. McLaren may be a bit weaker and Renault may do another low fuel glory run in Q3. Williams will be desperate to capitalise on their new-age diffuser advantage during this critical period. The diffuser three still have a couple of races to capitalise on the benefit they enjoy before the other seven teams have any real chance to close the gap.

“Unless I am very much mistaken, and I am very much mistaken” said Murray Walker in one of his most unforgettable moments commentating with the BBC. I feel the same way about the outcome of the ICA hearing in Paris. I suppose that I was a little anxious about things, given that Charlie Whiting had accepted the legality of the 'new-concept' diffusers and that his view had been endorsed by the Stewards at two successive races. But I felt sure that Whiting would be unable to explain to the judges why perforated underbodies were suddenly OK when they had never been allowed in the past. I also felt sure that the FIA would be unwilling to have wasted the time and money spent by the Overtaking Working Group that it had tasked to make a long overdue reduction in downforce. I was not expecting the protest to be rejected, and I don't think that anybody else in F1 expected this outcome either. I believe that the Brawn, Toyota, and Williams teams hoped to suffer no retrospective penalty but were fairly certain that the ICA was going to insist on full compliance with the intent of the regulations in future. I assumed that the hearing would result in a simplified and more straightforward wording of the rules to express what everyone knew to be their purpose.

The International Court of Appeal is completely independent from the FIA executive. In spite of all the nonsense in the press the governance of motorsport in general and Formula One in particular is exemplary. The ruling body has structures in place that offer more robust access to justice and fairness to all involved than exists in any other sport. So I am not going to rail against the ICA. However, I am waiting with great impatience for their full ruling to be published, and every team must be equally eager for the full text. There will be a great deal hanging on their words. Unlike Ferrari, Renault, Red Bull, and McLaren, who all protested the stewards' decision in favour of the disputed designs in Melbourne, BMW made its protest against the stewards second ruling in Malaysia. BMW has not yet withdrawn its appeal. If the reasons given by the ICA to reject the first protest seem in any way technically inadequate BMW may choose to force another ICA hearing. This matter may not be over yet.

Probably the biggest loser of all the seven teams who must now embark on a catastrophically expensive research program to introduce 'B-spec' cars as soon as possible is Red Bull. They fielded the most aerodynamically elegant of the cars that complied fully with the intended regulations and must have been very optimistic about the new season. Their car has been so effective that it has been able to get somewhere near the 'new concept' trio. Like Ferrari they are now faced with a very expensive modification as the super-diffusers cannot be fitted around their current gearbox or suspension. Rather than bash on about this myself I will simply quote Christian Horner's words from today's press conference in Shanghai. Horner was asked why his team had not considered fitting a double decker diffuser: 
“ It’s no coincidence that seven teams didn’t go down the double diffuser route. Obviously a lot of work was done in the Overtaking Working Group and within the regulations there is obviously a spirit or essence of what the regulations are set to achieve. Certainly the precedent of holes in the floor, from our perspective, was deemed to be illegal, so that’s why we chose the route that we did to protest the cars together with our colleagues at the first opportunity....to get clarity. Obviously the stewards and the FIA made their position known there [in Melbourne] and then the option to us was obviously to appeal that. We feel that we had a fair appeal hearing, where the facts were presented from either side and I think the bottom line is that there was a lot of ambiguity within the regulations and you can call it a clever interpretation, if you like, that the three teams have taken. I think it was certainly against the spirit of what was set out within the Overtaking Working Group.”

And this is Christian's view of the consequences:
“... we felt we had a fair hearing, we presented our case which was listened to carefully but now we’re in a situation where, as they are permitted, we have no choice but to develop our own solution, which is obviously time and money and a big development channel that becomes open, because the underbody of the car is obviously the most powerful aerodynamic device on the car and so lap times will continue to tumble significantly as the solutions are developed.”

So, no more discussion of the facts of this matter, at least until the full ruling is available. I think that there are several other consequences looming. There has been even more heat generated over this issue than has been made public so far. Harsh words were exchanged at the ICA hearing and there have been some intemperate statements made to the press, and not just from the usual suspect on these occasions: Flavio. I think that there was a degree of cynicism by the three teams who chose to introduce these diffusers. But the heat will eventually go out of this. They were trying to exploit part of the wording of the regulations (and ignoring other words in the rules) that would justify the introduction of something that is a well known performance enhancing layout that has always been banned in the past. When Charlie Whiting gave his approval to Toyota's design pre-season and later advised the stewards in Melbourne that the three disputed cars were within the rules the catastrophe was triggered.

What probably cannot be repaired is the team's relationship with the FIAs technical delegate Charlie Whiting, or their new found spirit of cooperation within their new body FOTA. Charlie may retain his role as race director but with so many big players on the design side of the teams now saying that he has neither the skills to write the rules with enough clarity, nor the knowledge of aerodynamics to make consistent judgements, his days must be numbered. Those members of the press who requested access to the ICA hearing must have been stunned by Charlie's failure to give coherent answers when questioned about his own rulings. I am told that Charlie arrived at the hearing without having read the submissions of the protesting teams or the replies made by the diffuser three. Nor did Charlie bring any notes to the hearing. Almost unbelievable but true. Charlie has served the FIA for years and has had the respect of the teams even when he was handing down opinions that were unpopular with some of them. When I have met him he has always struck me as a thoroughly likeable man. But now the majority of the designers in F1 probably feel that, whether through age or complacency, he has become unfit for his role.

As for FOTA, it may limp on as a body that will try to pressure the commercial rights holders for more money, but on technical matters (and don't forget that Ross Brawn is its technical representative) it is blown apart.

Meanwhile, there is a conspiracy theory doing the rounds. It isn't just half-crazed web chatter either: it seems to be an idea that has taken root in the Ferrari and Renault camps. It is that the ICA judgement was a foregone conclusion and that the complainants were being set up for a fall. The motive, they say, is to win acceptance for the standard floor that Max Mosley would like to see all the cars run in future. Personally I think that this is nonsense. It smacks of paranoia and perhaps illustrates how this whole controversy has destabilised the Ferrari team. My feeling is that Luca di Montezemolo is not the best sort of leader to keep a big ship on course or an excitable crew thinking clearly. This conspiracy hypothesis does not hold together. Max does not want to see any increase in downforce, nor a decision that has placed such a huge financial burden on the majority of teams just as the world economy staggers. He cannot influence the judgements of the ICA, but he must be as displeased with the nonsensical evidence given to it by his employee Charlie as are the teams whose protest was rejected. My own feeling is that the teams probably presented too complex an argument to the ICA. The fact is that the new designs are non-compliant because they do not have an underbody that is “impervious”. The passages that lead off from the underbody (hidden by those venetian blinds) channel air above the height limit allowed to the “impervious” underbody: QED. It is possible that the judges were distracted from this central point by the welter of side issues that were brought forward in the objections. Less might have been more, and might have produced a better result for everyone involved in the sport.

One thing I cannot see happening again in the near future is a group of top designers working to help the FIA develop the rules. There is no doubt in my mind that the three teams whose representatives formed the OWG on behalf of the FIA were so close to the intent of the new rules that they failed to anticipate any of their peers might try to circumvent them so blatantly. Ferrari, Renault, and McLaren were disadvantaged by their co-operation with the FIA.

The season is certainly not over. The three teams that have fully developed “new-age” diffusers have a big advantage but do not seem to be as far ahead of the others as wind tunnel analysis suggests they should be. The others may leapfrog right over them when they are able to fit their own systems. The teams that are working on this now will be willing and very motivated to push the interpretation of the diffuser to the very limit. Just as they thought that the “diffuser-three” were “taking the piss” they will now go out of their way to have a laugh over the rules rules themselves. They will be trying to gain performance of course, but also they will be trying to place Charlie Whiting in in an impossible position with provocative developments of the split diffuser concept. In spite of everything there are very small margins between the teams at present. The whole field is more closely matched than before and any small gain in performance could catapult one of the zero players right up into hero territory.

Today's qualifying in China was thrilling. Ferrari is treading water at present having made the bold decision to spend this weekend chasing an optimum c of g position on Kimi's car. The KERS was removed so that ballast could be fitted, as normally Kimi is right up on the minimum weight without ballast. Felipe was going to run with KERS as it does give lower lap times and he can still fit some ballast. This would probably have produced howls of protest from outside the team, but in the event problems with KERS forced its removal from Massa's car as well. What this tells you is that the Scuderia is going back to basics to get a grip on the basic balance of the car before addressing the diffuser design itself. Red Bull again showed tremendous speed. It is obvious that they have the best old-diffuser car in the field. The rest of the season may be catastrophically expensive for the compliant-seven but it will be fascinating to watch the big-players in particular as they close the gap and fight their way to the front. My suspicion is that the Brawns will romp away in tomorrow's race. But this is probably another Murray Walker moment....
Ciao

PS: I did intend to post these comments yesterday but got sidetracked. The trouble now is that the events of this race weekend keep sparking off further thoughts:
Whenever Brawn GP is discussed someone always says what a miracle it is to have produced a race-winning car on a small budget. In reality they designed a race-winning car while funded by Honda. In other words on a gigantic budget. And the enforced switch to the Mercedes engine might have given them a motor with a more driveable power curve and excellent packaging. A lucky break in fact?
Vettel is not a star in the making he is already a star. The pressure of going out at the end of Q2 and Q3 to set only one time must have been huge. To do this demonstrated supreme confidence. I wish somebody could tell us whether the team has already fitted a permeable surface to their diffuser....
Having seen the Q3 weights it is now clear that Alonso was on the sort of low-fuel glory run that the team adopted so often last year before their car became more competitive. Perhaps the new aero parts are window dressing rather than effective modifications? The Brawns are both carrying more fuel than the cars ahead of them on the grid. A good qualifying lap from Barrichello, but will he have the patience to follow the lighter cars without incident or is he so desperate to beat Button that he will have another incident packed run?

Just a few quick thoughts before tomorrow's hearing in Paris before the FIA Court of Appeal. In my posting two days ago I wrote that the FIA should be able to publish its decision on Tuesday. This should of course be Wednesday. The members of the Court of Appeal will be hearing submissions for the whole of Tuesday, and then will have to discuss the issues raised and reach their decision. I cannot see how their verdict could be released on Tuesday.

I expect a statement of their verdict on Wednesday followed by the full text of their decision and its basis following either later the same day or later in the week. If the decision goes against them I presume the three teams involved will have new underbody shapes available in Shanghai so that they can run in legal trim in the race on Sunday.

Snow conditions in the Chamonix valley are still good enough to tempt us to ski to exhaustion. In this state I was rather confused by a bank-holiday Monday that felt like a Sunday, if you see what I mean. This led to my confusion over which day actually followed tomorrow's hearing.

Looking back at my recent posts I can see another area that confused me initially. In my first discussion I said that the rules that covered the disputed diffusers were difficult to understand. This was because I was a little tired after several hard days on the mountain and had simply reviewed the issue as presented by the f1technical.net website. Alas, this grandly named web publication is about as sophisticated in its discussion of technical issues as the Daily Mail, and it led me to think that the argument was simply about the dimensional limits of the bodywork. I had hoped to get a full briefing from a very well-informed source but his own work-load prevented this.

The discussion of the diffuser dispute in my last posting came as the result of finally reading the relevant sections of the rules myself (you can get them from the FIA website of from Bernie's 'Official F1' website). I looked at the regulations, had a big think about how they could be subverted, looked again at the photographs that are publicly available of the three disputed cars, and found that the issue was not at all difficult to grasp. You can do the same. I was helped by a telephone conversation on Friday which confirmed my analysis and added a bit of background. I have not seen the actual diffuser undersides of any of the disputed cars but I believe I could give you a pretty good schematic sketch of the layouts they are running.

Meanwhile at Ferrari things seem even busier than in Chamonix. Rory Byrne is having yet another “Holiday in Paris” and will be sorry to be missing his Easter ski-trip. He is joined by the current Chief Designer, Nikolas Tombazis, to argue Ferrari's case against the three diffusers. But there is another announced movement of Ferrari personnel that I find interesting. Aldo Costa is now based back in Maranello co-ordinating the development of the F60 to full competitiveness. His role at the races has been taken by Chris Dyer, who effectively seems to be the new Team Manager. The job at the factory is important but sounds as if it is purely administrative. Could this move be related to some decision taken by Aldo during the heat of the race in Malaysia?

Meanwhile what I have called the Paris GP is probably the most important race of the season. Alonso and Raikkonen are not exaggerating when they say that the outcome of the hearing could decide the championship. For myself, I hope that it will throw the season open for all the teams to race fairly to the same rules. Watch this event closely.....
Ciao

The race last weekend
It was a little sad that the Malaysian GP ended with a red flag, though I was as amused as always to see that even the excellent BBC team did not seem to know the rules that apply when a race ends this way. It is possible to win a race after having crashed so heavily that the race was red-flagged at once if you were in the lead on the lap before you crashed. This has happened in the past, though nowadays the safety car would generally be deployed before the decision was taken to stop the event. Uniquely in this race the cars could not even avoid accidents and spins during the safety car period. Heidfeld had spun away second place just before the red flag came out, but retained the result as the order that counts is the order across the line on the last complete lap before the red flag is shown. The earlier spinners were not so lucky.

The main reason that the cars were so completely uncontrollable was not tyre aquaplaning but 'plank' planing. The so-called plank area of the central underbody is the closest part of the cars to the ground. The torrential rain produced local flooding of the track deep enough for the plank to reach the water. The sprung elements of the cars were then riding on a ground-effect film of water. Being incompressible water is a much more effective ground effect film to ride than the air cushion used by a hovercraft. This is exactly like the plywood skim-boards you see being used on surf beaches. They are small and cannot float with someone standing on them, but they scim across the shallow water draining from the beach after each wave. The riders can travel surprising distances as their drag is virtually zero. They are actually supported by the sand but are riding on an almost friction free film of water. So were the F1 cars. With the sprung weight taken by the water film the tyres would also have been significantly unweighted and would then have aquaplaned too. No braking, no steering, simply a ballistic excursion across the tarmac that would end only when the water became shallower. They might have been going slowly but this is not the sort of thing racing drivers enjoy.

Jenson Button drove another absolutely perfect race and his team was put under much more stress this time as the track conditions changed with the weather. Button never put a foot wrong, but Barrichello is still having a torrid time and this time there was no luck to get him onto the podium in spite of it. I feel sure that Rubens is doing everything to beat Button. I suspect that this very determination is leading to exactly the sort of errors under pressure that plagued the Brazilian when he was with Ferrari, and he is in danger of being dominated by his team mate in the same way as he was then. It is interesting that Button appeared less motivated than Barrichello when the Honda was useless. Now he finds himself in a race-winning car he has raised his game to the very top level, but Rubens seems to have become more fragile. Vettel is making mistakes because he is a hungry youngster, but Rubens is meant to be a steely veteran.

Desperation can be a very bad thing and Ferrari made a whole series of catastrophic decisions in Malaysia. The complacency in Q1 was bad enough but the decision to put Kimi on rain tyres before the track was wet was insane. I was horrified as I watched this pitstop unfold. In dry conditions these tyres are so soft that they are physically compromised in the first lap and the compound is falling apart on the second. Whoever took this decision (and it was not Michael Schumacher or Kimi himself) it was a desperate gamble. Raikkonen's Ferrari was well placed for points. The “diffuser three” had a huge advantage and it was best to ignore their pace and simply race the others, but I think the Ferrari team could not bear to watch the Brawn strolling away from them, not to mention the Toyota, and wrongly felt that some sort of long shot had to be taken.

In this situation the only sensible thing to do is cross your fingers and try to react to the weather when it changes. I suppose if you really wanted to gamble you should fit whatever tyres Nick Heidfeld happened to be using. Once again the German had an absolutely astonishing result in atrocious weather.

The real story of the race was again the presence of the “diffuser three” teams and their much faster cars. There is no way in theory to compete with the Brawn, Toyota, or Williams cars. The fact that they have not filled the first six places in the opening races simply demonstrates that it takes a lot more than simply having a faster car to get to the finish at the front. Brawn are undoubtedly the team to beat overall. Williams on the other hand have failed to capitalise on their advantage for all sorts of reasons. As the days of the multi-path diffusers are probably about to end they must be disappointed to have reaped so little reward.

But if you have any of the other cars you are really in a different race. The one thing that I could criticise the new BBC team about is their failure to explain the margin of advantage that the disputed diffuser configurations give the teams that have adopted them. Of the have-not teams Red Bull is still the most impressive. The Ferrari is possibly a little slower and the BMW is next. The entertaining thing is that the new rules really have reduced the performance differentials and everybody is much closer now. The competition is more intense than it has been for many years.

Make no mistake: given a smooth race weekend both the Brawns will stroll into the distance followed by the battling Williams and Toyotas. Everyone else will be racing for seventh place. Anybody on the grid could field a car that could lap a couple of seconds faster than everyone else. It would not actually be an F1 car, but all the teams have the knowledge to engineer more downforce if it was permitted. The three teams have chosen to ignore the part of the regulations that caps the venturi effect of the current underbody. Their strategy probably springs from a highly political suspicion that they will be able to gain from this for two or three races. The technology behind their performance gain is well known to every aero-department. It is one of a whole raft of things that would make a car faster. If it was allowed.

Blame the referee
I have never heard such violent criticism of Charlie Whiting before. Some people are seething at what they see as his failure to word the regulations in a totally unambiguous way, and his failure to recognise the significance of what he was shown by Toyota and tacitly approved early in the season. It is said that this is not his first failure to recognise a dangerous foul in aero matters. Somebody said to me “This is what happens when you have an ex truck driver writing the rules”. There is a lot of bitterness that hundreds of millions of pounds may be squandered over this matter this season by teams that are all struggling to stay afloat in straightened financial times. The other trenchant view I have heard from within an F1 design team is that the three teams involved “Really are just taking the piss over this – they're having a laugh!” So there really is a bit of heat here.

The Paris Grand Prix
The appeal against the stewards decisions to allow the disputed diffusers to be used in Melbourne and malaysia will be heard on Tuesday. The technical arguments had to be delivered to the FIA by midnight last Sunday. Brawn, Toyota, and Williams, will have been studying them all this week and have to lodge their own written replies this Sunday. The Ferrari technical and legal team gathers in Paris on Sunday. First thing on Monday morning, regardless of the fact that it is a public holiday, they will receive copies of the replies and spend the day studying the arguments raised. The other teams that are objecting will be doing the same thing.

The main event kicks off on Tuesday morning as all the interested parties get a chance to state their case and dispute the other submissions. This is such a major disagreement between the teams, and so little has been said that has any relevance to the actual details of the devices themselves and the way in which they appear to lie outside the rules, that it is necessary to look at this in detail. Although Brawn and the others will not have lodged their replies yet the eleventh hour is nearing. I do not think that I can do any harm to anyone by discussing the details today:

What should we do to hide our nakedness?
Does a half-closed Venetian blind form a continuous and solid surface? Let me put this another way. If you were hoping for privacy in a bedroom or a bathroom would you feel comfortable with a half-open Venetian blind covering the window? The solid and continues surface of a curtain would give you privacy but anyone would be able to see through the gaps in that blind. You would be most uncomfortable because the blind was not a solid screen.

ARTICLE 3: BODYWORK AND DIMENSIONS
One of the purposes of the regulations under Article 3 below is to minimize the detrimental effect that the wake of a car may have on a following car. Furthermore, infinite precision can be assumed on certain dimensions provided it is clear that such an assumption is not being made in order to circumvent or subvert the intention of the relevant regulation.
Basically the protested diffusers have all been designed to allow the exit ramp of the underbody to sweep up beyond the limit set by the rules. This limit (175 mm above the reference plane, which is the chassis 'plank') was chosen as a result of the wind-tunnel tests conducted by the Overtaking Working Group in 2007 in order to reduce overall downforce and, even more crucially, to decrease the adverse affects of the diffuser wake on a following car. The circumvention of this intention is of tremendous importance. The underbody of the F1 car forms a venturi even though complete venturi shapes were banned a long time ago. This surface is flat in the longitudinal plane from the bib area to the centre line of the rear wheels and then sweeps up in the area known as the diffuser. In reality there is an entry ramp even though it is invisible. Because of the overall pressure gradients around the front of the bib and the sidepods air flows downwards to pass under the car. The acceleration of this stream produces a large area of slightly reduced pressure that adds up to a huge total downforce. The only area that can be directly manipulated is the diffuser, which controls the flow out of the system and thus influences the pressure gradients pulling the air into the underbody. The contested designs have the potential to produce downforce that could be greater than last year's cars could generate, let alone cars that comply with the intention and letter of this year's rules. So the three disputed cars incorporate elements that are specifically designed to circumvent the intent of the rules. They are non-compliant with the rules for this reason.

3.12 Bodywork facing the ground :
No bodywork which is visible from beneath the car and which lies between the rear wheel centre line and a point 350mm rearward of it may be more than 175mm above the reference plane.....
A single break in the surface is permitted solely to allow the minimum required access for the device referred to in Article 5.15.....
Additionally, any bodywork in this area must produce uniform, solid, hard, continuous, rigid (no degree of freedom in relation to the body/chassis unit), impervious surfaces under all circumstances.
Next, the rules have evolved over the years and although there are many changes in the regulations for this season they represent revisions to well understood concepts. The requirement is for the underbody to be a single solid and continuous surface is long-standing and well understood. Teams have in the past introduced features that did not conform to this requirement and have been made to remove the non-conforming structures. Williams have tried this in the diffuser area in the past and had to remove the feature after a protest in 2001. What I will call the venetian-blind elements are horizontal aerodynamically-significant surfaces that divide the underbody where it transitions into the diffuser. They are rather like the turning vanes that used to dominate the side profile of the cars until the rules truncated them this year. The array of surfaces means that there are intake slots that penetrate the surface of the underbody and it can hardly be argued that it remains a solid surface. There has been no change in this particular requirement of the rules and it has been applied consistently for years. There will be some argument about exactly what slots and holes the rules allow in this surface for ease of manufacturing and access to other components but these will finally be irrelevant. The purpose of the holes that have been opened up in the undersurface of these three designs is to optimise downforce aerodynamics and they must therefore comply fully with the bodywork requirements. There is a gaping hole in the attempted justification of the divided diffusers and in the case of the Brawn GP car you can actually see right through it from the rear. Brawn, Toyota, and Williams, are running underbody surfaces that are not continuous and solid. They are well outside the rules here.

3.15 Aerodynamic influence: any specific part of the car influencing its aerodynamic performance...must comply with the rules relating to bodywork.
Finally (well finally from my point of view as there will be many more details in the arguments brought forward in Paris I suspect) there is the issue of what is a visible surface. The underbody surface that is visible from below must not rise higher than 175mm above the reference plane. The three contested teams will argue that the the areas of surface or surfaces that do so are not visible from below. Why are they not visible? Because they are obscured by the Venetian-blind surfaces. Even if these were permitted (and the arguments above suggest that they are not) it is incontestable that the uppermost surface that influences the aerodynamic performance of these diffusers is directly visible from below where it extends further forward, and continues unbroken to pass through and above the permitted vertical plane. The fact that the portion of this surface that lies above the line is hidden from below by another surface cannot be argued to free it from the dimensional restriction. Here too I believe that the devices are demonstrably outside the rules.

So my own conclusion is that the Venetian-blinds are out and a solid curtain should be used. Sir Jackie Stewart, David Coulthard, and Martin Brundle, may argue that they would be comfortable taking a shower masked from public view by a half-closed blind, but the rest of us might have to avert our eyes and save our horses from being frightened by the sight. I cannot see how the FIA can allow this development to continue as, quite apart from it being a clear breach of the regulations, it would quickly be developed to produce higher levels of downforce than F1 has enjoyed at any time in the past. Primary safety, circuit design, and ease of overtaking would all be compromised. How this will be tackled is anybody's guess. The teams could be excluded from the two races run so far, losing their points and their drivers' points. The first two results could be left standing but the teams told that they must run compliant underbodies from now on. I think that the latter decision is the most likely. Although absolute legal justice suggests exclusion, the pragmatic concern that the sporting contest should be decided on the track will suggest the simple banning of these configurations from now on. The FIA will also be aware that it has a certain culpability in that its technical representative Charlie Whiting failed to rule clearly against these devices when he advised the stewards after the protests in Melbourne and Sepang.

Although not part of the legal process I am sure that the appeal adjudicators will bear another thing in mind. The three disputed teams could simply bolt on a compliant underbody tomorrow. The seven teams who are protesting these designs could not fit similar things in the short term. Ferrari certainly has many other components in places that would prevent this upward extension of the diffuser. It would require a big reworking of the current car to follow this development path and I am pretty sure that the same goes for all the other teams that believe they have legal underbody shapes.

While we wait for the outcome in Paris there is one more comment to make. The three teams who have been protested did not introduce a clever or innovative solution within the rules. Everybody in F1 is well aware that there are huge gains in downforce available if the diffuser exit area can be enlarged. There are also huge gains available if the boundary layer could be sucked out of the transition area through holes or slots, as this layer of slow-moving airflow effectively reduces the diffuser exit area. In the past there have been periodic attempts to introduce layouts to achieve these ends and they have always been banned, though not always with Whiting's initial support. It could be that the aerodynamic significance of this area is not something that Charlie's background leads him to fully understand.....

If it is a crime what was the motive?
I think that the three teams in question took a blatant and cynical gamble. They chose to run this way because they believed that the huge changes in the rules for this year would be a diversion that would obscure the issue. They may have been encouraged by Charlie's slow recognition of the significance of the diffuser transition surfaces in the past. And they have obscured the technical facts and the existing regulations in their briefings to the media in an attempt to constrain the reaction of the FIA. Ross Brawn's statement about his offer to FOTA to re-write the rules more clearly is an example of barefaced but canny obfuscation. All FOTA members are free to complain or comment about the rules individually or collectively at any time. They are not free to write their own rules, and could never agree among themselves anyway. These three teams must have been confident that they would be able to run in the first few GPs and enjoy the huge aero advantage until the matter was resolved. They are gambling that no penalties will be imposed. And I am convinced that they will all have the reassurance of having a fully compliant underfloor ready to bolt onto their cars. They thought it was worth a punt and they may be right.....

Who will win the Paris Grand Prix on Tuesday?
Ciao

PS: Just in case someone raises the issue, all the vertical vanes that you see in the diffuser ramp are legal as none of them are openings in the surface and they all lie within the top and bottom dimensional limits. These are vortex generators designed to re-energise the boundary layer to reduce its choking affect on the diffuser exit. They are legitimate devices to increase underbody flow and therefore downforce.

PPS: This whole issue has a high degree of subtlety. After re-reading my piece I found myself having to change 'primary surface' to 'uppermost surface', for example. The link given in the comments to Rory Byrne's remarks quoted on the Autosport site is worth following. Naturally the two Autosport writers seem to have failed to grasp the actual layout of the protested diffusers. The argument about the nature and shape of the holes (or slots) that form the entry passages to the secondary diffusers (allowing boundary layer stagnation to be cleared and increasing the overall flow of the system) will certainly be discussed, but the fact that the top surface of these additional ducts is aerodynamically significant and should itself be regarded as the 'underbody' is central. I think that Rory was never interviewed by Autosport but that remarks he made have been quoted in part to build this piece. Further discussion after the Paris result which the FIA should be able to release on Tuesday.

The 2009 season has certainly started with a bang. Excitement and controversy seems to have continued unbroken in the brief interlude between the first two events. I know it makes sense to travel up from Melbourne to Malaysia but to schedule these two races on consecutive weekends must be a huge strain for everyone involved, whether or not they had to appear before the FIA race stewards several times.

Naturally there has been considerable speculation and curiosity about Ferrari's shortcomings in the opening race and about what they may be up to now, so I had better start with a few words about the scene in Maranello as I see it. The only hard news I can offer is that there seems to be a higher workload at the team's HQ than I have ever been aware of in the past. With the Technical Director and the Chief Designer currently in Sepang it has fallen on the team's Design and Development Consultant to take the strain in Italy. He may have an almost unlimited capacity for hard work but all the home base crew have been working late into the night and too busy to drop any snippets of information my way. It does seem obvious that quite apart from technical issues that surfaced in Melbourne, where there were rumours that Kimi suffered a problem with the differential, the team is also busy preparing its case against the disputed diffuser layouts of the Brawn, Williams, and Toyota teams. At the same time they must be working flat out to reconfigure the rear end of the car in order to accommodate a similar configuration themselves if the protests are not finally upheld by the FIA. I cannot see how any of the protesting teams could actually modify their own cars before the hearing in Paris. If you believe that someone else is running outside the rules and make an official complaint you cannot then fit similar devices yourself before the case is held. To do so would be as daft as telling lies to the stewards about what exactly it was that you had done behind the safety car. It would destroy your credibility.

But should the disputed diffuser and rear bodywork layouts be allowed it will be necessary for everyone who wants to be competitive to run similar arrangements. At present the Brawns, Williams, and Toyotas are effectively running in a different formula: they have an absolutely huge theoretical advantage and they are significantly circumventing the intent of the new regulations. It seems certain that the FIA will ban these interpretations of the rules and produce a new form of wording to clarify the regulations. The justification for this will, of course, be the issue of stated intent, which is the reduction of downforce and off the affect of the trailing upwash on any following cars. Whether the currently non-compliant teams will suffer any penalty is a moot point. You can read the wording of the rear bodywork regulations yourself on the FOM website. I have done this and I have to say that the meaning is far from clear to me. The very 'alternative' interpretations that have given the three disputed teams such a significant downforce advantage may prove to be a justifiable reading of this arcane text. They would therefore suffer no penalty but the wording of the rules will have to be changed to reflect the intention of the restrictions without ambiguity. This will cost these three teams their performance advantage and a great deal of money in developing new rear aero layouts.

This will be a rather unfair burden for the non-conforming threesome. But the huge development costs that the rest of the runners would have to bear if these diffuser layouts are allowed would also be unfair, and would represent an even greater total spend, as they are in total compliance with the rules and the purpose behind the rules. This is a disaster that should have been avoided. I think that it signals the start of the collapse of FOTA and demonstrates the futility of the teams themselves thinking that they could ever run the show without a completely independent body to police the whole thing. FOTA elected Ross Brawn as technical representative to avoid just this sort of chaotic financial disaster. And yet Ross failed to mention to the other FOTA members that there was any exploitable loophole in the FIA regulations. I share Flavio Briatore's feeling that this was a very poor start to Brawn's role as the representative of all the teams with regard to technical issues.

I cannot help feeling that the reason that neither Ferrari, nor Renault or McLaren, seemed to anticipate this interpretation of the rules until they saw the disputed cars in the pre-season testng is because they were so close to the process of framing them. Byrne, Symonds, and Lowe sat together on the Overtakng Working Group with a brief to produce this big change in F1 aerodynamics. They were possibly so familiar with the intention of what was finally put into words by the FIA that they failed to notice that any alternative approach might be possible. If they had not been involved in evolving these aerodynamic changes, but had simply been given the new regulations without any foreknowledge, they might have come up with similar solutions to those used by Brawn, Williams and Toyota.

If FOTA has been destabilised by the diffuser controversy it will also have been rocked by McLaren's decision to tell the Melbourne stewards that Trulli's Toyota had simply passed Lewis Hamilton's car rather than having been allowed to pass when both Sporting Director Dave Ryan and Lewis himself decided (probably wrongly) that it was necessary for them to do this. The radio transcript (which the team should have known would reach the stewards) even suggests that Trulli himself then slowed down to allow Hamilton to retake the position. Jarno succinctly summed up his own position by saying that he had been completely honest at all times with the inquiry. That McLaren chose to present a false case in what was clearly an effort to secure third place should not be a surprise. It is absolutely consistent with the way the team has gone about its racing over the last two seasons. As Fernando Alonso has said of the matter: “They were bound to be found out sooner or later”. This, after all, is a team that currently employs three top technical managers who have each been fined 150,000 euros each by an Italian court for intellectual property theft. It is also a team that seems to be having great difficulty in getting their current car up to speed after two seasons of great success during which they had illegal access to Ferrari design information and tactical decisions.......

I have always said that Lewis Hamilton is lucky and I have suggested that he has not been entirely honest in the past. But his luck really ran out this week. I had to feel sorry for him as I watched his press conference today. He was obviously devastated by this PR disaster, and hugely embarrassed for this to have become so public. He may have brought this on himself but he behaved with greater dignity and humility than most of us could muster in a similar situation. His drive in Melbourne benefited from the safety car periods closing the field, and others in front of him suffered bad luck, but it was a calm and controlled afternoon during which he avoided trouble and worked his way up the field. This tribulation could see the beginning of a new maturity. Underdog status as he struggles with a slow car may also be what Lewis needs to win back public affection.

Last year I made many comments about the poor mirror placement on most of today's cars. Before the Melbourne race David Coulthard observed that you cannot aim an F1 car at the apex of a corner and be looking in the mirrors at the same time. But during the race there was a wonderful moment when Alonso eased his line to avoid contact with Glock's Toyota. He had clearly seen the Toyota start to spin in his mirrors. That was a moment of genius. It is just a pity that Robert Kubica failed to give Sebastian Vettel enough room to avoid contact. I think that was rather the opposite of an inspired moment and I really cannot see why Sebastian should have suffered any penalty after the incident.

In many ways Melbourne continued the pattern of last season. The unexpectedly cool track compromised the Ferraris, and their strategy of running the soft tyres in the warmer conditions at the start rather than in the colder temperatures at the end of the race hardly seemed a wise decision. Their KERS boost off the line certainly was exciting though. The Red Bulls were fast, but whether they really are a match for Ferrari in anything but cool weather remains to be seen. BMW still seem to be struggling with a car that goes on and off the boil unpredictably as its tyre temperatures fluctuate. McLaren's slump is the big surprise but this team has the depth to get back near the front. But if the general pattern was the same the differentials between the F1 teams have certainly narrowed in what I am certain will be a very exciting season.

Of what I will call the Formula-Libre F1 teams Brawn seem to be well ahead. Button drove a perfect race in the fastest car and it was certainly a dream result. Barrichello was lucky to finish second after a torrid afternoon, but the Brawn is really fast and may stroll to victory again in Sepang. Williams was unlucky and should have been right at the front, while Toyota reached the podium in spite of starting from the pitlane. It is impossible to deny that these three teams are in a slightly different race from all the others. The speed that they all displayed in Melbourne will have raised the political temperature in the Malaysian paddock.

This may be a difficult time for those who work inside F1 but for those of us who watch there are many things to celebrate. After the initial period of adjustment I now find the new cars really beautiful. The combination of the wide and low front wing with the high narrow wing at the rear makes the cars look wider, whereas for many years now they have looked to me to be as absurdly narrow as F3 cars. The cleaner bodywork is also refreshing, and there is a greater variety of shapes this season than for a long time.

In the UK the change of broadcast rights to the BBC has been tremendously refreshing. In spite of being new to the sport absolutely top marks must go to the new young presenter Jake Humphrey. I was wary when I heard that David Coulthard would be joining the team but he was articulate and balanced and Eddie Jordan was good value and brought his experience of team ownership to bear on the current issues. The style of the program was relaxed and intelligent rather than self-consciously striving to be entertaining. The BBC coverage is also virtually free from jingoistic bias and cheap attacks on the FIA. Unlike ITV it does not seem to be in bed with McLaren. I was not initially pleased to hear that Martin Brundle was crossing over from ITV but he seemed to catch the editorial spirit of the new show and seemed more serious and considered in his comments than he was on ITV. Today Anthony Davidson was very good value on the red-button coverage of the second practice.

Today the Ferraris were fast, even if the KERS overheated in Kimi's car. The Brawns were surely taking things easy? Heavy thunder-showers are forecast for qualifying and the race. Malaysia may be hot and wet. Then China will be cool. After that we have the diffuser appeal hearing to look forward to. Enjoy the new season....

Ciao

Skiing powder snow on my birthday today has been fabulous, but I am more than a little frustrated by developments in Australia. I have been holding my breath (and my tongue) ever since the issue of the questionable aerodynamic legality of some of this year's cars came to light. I was hoping that this would be quietly sorted out before the cars arrived in Melbourne. It now seems that we not only face a technical disaster here, but that F1 is setting itself up for a huge PR own-goal by starting the new season with a stormy public row over this issue.

What an astonishing opening to this years championship. My information is that all six teams that have built cars that unquestionably conform to the intended aerodynamic rules introduced this season are prepared to dispute the legality of the three teams that have not: Toyota, Williams, and Brawn. The rules that apply to the revised front wings and the newly restricted diffuser start with a notice of the intent behind these restrictions. The purpose is to reduce the vulnerability to loss of downforce at the front of a car that is following another and to reduce the power and spread of the trailing upwash vortices that are the problem that the following car experiences. Given this clear message, that comes strait from the recommendations that were made by the Overtaking Working Group, it has to be said that the teams that have chosen to utilise bodywork that extends behind the rear of the diffuser exit and effectively extends its length and exit area are in clear breach. It is no surprise that some teams should attempt to try this approach, but it is an immense surprise that Charlie Whiting apparently nodded through the Toyota layout when he was shown the car some time ago. The other two teams never invited him to comment.

This is an issue that is going to cause major problems for the FIA. Mosley has said that it is vital that the work of the OWG should prove to be effective in allowing cars to follow each other more closely through fast corners and overtake more easily. Yet here is the FIA's principal technical inspector apparently failing to rule against a layout designed to destroy the whole strategy. One of the men involved in the research that led to the new rules (in fact the main man) has said that “Charlie seems to have lost his grip”. If this development direction is allowed when the final appeals are heard it will not be very long before 2008 levels of downforce are achieved and the cars will be as compromised when trying to overtake as they ever were. And it will not be the fault of the OWG but of the FIA's failure to police the regulations in a way that would prevent this happening.

As for Melbourne itself, it certainly seems at this stage that the three offending cars will be allowed to run with their present set-up. The same man from the OWG says that this will give them a half-second advantage over every lap. This will be an almost impossible handicap for the 'legal' teams. The heat that this issue will generate will surely shatter the phoney FOTA alliance. The argument over revenues involving BMW, Renault, and McLaren with the FOM, that has led to threats to withdraw from the race, is a storm in a teacup by comparison.

While we are all focussed on the rear ends of the offending cars perhaps we should also take a close look at the front of the Brawn. My personal opinion is that the unusually low nose is another attempt to subvert the intention of the new rules (and keep in mind that the intent is actually written into this year's rules). The mandatory centre section of the front wing is designed to produce lift. As I pointed out in a previous posting this means that, because this lift is lost when running in another car's wake, the total loss of downforce is lessened when following a rival. The Brawn nose sweeps down close to the upper surface of the lifting front wing section and seems to me to be intended to greatly reduce the lift it generates. Increased front downforce is the result, and is perhaps needed as the 'illegally' extended diffuser will be producing significantly more downforce towards the rear.

Melbourne will be a fascinating opening to what should be a tremendously interesting season. But it is tragic that this race should be dominated by a technical dispute of such importance. Few outside the design departments of the F1 teams will understand how crucial this arcane argument actually is. If Toyota, Williams, and Brawn are finally allowed to race their cars in their present form, and escape disqualification later in the season when the decision to let them run is appealed, we can all kiss goodbye to the whole plan that has been adopted to free these cars to race each other more openly. Once again we will have to watch races dominated by strategy because a slow car can obstruct a faster one for lap after lap. That isn't racing: it's a procession.

The 'legal' teams intend to protest the results of the Melbourne GP if any of the 'illegal' cars finish in the points. This will not be a happy event.
Ciao

Teddy Mayer died last week. He was one of the group of friends who started the McLaren team with Bruce McLaren and built it up into an organisation that ran at the top of Formula One, Indy cars, Can-Am sports cars and Formula 5000. Like Jack Brabham, Bruce had learnt about the fundamentals of race car design during the years he spent with the Cooper team which changed the shape of the Formula 1 car from their little base in Surbiton. Brabham and McLaren both became top teams, and both can trace their ancestry back to Surbiton and the way the two Cooper brothers had tackled the business of building racing cars in a completely new way.

Teddy Mayer was in at the birth of McLaren. He guided it through the desperate days after Bruce was killed testing a Can-Am car at Goodwood, and helped build it up to the very top of Formula One. Like all teams there were poor years. When the team was struggling with a difficult car and their world-championship winning driver James Hunt was losing his motivation and becoming increasingly frightened by the dangers of the sport, a group of plotters hijacked the company. Ron Dennis got together with Marlboro, the team's sponsor, and used the threat of withdrawl of funds to bring off a hostile takeover of McLaren. Like everyone else, including Bruce McLaren’s widow, Mayer was soon ejected from Ron’s new team, which has continued to enjoy great success but which has a very different feel from the old McLaren. The full account of this hostile takeover and the aftermath has yet to be written but it would make an interesting story. It would not be about sport in any sense of the word.

In view of this history it is ironic that the first tribute to Teddy Mayer that I read was attributed to Ron Dennis, who was his nemesis at McLaren. Mayer went on, of course to further success with the Penske team in the USA. What I suggest my reader should do is first to read the tribute made by Emerson Fittipaldi. Next look at the wonderful collection of historic photographs on the official F1 website. A picture does often tell so much more than words. In all of the photos Mayer looks (how can I put this?) ‘unbuttoned’. This was the post ‘60s era and it was the fashion to have a relaxed style. Mayer always looks relaxed. What a clash of personalities there must have been with the young Ron Dennis: workaholic, driven by a desire to prove himself to the world by accumulating money, hostile to the hippy style that was everywhere at the time, and resentful towards those who adopted it. The new ‘owner’ Ron set out to purge the team of everyone who made him uncomfortable in this way.

This set of images is an excellent celebration of Teddy Mayer’s time in F1, but also a wonderful evocation of a vanished era in the sport. I hope you enjoy looking at them. I feel that the most poignant image is the shot of Mayer with Dennis. Dennis is dapper with his anorak tightly zipped up and is posing for the shot, his eyes fixed on a point in the sky as if looking at his dream of future power and wealth. It is a pose that Ron adopts occasionally to this day. Teddy is looking at Ron as if at a wayward young child who is developing a difficult personality. It is not a hostile look but one that seems to me to be both sympathetic and coloured by disappointment. Ron is probably thinking that Teddy should try to smarten up his team uniform. I never met Mayer but I am certain that it was my loss never to have done so.

The World Championship and the alternative scoring system
Here at last is my tabulation of the Word Drivers’ Championship results scored not on a points system, but simply by results over the Grand Prix races of each season. Drivers who simply accumulate a lot of points finishes cannot overtake drivers who have finished higher up the field in any of the races, and the winner of the championship each year cannot be a man who has fewer wins than someone else. No matter how you fiddle with the points awarded for wins and places you can never match the purity of this system. I believe that it gives a correct reflection of the real relative performances of all the drivers in each season, whereas the points systems that have been applied will always distort the results in favour of those who have placed consistently rather than run right at the front.

I present three tables. The first shows the first three drivers in each year, using the result-based (or medal) system. The second is a list of drivers ranked according to the total number of championships they have won. The third table is my own personal favourite. It shows the total years from a drivers first to last appearance in the top three positions. I think that it is a very good indication of the impact these people have made on the sport and it recognises the competitiveness of many drivers who never actually manage to win the championship itself. I never involve myself in arguments about the relative greatness of drivers as I think that such discussions are pointless. But I would point to these three tables as holding an objective key to this debate. I note with interest how a driver like Alain Prost, who some people criticised for being more interested in points than wins, actually would have had even more success under this scoring system. Whether you want to change things or not I hope that you will find the tables of interest. The collation of the data was difficult and I am sure that I must have made many errors. Please feel free to let me know about any mistakes that you spot, and I will update and correct the tables.

Table 1: The Real World Drivers’ Championship: Results based on wins taking trumps, then second places, etc. Drivers dropped from top three are noted. Where this system creates a change the ‘official’ FIA points-based position appears in brackets. Drivers who were in the top three in the FIA points but have been dropped under this system are named in small print.

Year, World Champion, Runner up, Third place

1950 Nino Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Luigi Fagioli

1951 Juan Manuel Fangio, Alberto Ascari, Oscar Gonzalez

1952 Alberto Ascari, Piero Taruffi (3), Nino Farina (2)

1953 Alberto Ascari, Nino Farina (3), Juan Manuel Fangio (2)

1954 Juan Manuel Fangio, Mike Hawthorn (3), Oscar Gonzalez (2)

1955 Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Maurice Trintignant (4) drops Castellotti

1956 Stirling Moss (2), Juan Manuel Fangio (1), Peter Collins

1957 Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Luigi Musso

1958 Stirling Moss (2), Tony Brooks (3), Mike Hawthorn (1)

1959 Jack Brabham, Tony Brooks, Stirling Moss

1960 Jack Brabham, Stirling Moss (3), Bruce McLaren (2)

1961 Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips, Stirling Moss

1962 Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Bruce McLaren

1963 Jim Clark, Graham Hill, John Surtees (4) drops Ginther

1964 Jim Clark (3), John Surtees (1), Graham Hill (2)

1965 Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart

1966 Jack Brabham, John Surtees, Jim Clark (6) drops Rindt

1967 Jim Clark (3), Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme (1)

1968 Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Denny Hulme

1969 Jackie Stewart, Jackie Ickx, Jochen Rindt (4) drops McLaren

1970 Jochen Rindt ,Jacky Ickx, Clay Regazzoni

1971 Jackie Stewart, Francois Cevert (3), Jacky Ickx (4) drops Peterson

1972 Emerson Fittipaldi Jackie Stewart Denny Hulme

1973 Jackie Stewart, Ronnie Peterson (3), Emerson Fittipaldi (2)

1974 Emerson Fittipaldi, Ronnie Peterson (5) drops Reggazoni, Carlos Reuteman (6) drops Scheckter

1975 Niki Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi, Carlos Reutemann

1976 James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Jody Scheckter

1977 Mario Andretti (3), Niki Lauda (1), Jody Scheckter (2)

1978 Mario Andretti, Carlos Reutemann (3), Ronnie Peterson (2)

1979 Alan Jones (3), Giles Villeneuve, Jody Scheckter (1)

1980 Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet, Rene Arnoux (6) drops Reutemann

1981 Alain Prost (5), Nelson Piquet (1), Carlos Reutemann (2) drops Jones

1982 Didier Pironi (2) drops Rosberg, John Watson (3), Alain Prost (4)

1983 Alain Prost (2), Nelson Piquet (1), Rene Arnoux

1984 Alain Prost (2), Niki Lauda (1), Nelson Piquet (5) drops de Angelis

1985 Alain Prost, Michele Alboreto, Ayrton Senna (4) drops Rosberg

1986 Nigel Mansell (2), Alain Prost (1), Nelson Piquet

1987 Nigel Mansell (2), Nelson Piquet (1), Alain Prost (4) drops Senna

1988 Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Gerhard Berger

1989 Ayrton Senna (2), Alain Prost (1)  Nigel Mansell (4) drops Patrese

1990 Ayrton Senna, Alain Pros,t Nelson Piquet

1991 Ayrton Senna, Nigel Mansell, Ricardo Patrese

1992 Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna (4) drops Patrese, Gerhard Berger (5) drops M Schumacher

1993 Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Damon Hill

1994 Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill, Gerhard Berger

1995 Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill, Johnny Herbert (4) drops Coulthard

1996 Damon Hill, Jacques Villeneuve, Michael Schumacher

1997 Jacques Villeneuve, Michael Schumacher (X) drops Frentzen, David Coulthard

1998 Mika Hakkinen, Michael Schumacher, David Coulthard

1999 Mika Hakkinen, Eddie Irvine, Michael Schumacher (5) drops Frentzen

2000 Michael Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard

2001 Michael Schumacher, Ralf Schumacher (4), David Coulthard (2) drops Barrichello

2002 Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello, Ralf Schumacher (4) drops Montoya

2003 Michael Schumacher, Juan Pablo Montoya (3) drops Raikkonen, Rubens Barrichello (4)

2004 Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello, Kimi Raikkonen (7) drops Button

2005 Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen, Juan Pablo Montoya (4) drops M Schumacher

2006 Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumacher, Felipe Massa

2007 Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso

2008 Felipe Massa (2), Lewis Hamilton (1), Kimi Raikonnen

Table 2: Drivers by Championships Won
(then by 2^nd & 3^rd, then by seniority)

1 Schumacher 7  (+ 3x2 & 1x3)

2 Prost 5   (+ 4x2 & 2x3)

3 Fangio 4  (+2x2 &1x3)
   Senna 4   (+2x2 & 1x3)

5 Clark 4  + 1x2 1x3

6 Stewart 3  + 2x2

7 Mansell 3  + 1x2 1x3

8 Brabham 3  + 1x2

9 Moss 2  + 3x2 2x3

10 Graham Hill 2  + 2x2 1x3

11 Fittipaldi 2  + 1x2 1x3

12 Ascari 2  + 1x2
     Hakkinen 2  + 1x2

14 Alonso 2 1x3

15 Andretti 2
    Jones 2

17 Lauda 1  + 3x2

18 Damon Hill 1  + 2x2 1x3

19 Farina 1  + 1x2 1x3
     Raikkonen 1  + 1x2 1x3

21 Rindt 1  + 1x3
     Massa 1 + 1x3

23 Phil Hill 1
     Hunt 1
     Pironi 1
     J Villeneuve 1

Big losers & winners from this system of scoring:
Prost now has 5 championships, 3 of them consecutive.
Senna now has 4 consecutive championship wins.
Clark now has 4 championships.
Mansell now has 3 championships.
Moss now has 2 championships (instead of none).
Jones now has 2 championships.
In 2001 Ralf Schumacher gains second place behind his brother: a unique event. He also gains a third place.
Fangio loses one of his championships.
Brabham loses one of his championships.
Lauda loses two of his championships.
Piquet loses both of his championships.
Hawthorn, Surtees, Hulme, Scheckter, and Rosberg, have all now lost their single championship victories.
de Angelis, Button, Castellotti, Ginther, Frentzen, and Keke Rosberg, are dropped from any top three position.

The more I look at it the more I think that this way of scoring championships and presenting statistics gives a more accurate reflection of the real history of the seasons than any of the conventional points system that have been used.

Table 3: Longevity as a Top Contender: the number of years (inclusive) from a driver’s first to last appearance in the top three positions may be a good indication of their lasting impact on the sport. Seniority resolves ties.

Prost 13
Schumacher 13

Lauda 11
Piquet 11

Brabham 9
Stewart 9
Senna 9

Fangio 8
Reutemann 8

Moss 7
Graham Hill 7
Mansell 7
Berger 7

Clark 6
Hulme 6
Peterson 6

Hawthorn 5
Coulthard 5
Raikkonen 5

Farina 4
Gonzales 4
Surtees 4
Fittipaldi 4
Scheckter 4
Arnoux 4
Damon Hill 4

Ascari 3
McLaren 3
Berger 3 
Ickx 3
Barichello 3
Hakkinen 3
Montoya 3
Alonso 3
Massa 3

Brooks 2
Jones 2
Rindt 2
Ralf Schumacher 2
J Villeneuve 2
Hamilton 2

If it is difficult to become a Formula 1 driver, it an even greater achievement to win a top three position on this championship scoring system, which rewards wins in particular rather than consistent points finishes. The table above recognises the significance of anyone who has achieved a top three finish more than once, and also indicates the importance of many drivers who were genuine front runners over several seasons even though the top prize eluded them.

Fatal accidents cut short the careers of Ascari, Clark, McLaren, Musso, Peterson, Rindt, Senna, and von Tripps, while they still had potential to move higher. Serious injury cut short Moss's career, as well as that of Pironi.

Hakkinen, Hawthorn, Michael Schumacher, Stewart, and Fittipaldi, could have raced on for longer and achieved even more had they not chosen to retire from F1. Montoya fell out with Ron Dennis and left F1 prematurely.

Massa, Alonso, and Raikkonen, will probably move higher. Lewis Hamilton seems certain to rise much further, having placed within the first three in both of his first two seasons in F1.
Ciao

This time last year there was a seething cauldron of intrigue and controversy just behind the public scenery of Formula One. The biggest story was that the FIA technical investigation into McLaren's 2008 car had revealed a dimensional similarity to the previous year's Ferrari that was impossible to believe was mere coincidence, and two systems on the car that were demonstrably designed using data stolen from the Italian team. These facts were in the public domain because the FIA published the report and the McLaren team was forced to make an abject (though not entirely straightforward) public apology. The issue interested me because of the way the British press in particular failed to report the factual basis of the evidence against McLaren and continued, by and large, to trot out the altogether misleading PR spin manufactured by their new master of smoke and mirrors, Matt Bishop.

This winter the Bishop has been busy again. Cast your eye over any of the commercial F1 websites and count up the number of stories about McLaren and Ron Dennis. They easily outnumber those on any other single aspect of the sport. But this time the intent is a little less controversial. I am informed that Mercedes have been desperate to remove Dennis from the helm of the F1 team for some time now, and at last Ron has been pressured into relinquishing control of the race team. But he is still fighting a rearguard action to preserve his pride. Bishop's stories emphasise that Ron is still CEO of the wider McLaren enterprise, and we now learn that because he is so “passionate about the sport” he will in fact still be attending the races. The story is again being floated (in the oblique form of denials) that Dennis could somehow be a candidate for FIA president sometime in the future. This would be laughable if it were not for the fact that there are many people who cannot see how deeply inappropriate it would be if this ever came to pass.

Which brings me to another related subject. Sir Jackie Stewart remains a hero of mine for his driving, his forceful promotion of improved safety in the sport, and the way he later led his own team to more success than anyone expected within a few seasons. But that was in the past. Mosley's observation that Jackie is a “certified idiot” was certainly impolite, and barely excusable even under the pressure that the FIA president felt from the press during the hearings into the McLaren espionage scandal, but it contained a germ of truth. Stewart's dyslexia probably makes it hard for him to plough through the sort of exhaustive documents that the FIA made public after each hearing, and difficult for him to understand the judicial fairness of the proceedings from their written accounts. Since he retired from driving he has made sure that he walks always amongst the rich and powerful. And often he is being paid to do so. Mosley also commented on Sir Jackie's clownish appearance, and it is fair to say that his wee hat and his tartan trousers indicate that he is a performer. Recently his role has been to entertain the corporate guests of the Royal Bank of Scotland. It is hard to believe that the proposal that the disgraced CEO of the RBS, Sir Fred Goodwin, is a suitable man to become the next FIA president could have been floated by anyone other than his court jester Jackie. This may be what led Ecclestone to suggest that Sir Jackie (who is rather younger than Bernie) seemed to be suffering from “premature Alzheimer's”. You have to remember that Sir Fred was at the helm while his company set itself up for the most catastrophic collapse of any of the UK banks. Some people believe that there was criminal mismanagement involved, not least in the way that the bankrupt bank had continued to pay huge bonuses to executives right up until the moment its desperate situation became public. Fans of the recent BBC production of  Dicken's 'Little Dorrit' will recall that the eponymous head of the fictitious Merdle's Bank took the honourable way out with a pistol, rather than leaving the shipwreck with an enormous redundancy package and then putting out feelers towards securing another high profile job.

Meanwhile below the surface two things still intrigue me, and I still think that they are related in some way. We still do not know who it was who tried to force Max Mosley to resign from the FIA presidency with a newspaper sting followed by a widespread press-campaign of vilification. And we do not know how difficult a commercial disappointment it has been for McLaren to have to shelve their plans to set up a second team this year with so much already in place to run it. The deal to supply Force India with engines and drive-trains may help Mercedes with its budget, but it is not at all what Ron was after.

At least this is proving to be another fantastic winter in the Alps with more snow and lower temperatures than there has been for many years. This is the second good winter in a row and most of my attention recently has been on fine tuning the canting and stiffness of my boots. Like setting up a race car it is a black art as much as it is a science. But I do have time to offer a little insight into something that has baffled many commentators:

Ferrari and KERS: how is the Scuderia getting on?
Rumours abound about the state of play in Maranello. There were reports of panic, and that the team was in the process of developing both a KERS and a non-KERS car. Others have boldly stated that KERS has proved to offer no performance advantage in races, and there is speculation that Luca di Montezemolo has been trying to put back the introduction of KERS because Ferrari in particular has big problems with the technology.

The fact is that many months ago the team began to have serious doubts about the sub-contractor Magneti Marelli's ability to develop a competitive KERS system. Aldo Costa and Rory Byrne were particularly critical of Marelli's plans. In view of these doubts the team went ahead, in combination with an amazingly capable USA-based technical partner, to develop its own system. It was this Ferrari system that has run on the car from the first test and will be used in the races this season. The Ferrari KERS has proved very reliable from the start, and offers an absolute performance advantage for races and qualifying. Teams that do not develop an effective KERS package will be at a big disadvantage this year. The decision has been taken by Ferrari to drop the Magneti Marelli system. I have been told that it simply does not work.

There is remaining controversy at Ferrari. Some argue that Magneti Marelli have not come up with a usable system and should not be paid. Others (could this be Montezemolo's line?) say that Magneti Marelli is a Fiat subsidiary and that the contract fee should therefore be paid. But this is money that will come out of the race budget and I am told that if any outside contractor had failed to deliver in this way it would certainly not get any money at all. I cannot say what motivates Montezemolo's public statements on KERS, but one thing is certain: Magneti Marelli has dropped the ball on this. Renault, Red Bull, and Toro Rosso are committed to start the season with this currently lame system while Ferrari has its own design which is showing tremendous promise and potential.

The energy for the electrical generation of the KERS batteries comes off the rear wheels under braking. This means that the brakes themselves do less work. This does complicate the issues of pedal feel and brake-balance, and I suspect that this could be more of a problem in the wet than in the dry. As an outside observer not privy to the detailed design of the electrical motor-come-generator I believe that some way of adjusting the efficiency of generation, and therefore reducing the back-EMF (in effect the braking effect of KERS), will have to be found by, for example, moving the magnets away from the armature. This would reduce the braking effect of the system but also reduce the energy passing to the batteries, which could prove to be excessive on circuits with heavy braking from high speeds.

This is a fascinating area and it is certain that the solutions adopted within Formula 1 to maintain good driver feel, regulate the maximum energy recovered so as not to overcharge the batteries, and to control and adjust the balance between the driven wheels, that are braked by both conventional friction rotors and pads and the KERS generator, and the undriven wheels that will only have disc brakes, will find their way into road cars of every shape and size in the fairly near future.

The new aerodynamics
The recommendations of the Overtaking Working Group have shaped the regulations for this season. But they were not adopted in full. Ferrari's Rory Byrne was the man on this committee who put in most of the work, and it was the Ferrari wind tunnel that was used to develop the group's proposed package. When it came to the final adoption of the new proposals the discussions between the teams and the FIA resulted in a modified set of rules. We can be certain that Byrne must have fully supported the proposals that he had worked so hard to frame. Renault's Pat Symonds was very keen that the working group's proposals should be adopted in full. But the opposition came from the third man on the OWG. Paddy Lowe of McLaren, who I am told had made little input last year into the development of the proposals, was the main opponent of their adoption, and forced a watering-down of the aerodynamic changes. Now why is it that this does not surprise me in the least....?

Politics aside, the main intent of the new rules is to reduce the loss of downforce suffered by a car that is closely following another. It is not too great a simplification to say that the main affect was loss of front downforce and the resulting understeer would force the following car to drop back. The visible changes such as the narrower and higher rear wing are to reduce the spread and lift the trailing vortices so that the wake interferes less with the now wider and lower front wing of the following car. But there is a very clever nuance that I have not seen reported elsewhere (though someone else may have written about it without my having noticed).

The mandatory centre section of the new front wings does not produce downforce. This aerofoil section actually produces lift and teams are not allowed to modify this section of wing or change its angle of attack. The lift produced by this part of the front wing reduces front-end grip, but when following another car the disruption of flow over this section of the wing will reduce the lift and therefore increase front end grip. What a wonderful piece of lateral thinking. It is such an obvious way to reverse some of the normal disadvantageous aero affect, but I bet that most of us could lie all day in a warm bath thinking about the problem and never come up with such an elegant idea. I think this is a brilliant solution, though policing will have to be rigorous or teams may subtly tweak the angle of attack of the whole front wing assembly to gain overall downforce.

The outer sections of the front wing offer design freedom within the dimensional regulations and are, of course, arranged to maximise downforce as usual. The provision for the driver to increase the angle of attack of these elements to recover aero balance when close behind a rival is the other big change.

A week or two ago Søren asked me if I thought that this additional task might overload drivers, but I think this is unlikely. The front wing trimming will probably become second nature as a driver closes in on the tail of a slower car. The existing alterations of brake balance, and perhaps engine response, that seem to be made corner by corner must be much harder to cope with as they are not intuitive at all and have to be remembered. The complex array of steering wheel switches already seems far from user-friendly. So I think the new systems will not add much more to driver work-load, and we may even be treated to the sight of cars following each other closely through corners like the Parabolica at Monza, and thus able to overtake quite easily on the pit straight.

Ferrari and the exhaust pipes
In some ways the winter months are the silly season in Formula One and all sorts of trivia are blown up into fake confrontations. I believe that the reason Ferrari ran exposed tailpipes in early testing (during which the car does not have to conform to the regulations) was simply as a result of the fairly late introduction of the new engine restrictions. The reduction of maximum RPM will, for example, result in a change to the exhaust system because a new tuned tailpipe length will be needed. The Scuderia simply ran with an exposed system to avoid having to delay testing until the engine development was complete and the resultant bodywork configuration could be finalised. It must please them that it proved to be such a distraction for some of their rivals.

The Ideal Points System
I am interested to read rumours that the FIA is still considering abandoning points in favour of a scoring system based simply on finishing positions. It seems unlikely that the points system will be abandoned but, as my reader will know, I am in favour of making this change. I realise that I did promise to publish a table showing how this would have affected the results of the World Drivers' Championship in all the years since the FIA contest began.
I really will post this table soon. If only in the hope that the somebody in the FIA may sometimes read this blog.......
Ciao

All about me
My rate of publishing has rather slowed down recently. Partly this is because the 2008 season has come to an end, but there is another significant event that has affected my will to parade my own thoughts. Earlier this month I suffered a significant concussion when a recreational skier veered into my path just as I came through the finish of a Giant Slalom on superb pre-season Austrian snow. I was unconscious for a short while, but then went back up the T-bar and skied around in a disorganised sort of a way for some minutes. Apparently I was talking to people I met but not making complete sense. When it became obvious that my memory was disrupted people became concerned and called for the rescue patrol. I was transported down the mountain and then to hospital. I have no memory at all of the impact or of anything that happened for 20 minutes or so afterwards. I have some recollection of the conversation I was having that led to my friends calling for help. I also have a vague memory of the dream-like state I was in for a while. This dream was not at all unpleasant and contained most of the real events of the morning, though not the accident itself. The sequence in which some things happened was totally reversed in the dream. In it I seemed to either experience or observe a near-miss before the races even began and asked for the fencing to be extended to make the finish area safe.

What a strange thing memory is. Without a memory of events they seem not to exist at all. That recollection can be lost altogether, and also mixed up in time and weirdly distorted after a blow to the head, is a vivid demonstration of the fragile physical nature of our sense of reality and self. It is all in the head. As the wonderful Woody Allen said somewhere: “The brain is my second-favourite organ”.

It was a lucky escape I suppose. Although I have had two particularly heavy accidents in racing cars that led to concussion, this is the first time I have suffered this sort of amnesia. But this incident has affected my memory in another way. The associative links it activated have brought back a flood of distant memories from motorsport. I remember my first visit to the garage belonging to the man who was to become my first sponsor. In a corner of the workshop was the burnt out wreck of the car in which his previous young driver had died. I remember the two team mates who went on to die in race cars. I remember the melee at the start of a race at Mallory Park that left a tyre mark on the nose of my car from the guys who were tangling in front of me. One of them rolled into the infield and was left paralysed from the neck down. Years later a young driver I was engineering suffered the same terrible injury. I remember my close friend John Sheldon lying near to death in the Archibald McIndoe burns unit in East Grinstead after his skin grafts became infected following his huge accident at Le Mans. My wife and I visited John daily, but after coming through the crisis he had no memory of us having been to see him at all.

And I cannot avoid thinking about the day I watched Ayrton Senna dying on television after his heavy shunt in the early stages of the race at Imola. Roland Ratzenburger’s fatal accident in practice had also been on the Eurosport live cover the previous day. You wonder what these shocking events must be like for the people themselves. But if there is no memory the experience never exists for the victim. Perhaps as Ayrton lay in his car, and then on the ground alongside it, he was living a dream as his brain shut down. A chronologically mixed-up sequence: He had had an off at Tamburello in practice. Nothing too bad. He was telling Patrick Head what had gone wrong and that they would have to use the spare car. Perhaps they should use a little more downforce to steady the car for the race……

I would never dream of strapping myself into a competition car without wearing a helmet, and even then it is risky as all these recollections make clear. In future I will also wear one whenever I intend to ski fast.

Ferrari finals day at Mugello
Dolores and I were lucky enough to be guests of the Scuderia at Mugello at the end of November. This is a lovely circuit set in magnificent scenery close to the mountains to the North of Florence. It was my first visit and I was very impressed at the sight of the F1 cars running their demonstration laps. Massa and Raikkonen ended with synchronised doughnuts that left the pit straight blanketed in smoke. The engines cut and as the smoke slowly cleared the cars could be seen parked in formation with the team members gathering around them for a group photograph. It was all very theatrical and impressive. The crowd was smaller than previous years I was told, probably because of the final disappointment of the championship outcome. But it was still a nightmare trying to get out of the circuit and back to Maranello in the evening.

Anyway I got the chance to talk to many Ferrari people as well as the opportunity to hang out in the team hospitality unit like a fly on the wall. The word is that KERS represents a major challenge for all the teams. It will make a very big difference at the start of races - an average of 18 metres gained over a non-KERS car on the run to the first corner I was told. This is because the system can be fully charged before the race begins. Also a potential advantage in qualifying. But there is a weight penalty and very big problems to solve, mainly around the difficulty of retaining good driver feel in the brakes. I don't think that anyone knows just which team will do best developing this system. Patrick Head at Williams has been saying how much he looks forward to the challenge and, judging from what the team itself is saying, BMW must feel they have a handle on things. The intense competitiveness within F1 probably means that everyone will get fairly close and all the top teams will probably make a pretty good job of the new systems. But you never know. This is a new area of development and someone may make an unexpected leap forwards ahead of the others.

I was happy that Stefano Domenicali managed to retain Ferrari's manufacturers' championship in his first year in charge. I met him for the first time at Mugello and he is a very approachable and likeable man. Easy to talk to and enjoyable company. The same cannot be said for every team manager in F1, or any other formula for that matter. Luca Badoer is always friendly and straightforward and the other test driver Marc Gene is another friendly guy, Felipe is as outgoing as he looks on TV, Kimi is very private but does smile, and Rob Smedley was signing lots of autographs as he tried to leave the paddock with his wife and very young baby at the end of the day.

Nicholas Tombazis was another man I had not met before and I was delighted to find that Rory Byrne’s replacement as Chief Designer is a warm and humorous man who is good company. The coming season will be a fascinating challenge for everyone and we can only hope that the economic situation does not reduce the field or spoil the show.

It was suggested to me that Kimi cannot have been at all pleased with the way the second half of the season went, and that “he had never even looked like winning a race towards the end of the season”. The recent announcement that Andrea Stella is to be his new race engineer is interesting. Will this prove to be what is needed to propel Raikkonen back into contention with his team mate Massa?

Odds and ends
I notice that there are still a few hits on this site even though the 2008 F1 season is over. Some are directed at the archives, with interest still being displayed about the use of the suspension ‘inerter’ (or J-damper as McLaren called it in a direct reference to the published papers of the Cambridge University team who claim to have invented the device). There have been some very confused postings about these devices on other websites. The fundamental purpose is to lower the suspension frequencies of the cars without having to soften the springs. The ‘J’ comes from the letter used by the Cambridge team in their technical papers. The output of their device is termed ‘J’ and it stands for ‘inerter effect’. It is not derived from the rather archaic term ‘jounce’ (meaning vertical chassis bounce) as some have suggested.

The finances of F1 will be an increasingly important issue in 2009. Like almost every other human activity it will be operating in a much reduced economic environment. The FIA’s bold step to offer a fixed-price engine and transmission package may be crucial to the survival of private teams. And there may be more private teams in the paddock as more motor manufacturers pull out. Private purchasers of the remains of these unlimited-money enterprises may flock to use a contract engine package of known cost. Distribution of the commercial receipts of the whole sport remains contentious. With bad times looming every team, and not just the small ones, will be asking why the Commercial Rights Holders should be taking 50% of the income, and what exactly it is that they do to warrent these huge rewards. The FIA, as well as the teams, will continue to ask for this to be changed. The FIA does not have a commercial interest in the sport, just as I suspect that the CRH do not have any genuine sporting interest in the enterprise from which their money flows. But Mosley will continue to call a spade a spade until something is changed in this arrangement.

Finally Bernie Ecclestone has suggested a championship table decided purely on finishing places. Eddie Jordan has failed to grasp what Bernie is on about. Every driver in the field can be separated into a table depending on their finishing positions alone and no points allocation is needed. The money could be distributed this way as well. But this system is probably not going to be introduced even though I think it would be great if it was. My next posting will be sometime around the New Year and I will publish my long-promised tabulation of the top three drivers in every Grand Prix season using this method.

Season’s greetings and be careful out there.
Ciao