F1 Blog Pt.3

Imagine the Wright brothers on their first flight, all the testing with kites and models had reassured them that lift was a real thing but testing a model is one thing climbing aboard an actual aircraft yourself for the first time, that’s a different level of believe altogether. It’s an amazing thing to realize that the idea of flipping the wing over to create downforce would take an additional 60 years to really stake its claim in motorsports.

Downforce & Drag

That tardiness to the party didn’t diminish the impact. It changed the sport forever, cars didn’t just need to be streamlined they also needed to make downforce and do it efficiently (there’s that word again). Downforce is not free, it comes with a negative attached called drag. Drag is aerodynamic friction or resistance, drag slows the car down as the downforce attempts to make it faster. The idea, obviously, is to have the downforce gain be greater than the loss from drag giving a net increase of speed around the track.

I say net increase because the downforce will lower the cars top speed on the straights, the net gain comes from it being faster everywhere else. It also increases at a square of the speed so the faster you go, the more downforce (and corresponding drag) you get. Generalizing a bit, measurable downforce starts being really noticeable at a bit under 100kph (62mph) and starts getting serious soon there after reaching the amazing “stick to the ceiling” numbers above 160kph (100mph) in top tier aero car.

Grip & Load

Downforce makes the car faster due to another relationship: grip and vertical load. This is of course directly describing the load sensitivity of tires. Everything about the setup and driving of the car is derived from understanding load sensitivity—more load, more grip. That’s why the drivers main job is dynamically and continually balancing that load as they drive and if the car produces downforce its invisible hand is also pushing down on the tires (through the car) as well.

Downforce adding load is really cool because it doesn’t add weight to the car, now this is kind of interesting to imagine. You might be sitting there thinking if adding load gives me more grip I should just strap manhole covers to the floor of the car and I’ll have more grip and not just when the car is going fast. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it’s not the same due to the extra weight the car has to carry vs. downforce. Downforce is load, not weight and that means that when you brake, corner and accelerate the downforce doesn’t add mass to the car (like the manhole covers would) and that means downforce doesn’t add inertia or momentum like the weight does. Other than the associated drag it is just free grip.

The ideal then is maximum efficient downforce with the lightest car possible. Wait… I think I just described a Formula 1 car. Chuck in a 900hp power unit and you have then most capable land based G machine on the planet.

They could actually pull more G’s though and even though we shall probable see those 2004 lap records fall this year, the cars are still extraordinarily restricted, just like a 10,000+ HP Top Fuel dragster is restricted. It only seems like these sports are at the very limit of what can be technologically done but that is not even close to being true.

It is typically a balance of safety, budget and spectacle. This year’s considerable bump should produce more physically demanding racing which will test the driver’s fitness (as we talked about in Pt. 1) and the tire construction should allow the cars to be pushed (not babied) for their entire life. It is definitely a move in the right direction as long as the disparity between the teams has not gone the wrong way.

Why the 2017 regulations may work

The tires will actually play a crucial role in determining if the increased downforce of 2017’s rules package will be effective. If you’ve been watching the broadcasts for any amount of time you’ll have heard the word “graining” used by the teams, drivers and commentators. It is usually caused by pushing a tire that you can’t (or haven’t) got up to optimum temperature yet. Driving through understeer on a cold tire. The old tires where very susceptible to graining because Pirelli intentionally made the tires overly sensitive and delicate (at the request of the FIA) in a questionable effort to control disparity and improve the racing. These tires also grained in another situation that is very important to any hope of real racing, the ability to follow closely.

As soon as the cornering speeds get aerodynamic, the ability to follow closely is hugely effected by the wake of the car you are trying to follow. If their wake causes your front wing to lose downforce it makes your car understeer and when it understeers the tires are susceptible to graining. Graining basically sheers the rubber off the tire without the adhesion the tire needs to get into operating temperature range. That is why the tires in 2017 are not just bigger their compounding and construction will resist graining by being more tolerant of understeer.

The other way the FIA is trying to close the field up, besides tire improvements, is that they are actually adjusting the wake of the leading car. Race cars make downforce in two distinct ways; air going over the car and air going under it. Remember when we were talking about how the FIA restricts everything earlier(?), well one of the big adjustments they made in the rule book is the shape of the floor under the car, along with the ride height and the size/position of the wings, it’s another ratio they can play with. The air under the car (which exits the diffuser) leaves a relatively “clean” wake while the wings leave a relatively “dirty” wake.

In 2017 by increasing the diffuser size the teams will hopefully run less wing front and rear therefore even though they have increased cornering speeds considerably, the wake the following driver needs to drive through to pass or follow should be cleaner and provide more downforce to their front wings while the tires are now better at coping with potential graining.

Just like Orville and Wilber continuously refined their aerodynamics and adjusted lift to drag ratios depending on available power as their experience base grew, the FIA and the teams are furiously competing on the world’s stage that is Formula 1. Over the course of the Winter they have simulated and modeled countless combinations hoping to “out efficiency” the other guys. They have had their wind tunnels working 24/7 since the 2017 rules package was released and ran the cars on “shaker” rigs simulating every track on the calendar while the drivers drive every possible variant on the driving simulators. Just a little bit less efficiency in the aerodynamics can mean a losing season for the team especially if it is a fundamental flaw in the shape of a part of the car that cannot be altered once the car has been FIA crashed tested (for example).

If the culprits are little trim bits and pieces, then the season can be salvaged but if the package is fundamentally inefficient or unbalanced they are in trouble. Fortunately, they have at least unlocked the engine development which could help level the playing field (assuming Mercedes does not simply progress at the same rate).

Horsepower!

That brings up my last point: Horsepower is downforce. I am not talking about blown diffusers and the like, I am referring to the well proven fact that if you have more horsepower you can set the car to run with more downforce and drag. The straightaway speeds will be around the same but your braking cornering and accelerating will be improved as will relative tire wear…it is the sneaky and smart way to win races and championships.

Whether you are a fan of aero or not, there is no denying the influence it now has in any form of racing, now that we know the benefits of downforce no matter the rules, teams will shape the car (within those rules) to maximize the downforce to drag ratio and produce the optimally efficient car that basks in the winner’s circle at the end of the race.

Why Coaching Drivers Reveals Unique Insights

When trying to understand human nature typically you have people who study behavior in clinical and controlled circumstances. They want to control the environment to of course eliminate the variables. They use observation and objective measurement to develop a hypothesis and draw conclusions. These studies can last hours, days, weeks and sometimes years, the longer you run it the more subjects and the more you can rely on the data.

For over 20 years I have been running the same experiment. I sit next to people, all kinds of people and in a really fun way, in a matter of seconds my environment will reveal who they really are. We are actually two people, the real us and the us we pretend to be. We don't really think about this much because it is part of our normal routine. Many cultures have names for the "inside man and the outside man" that I'm referring to. Who we really are vs. what we think society expects to see of us.

It is a bit alarming and initially awkward for them to sit next to a stranger and have them learn your deepest secrets but at the same time it can be liberating as a journey of self discovery.

The unique thing about my experiment is its accessibility. Just about everyone can drive a car and most do on a daily bases. Learning within that familiar environment makes it attractive, it's sneaky that way, people don't realize as soon as the car skids it will instantly trigger "fight or flight" response in everyone that hasn't experienced it before.

As soon as fight or flight is triggered you are dealing with that persons subconscious, the inner person. As uncomfortable as this may sound it is actually pretty fun for the student, much like a roller coaster or a scary movie. 

The difference is that it's a teaching environment as well. This means I am observing and measuring the individuals reactions to come up with the most efficient course of action for this person. 

It is amazing how different people are, some are overtly boastful before, some meek and humble though most of course fall somewhere in between. What is interesting is that it has absolutely no correlation with how they actually are. The person we act as can be vastly different to who we really are. Since we are consciously adapting to circumstances we can only do it in environments where we are so comfortable that we can stay one step ahead.

The skidding car shatters the facade, think of a friend that has a really funny laugh (or maybe a snort!) that comes out only when they are genuinely surprised by something hilarious. There are many more things we can repress. Look at the definition of repression:  "a mental process by which distressing thoughts, memories, or impulses that may give rise to anxiety are excluded from consciousness and left to operate in the unconscious"

"Left to operate in the subconscious", Houston we have a problem. burying a problem works as long as we feel we are in control, specifically no surprises (the snort laugh). 

So with students I have the honer of seeing them as they really are. We then form a bit of mutual trust (I will only use this knowledge to help you) and we start making progress step by step. For each person though the steps are different, different sizes, different shapes and sometimes in a different order. The clarity of not having to filter everything though the conscious facade makes the progress super efficient and quite pure.

Again an absolute honor and of course I must add I am the same, with the same issues. I realized all of that after years of teaching that in a way they were teaching me because I would see the same traits mirrored in myself. I feel that's when it hit me, I had developed a sense of empathy, I could bring up things anticipating what they needed next so we could avoid stalling the progress. 

I went from a facilitator to a actual teacher and soon thereafter I realized I need to write a book. Optimum Drive is about this cathartic journey of self-discovery and insight into what actually makes us tick. I understand now why people plateau, I can see their potential but they can't, my job is to clear the clutter we all put in the way of our own journey. I truly believe we all have to potential for greatness within us.

-Paul F. Gerrard

F1 Blog Entry 2

Tires: Of all the components of motorsports from the teams to the drivers to the cars and the tracks the humble tire stands out from the rest as the single most important point of focus in racing. As an example, you hear more talk of tires than any other topic during the commentary of any race. In racing, indeed everything matters but also everything must go through the tire. It is the single point of convergence in racing. What happens where the tire hits the road surface is simply all that matters.

When I was contemplating writing Optimum Drive the thought that really compelled me was the epiphany we’ve selfishly always set the car up for the driver. What we should always be doing is setting the car and driver up for the tire. Winning is largely accomplished by being more efficient with your tires. 

Sometimes people struggle with the concept of efficiency in racing, it seems a contradiction in motorsports. Motorsports appears to be all about wasting things on the surface, you burn through everything at startling rates in motorsports compared to road driving, that part is true. The crucible of motorsports and how it pulverizes and punishes everything at an alarming rate is the very thing that makes it interesting and useful (and expensive and frankly fun). Want to know how your car will hold up in a hundred thousand miles? Just race it for a hundred, you’ll go though all the tires, brakes, clutch, engine wear, you name it and then some. 

So racing is hard but why is it efficient? Due to the stresses it places on everything, if you can get those thousands of components of the car to just last a little longer than the other guys you gain a huge advantage (whether it is 100,000 miles on the road or 100 miles on the track). The two that matter the most are: Fuel, if you can have the same straight line speed as the other guys and use less fuel you have a fantastic advantage due the less frequent fuel stops and less weight in fuel that you have to carry. The second is of course the topic here; tires. If you can produce the same grip but at the same time do less wear (called degradation in engineering terms) you, just like the fuel efficiency example, have a measurable advantage. As the others consume at a higher rate, their speed difference (or delta) between the first lap on the tires and their last is greater. By the end of the race or stint on those tires (if it’s a race with tire changes) they will be a sitting duck. This is due to a result of the degradation; the tires get slower every lap after they have reached operating temperature. There may be a small plateau of a few consistent laps but then the degradation inevitable sets in. 

If you’ve ever wondered why a car that qualifies well slowly drifts back in the race you now have your answer. It is relatively easy to get a set up in the car that is fast over one flying lap and much more tricky to reduce degradation relative to the other teams. The qualifying setup is about efficiency of speed over one lap while the race setup is about the fastest average lap time over the life of the tire. Two very different goals. That’s what the teams are doing when they talk about “focusing on long runs not lap times” during testing and practice. It’s tempting for teams to go for the glory of topping the test times for the day but that’s a bit short sighted because winning races is about reducing the degradation delta and giving in to the absolutely most important component of the car… the humble tire.

The humble tire is actually quite complex, as I wrote in Optimum Drive, I, like many other racers, didn’t think tires were that complex or that different. Man, was I wrong, all it took was doing some work with a tire manufacture, it’s actually more complex than any other component on the car as well. The vast sums of development money and overwhelming number of choices (variables) in their construction make the rest of the car seem like it comes from the Stone Ages.

When I started doing tire testing for Michelin I was handed a “subjective handling sheet”, I had seen these before doing vehicle validation and testing for vehicle manufactures and you assume since the vehicle manufactures sheet (since it included not only the tire but the entire car) that it would be longer, only makes sense right? Wrong, very wrong, you know the saying that the Eskimos have 100 words for snow? That is Michelin and tires, the subjective handling sheet was pages long and had many, many terms (and sometime made up Michelin words that were an interesting mix of French and English) to describe all of the individual characteristics of the tires in stunning, vivid detail.

I learned over time that they all had a subtlety different connotation that were not only measurable objectively but could, with considerable practice, be felt. Add them all up and those differences really started to matter, to define the character and performance of that particular tire. They had sliced it up so many times that you could start to define the feel and confidence that particular tire provided. It was far beyond what I had seen any vehicle manufacture do, it was just part of their “so much is riding on your tires” culture they had refined and perfected over the course of a hundred plus years of continuous development.

There are many variables in tire construction, there is also considerable technology. Those two statements would be a pretty big surprise to most average consumers (but you are not average are you). They think tires are all simply “round and black” and the premium ones are just overpriced, overhyped versions of the cheapest ones. Perhaps the saddest thing I see at “Cars & Coffee” is a wonderfully complex, lovingly developed vehicle with $40 tires on it. Tells me all I need to know about this undeserving owner thinking they are smart and savvy by saving money on tires. I have the same comment for people who live in snowy climates and are too shortsighted or misinformed to put dedicated Winter tires on their car. No people, even the best All-Season tire does not preform nearly as well as a good Winter tire.

The bottom line here with all of this tire talk is that whether we are setting lap records, winning races and championships or perhaps just out on a Sunday enjoying the finest piece of machinery we can modestly afford or maybe just out getting some milk on a snowy night, nothing has a greater influence on our joy and success than the humble tire.

F1 Blog Entry 1

What better way to highlight the upcoming release of a new book on driving than to have the author, Paul Gerrard, do a series of pieces and a podcast interview for FBC discussing some of the finer elements of driving? In a new series, we are calling Optimum Drive with Paul Gerrard, we will focus on some intriguing parts of Paul’s new book coming out this April. You can pre-order the book right here from Amazon. If you’re a fan of the art of driving, this book is a must-have and we are very honored to be working with Paul on this special series just for our readers/listeners.

Paul Gerrard:

Paul F. Gerrard is an accomplished professional racing driver, precision/stunt driver, advanced driving instructor, vehicle evaluator and presenter. His career started in Europe winning a prestigious Winfield Scholarship that lead to successfully racing formula cars in both Europe and the United States. He made the transition into racing sports cars and simultaneously started instructing a wide range of drivers from military special forces to aspiring racers to teen drivers.

Next on his progression was television appearing as an automotive expert and driver on shows such as Top Gear (UK and US editions), MythBusters, Speedmakers, Supercars Exposed, Ultimate Factories and many others. He has presented on every automotive topic imaginable and specializes in make technology and driving easy to understand for people at any level. Paul is also a sought-after expert witness in high-level automotive court cases.

He has continually raced winning several national championships along the way racing everything from Pikes Peak to just about every professional road racing series all the way to being ranked number three in the world in vehicle jumping distance for a 2010 Hot Wheels Stunt.

Also under his belt is over two decades of racing driver coaching and director level responsibilities at some of the most advanced racing schools in the world. While his passion is and always was racing, Paul has cultivated and created a career that allows him to not only enjoy his passion but do something that is perhaps even more satisfying… share that passion for what he considers the most accessible and highest level mechanical interaction possible… a car and our uniquely human ability to connect with it.

Optimum Drive:

Optimum Drive is a book about achieving driving greatness. Its focus is not on the simple mechanics of vehicle line and calculated corner speed but about the granular dynamic balancing a great driver can do to actually up that speed above what most people think is possible. There exists a secret handshake of sorts for the greats, an elite club at a level that almost seems superhuman. The process in this book exposes and describes the steps anyone can take to gain access into the most elusive step a driver can take…turning what they do with three simple controls into art.

The Art and Science of Test Driving and Testing

Good usable repeatable laps that is what the team wants the driver to do, seems simple enough but so few are really good at it. For a driver, it takes a lot of restraint to do repeatable useable good laps, the very mentality of a competitive person is to be aggressive not show restraint. You’ll see teams favor certain drivers for certain testing tasks, the lower down the totem pole you are, the more menial the driving task all the way from only straight line running to correlate wind tunnel with real world to individual testing/running of vehicle systems. The initial running is seldom done anywhere near the limit so those duties usually fall to the “Friday drivers”.

I mentioned the word correlation a moment ago and that is what the teams need to establish, a baseline. While the car may be turning its first real laps it, in fact, has probably done a whole season virtually over this Winter. The teams need to take all that virtual data and see how close it is to actual data they collect during the test. That is the all-important correlation they are after. Is the car behaving exactly how the simulations predicted?

To do this they break everything down as much as time will allow. The fairly recent draconian (cost cutting lol) restrictions on testing have made the reliance on simulations greater so there is a lot of pressure to get them right because the car is turning less laps and later in the process and that makes everyone very nervous. They don’t have much time to correct things if the correlation is poor. I wonder if a car has ever turned out better than they predicted? Usually of course the opposite is the case and there is always a team or two flying in some bits while the car misses some crucial track time or is embarrassingly off the pace relative to last season.

Through it all, the test driver (not the race driver) hat is on dutifully driving the car as precisely as possible so they themselves are not make the data harder to be correlated due to them being on their own driving program (like trying to go too fast and therefore perhaps being inconsistent).

The time for speed will come though some teams will fly under the radar until unleashing the cars full potential in Melbourne qualifying. Others (usually those who have something to prove or are still sponsor hunting) will go for a lap at the end of each day to show the world that this year is going to be different and generate some short-lived but important pre-season buzz.

The bottom line is that everyone is on their own program, some will be frantic, some restrained and others quietly confident. Meanwhile the drivers circulate with engineers dutifully checking data, all with fingers crossed that the car is living up to its virtual potential as it’s turning ones and zeros into actual physical form…untold millions invested, eight meager test days, then only a month to Melbourne…what could possible go wrong!?

The difference between two distinct yet necessary driver types: The test driver vs. the race driver.

Now, it is safe to say any good, let alone great, driver should be able to do both. One sets up the car and the other races it. The test driver is like a robot, they put the same good known input in (within reason) regardless of output (understeer, oversteer, lock-up, or wheel spin), and the engineers adjust and re-adjust the car until the output is as close to perfect as possible.

That’s how you set- up a car to maximize its performance. The more consistent the test driver’s inputs, the more accurate the engineers’ data, and the closer the can get to the ideal compromise in the car’s set-up. Then the race starts and the driver switches modes; the car’s set-up is now pretty fixed (just usually brake bias, anti-roll bars, and tire pressures, and wing adjustments at the pit stops), so the driver now needs to not be the rock-solid robot doing exactly the same thing every lap. They now need to be focused instead only on the output, continuously adjusting their inputs to optimize the output. The whole idea of our role being that dynamic car balancer is us in race mode, but the test (mode) driver balances the car and repeats the run exactly as the engineers tweak.