Should F1 change its rules to cut Mercedes' advantage, has Renault gone backwards and should small teams get the most prize money? GARY ANDERSON answers these questions and more
Do you think Mercedes should be reined in by a rule change?
@biker391, via Twitter
No, I don't think it should; Mercedes has gone out and attacked the situation and come up with the best power-unit package.
Red Bull is the team making most noise about this situation, but during the normally aspirated V8 days it chose the Renault engine because it believed it to be the best. It wasn't the most powerful, but its cooling requirement and fuel consumption was better than the others.
Now that it's suffering with the Renault power-unit package, it believes the best thing is to make as much noise as possible - including mooting pulling out of Formula 1 - and it hopes that just possibly someone will do something about it. I can assure you if the boot was on the other foot, Red Bull wouldn't be agreeing to any changes.
We all want similarity in both engine performance and chassis performance to allow us to watch the drivers in close competition, so things do need to be addressed for the future.
But for now Renault needs to get its finger out and spend its tokens on the right things to improve the performance, and Red Bull needs to shut up and get on with its development otherwise Toro Rosso is going to blow it away with the same power unit.
In this era of engine wars, do aerodynamics really play as much of a part as they did up to the end of 2013?
@Arqtik, via Twitter
Aerodynamics will always be a very important part of an F1 car's overall performance, however the power unit as introduced for 2014 has now become equally as important.
During the normally aspirated V8 days, and especially the later years of this engine formula when the engines had to be homologated, aerodynamics were probably responsible for 80 per cent of the car's performance.
We always used to say a very good engine could not win you a race, but a poor engine could definitely lose you a race.
Now with the new power-unit regulations I think it's a lot more like 50/50, which in reality is how it should be. Why should the engine manufacturers not get equal recognition to the chassis manufacturers? They work just as hard.
Would F1 be more exciting if prize-money handouts were switched so that lower-placed teams got more money?
@Baker_F1, via Twitter
The prize-money payout is a very complicated system and I do not profess to know how it all pans out, but I do believe the 'haves' get a lot more than they should.
If we look at the situation before Bernie took over as ringmaster, each team would have to negotiate with the circuit organisers to get its own appearance money. Every team would get a different amount and then on top of that would be a small prize fund.
If you were a race organiser back in the 1960s or early 1970s you would pay more money for Ferrari to show up than, say, Joe Bloggs Racing.
It would also be more likely that Ferrari would win, so it would take away a bigger total payout than small teams.
In reality the system is still the same and I believe the fact it's still the same is what's wrong with it.
There is a lot of talk of capping budgets, but I would go about it in a slightly different way. First of all I would rewrite the regulations to control what can be spent in a lot more detail. Stupid amounts of money are spent on stuff that does not add to the show.
When that's done, I would work out what a mid-range F1 budget should be. Currently a top team spends ￡250 million and a small team spends ￡75m, so the average is ￡150m. With the reductions generated by the regulation change, ￡100m should be fine.
Instead of the team having to pay to enter F1, I would turn it around the other way. If a team enters the championship and can give the necessary guarantees, it then gets staged monthly payments from the organisers of 50 per cent of the average budget. It is then down to each team to generate the other 50 per cent or whatever it can secure from sponsorship.
A prize-money fund, as in the past, would then be paid out at each race depending on performance.
Has Renault stood still, if not gone backwards, since last year? Are their problems software and/or hardware related?
@Halsey2722, via Twitter
On face value it looks like it's actually gone backwards. Mercedes and especially Ferrari have definitely moved forward, so it makes Renault look that little bit worse.
I must admit to being a bit fed up with Red Bull bleating on about how bad Renault is. To be competitive they need to work together and stop sticking the knife in. Renault has not gone out and done a bad job on purpose and it needs help to rectify the problem.
Mario Illien is a clever man and will be a valuable asset to Renault, but it needs to be careful it doesn't let politics destroy what it already has.
Renault's technical director Rob White is also a very clever man, but he seems to the one with the knife inserted between the shoulder blades. I hope this is not so as I have worked with Rob and he is a great guy and deserves more.
Whatever Mario brings to the show will take time, so if Renault really is in the position we saw in Australia and that was not just a bad day in the office, then I'm afraid I think this season will be tough. Yes, it will improve as it spends its tokens, but then so will Mercedes, Ferrari and even Honda.
What do you think of the idea of handicapping in qualifying, with perhaps a time penalty based on the number of points a driver has? Say 0.01s per point? So for the Malaysian GP, Lewis Hamilton would have a 0.25s penalty.
Gary Shotter, via Facebook
Gary, there are many opinions on how to fix F1, but I think when you start to introduce any form of handicap it all gets messy.
In my opinion whatever is done needs to be able to be understood by the casual viewer and not so circus-orientated it would bore the enthusiast.
We need to define what we want to fix before we can fix it, and I think everyone would agree we want closer competition, plenty of action and with the driver a bigger part of the end result.
If I was in a place of influence I would be seriously considering reversed-grid positions based on the drivers' championship position.
In the end I think this would give us a more rounded champion and I'm sure that at the end of the season whoever wins it would feel a more complete driver than one that just wins from the front in the fastest car.
The powers that be don't want to change the face of F1, but it has been changing since it started in 1950. I genuinely think that format would make it a much more watched formula as the excitement would be race-long and not just during a botched pitstop as we have now.
I'm doing an EPQ on F1 and was wondering what impacts F1 car-design most: safety, aerodynamics or new technology such as engines?
@AbbyWoodallx, via Twitter
Everything influences an F1 car's design, and most of those elements interact with each other. For instance, new materials are required to reduce weight while allowing better safety.
Aerodynamic understanding and the tools required for it have been what's driven aerodynamics to the level we currently have.
On the engine side, 20 years ago discovering that CFD could be used to design the inlet and exhaust ports was a major breakthrough.
Every team will prioritise individual areas and their percentage influence on the car's overall performance, and allocate resource to these areas accordingly. But as I said above, in the end everything works as one and in reality has to be treated like that.
If Mercedes improves its engine with the tokens, does Williams get an updated engine?
@noellysons, via Twitter
I would certainly hope so. The tokens will be spent on mechanical areas of the engine so in effect it would be in Mercedes' interest to pass these developments on to its partner teams.
That said, I'm sure there will be a budgetary implication. It will have had to build each team four engines and if some of those components have to be scrapped, then it might just mean that a team will have to decide if it wants to pay for the development or not.
I'm sure Williams will go with whatever upgrades are available. It's there to be the best, and to do that you need the best.
In your excellent analysis of the pace in Australia 2014 compared to 2015, isn't the fact that qualifying was wet last year a problem? Is that a fair comparison?
John White, via email
John, first of all thanks for the compliment and I hope what I do for AUTOSPORT helps with your and many other people's understanding of F1.
When I look at times for my analysis, I take the fastest time achieved by a driver over the race weekend. As you say, Australian Grand Prix qualifying for 2014 was wet, so the times came from practice two and three.
When I compared them to 2015 qualifying this would mean that the offset is slightly bigger as normally the cars would have gone a bit faster in 2014 qualifying.
However, after that initial comparison of laptime I only used teams' delta time to Mercedes rather than their outright pace to do my analysis, so the focus was on how teams compared to the benchmark pacesetter rather than their actual laptimes.
As you saw we had teams that improved a little compared to Mercedes and teams that lost a lot, so this offset would stay more or less the same regardless of session or conditions.
With any analysis you can only use the data you have available and with this one I wanted to see where everyone was after the first race.
I will do the same again after Barcelona when I'm pretty sure we will get a more rounded picture, but unfortunately I still think it will be those two Silver Arrows that we'll be basing our analysis on.
Should F1 change its rules to cut Mercedes' advantage, has Renault gone backwards and should small teams get the most prize money? GARY ANDERSON answers these questions and more
Do you think Mercedes should be reined in by a rule change?
@biker391, via Twitter
No, I don't think it should; Mercedes has gone out and attacked the situation and come up with the best power-unit package.
Red Bull is the team making most noise about this situation, but during the normally aspirated V8 days it chose the Renault engine because it believed it to be the best. It wasn't the most powerful, but its cooling requirement and fuel consumption was better than the others.
Now that it's suffering with the Renault power-unit package, it believes the best thing is to make as much noise as possible - including mooting pulling out of Formula 1 - and it hopes that just possibly someone will do something about it. I can assure you if the boot was on the other foot, Red Bull wouldn't be agreeing to any changes.
We all want similarity in both engine performance and chassis performance to allow us to watch the drivers in close competition, so things do need to be addressed for the future.
But for now Renault needs to get its finger out and spend its tokens on the right things to improve the performance, and Red Bull needs to shut up and get on with its development otherwise Toro Rosso is going to blow it away with the same power unit.
In this era of engine wars, do aerodynamics really play as much of a part as they did up to the end of 2013?
@Arqtik, via Twitter
Aerodynamics will always be a very important part of an F1 car's overall performance, however the power unit as introduced for 2014 has now become equally as important.
During the normally aspirated V8 days, and especially the later years of this engine formula when the engines had to be homologated, aerodynamics were probably responsible for 80 per cent of the car's performance.
We always used to say a very good engine could not win you a race, but a poor engine could definitely lose you a race.
Now with the new power-unit regulations I think it's a lot more like 50/50, which in reality is how it should be. Why should the engine manufacturers not get equal recognition to the chassis manufacturers? They work just as hard.
Would F1 be more exciting if prize-money handouts were switched so that lower-placed teams got more money?
@Baker_F1, via Twitter
The prize-money payout is a very complicated system and I do not profess to know how it all pans out, but I do believe the 'haves' get a lot more than they should.
If we look at the situation before Bernie took over as ringmaster, each team would have to negotiate with the circuit organisers to get its own appearance money. Every team would get a different amount and then on top of that would be a small prize fund.
If you were a race organiser back in the 1960s or early 1970s you would pay more money for Ferrari to show up than, say, Joe Bloggs Racing.
It would also be more likely that Ferrari would win, so it would take away a bigger total payout than small teams.
In reality the system is still the same and I believe the fact it's still the same is what's wrong with it.
There is a lot of talk of capping budgets, but I would go about it in a slightly different way. First of all I would rewrite the regulations to control what can be spent in a lot more detail. Stupid amounts of money are spent on stuff that does not add to the show.
When that's done, I would work out what a mid-range F1 budget should be. Currently a top team spends ￡250 million and a small team spends ￡75m, so the average is ￡150m. With the reductions generated by the regulation change, ￡100m should be fine.
Instead of the team having to pay to enter F1, I would turn it around the other way. If a team enters the championship and can give the necessary guarantees, it then gets staged monthly payments from the organisers of 50 per cent of the average budget. It is then down to each team to generate the other 50 per cent or whatever it can secure from sponsorship.
A prize-money fund, as in the past, would then be paid out at each race depending on performance.
Has Renault stood still, if not gone backwards, since last year? Are their problems software and/or hardware related?
@Halsey2722, via Twitter
On face value it looks like it's actually gone backwards. Mercedes and especially Ferrari have definitely moved forward, so it makes Renault look that little bit worse.
I must admit to being a bit fed up with Red Bull bleating on about how bad Renault is. To be competitive they need to work together and stop sticking the knife in. Renault has not gone out and done a bad job on purpose and it needs help to rectify the problem.
Mario Illien is a clever man and will be a valuable asset to Renault, but it needs to be careful it doesn't let politics destroy what it already has.
Renault's technical director Rob White is also a very clever man, but he seems to the one with the knife inserted between the shoulder blades. I hope this is not so as I have worked with Rob and he is a great guy and deserves more.
Whatever Mario brings to the show will take time, so if Renault really is in the position we saw in Australia and that was not just a bad day in the office, then I'm afraid I think this season will be tough. Yes, it will improve as it spends its tokens, but then so will Mercedes, Ferrari and even Honda.
What do you think of the idea of handicapping in qualifying, with perhaps a time penalty based on the number of points a driver has? Say 0.01s per point? So for the Malaysian GP, Lewis Hamilton would have a 0.25s penalty.
Gary Shotter, via Facebook
Gary, there are many opinions on how to fix F1, but I think when you start to introduce any form of handicap it all gets messy.
In my opinion whatever is done needs to be able to be understood by the casual viewer and not so circus-orientated it would bore the enthusiast.
We need to define what we want to fix before we can fix it, and I think everyone would agree we want closer competition, plenty of action and with the driver a bigger part of the end result.
If I was in a place of influence I would be seriously considering reversed-grid positions based on the drivers' championship position.
In the end I think this would give us a more rounded champion and I'm sure that at the end of the season whoever wins it would feel a more complete driver than one that just wins from the front in the fastest car.
The powers that be don't want to change the face of F1, but it has been changing since it started in 1950. I genuinely think that format would make it a much more watched formula as the excitement would be race-long and not just during a botched pitstop as we have now.
I'm doing an EPQ on F1 and was wondering what impacts F1 car-design most: safety, aerodynamics or new technology such as engines?
@AbbyWoodallx, via Twitter
Everything influences an F1 car's design, and most of those elements interact with each other. For instance, new materials are required to reduce weight while allowing better safety.
Aerodynamic understanding and the tools required for it have been what's driven aerodynamics to the level we currently have.
On the engine side, 20 years ago discovering that CFD could be used to design the inlet and exhaust ports was a major breakthrough.
Every team will prioritise individual areas and their percentage influence on the car's overall performance, and allocate resource to these areas accordingly. But as I said above, in the end everything works as one and in reality has to be treated like that.
If Mercedes improves its engine with the tokens, does Williams get an updated engine?
@noellysons, via Twitter
I would certainly hope so. The tokens will be spent on mechanical areas of the engine so in effect it would be in Mercedes' interest to pass these developments on to its partner teams.
That said, I'm sure there will be a budgetary implication. It will have had to build each team four engines and if some of those components have to be scrapped, then it might just mean that a team will have to decide if it wants to pay for the development or not.
I'm sure Williams will go with whatever upgrades are available. It's there to be the best, and to do that you need the best.
In your excellent analysis of the pace in Australia 2014 compared to 2015, isn't the fact that qualifying was wet last year a problem? Is that a fair comparison?
John White, via email
John, first of all thanks for the compliment and I hope what I do for AUTOSPORT helps with your and many other people's understanding of F1.
When I look at times for my analysis, I take the fastest time achieved by a driver over the race weekend. As you say, Australian Grand Prix qualifying for 2014 was wet, so the times came from practice two and three.
When I compared them to 2015 qualifying this would mean that the offset is slightly bigger as normally the cars would have gone a bit faster in 2014 qualifying.
However, after that initial comparison of laptime I only used teams' delta time to Mercedes rather than their outright pace to do my analysis, so the focus was on how teams compared to the benchmark pacesetter rather than their actual laptimes.
As you saw we had teams that improved a little compared to Mercedes and teams that lost a lot, so this offset would stay more or less the same regardless of session or conditions.
With any analysis you can only use the data you have available and with this one I wanted to see where everyone was after the first race.
I will do the same again after Barcelona when I'm pretty sure we will get a more rounded picture, but unfortunately I still think it will be those two Silver Arrows that we'll be basing our analysis on.
