Remember that Imola pole lap? How I said we’d be talking about the noise it made? Well, this is the bit where I talk about the noise it made.
Okay. First thing to note: It’s a V10, and I love V10s. I like V8s less and I really dislike V6s.
V10s, though. Whoosh. The noise that a V10 makes is unreal: high-pitched yet dangerous; full-throated and insistent. And if you think it sounds good on your phone’s speaker, imagine being in the cockpit. Even with earplugs fitted the noise is awesome, and I mean that literally. It takes your breath away. It envelops you – it puts you at the centre of the machine’s industry; it reminds you that you’re not so much the driver of this incredible piece of machinery as a mere component of it.
Nowadays, of course, they use more powerful engines than that. What I drove then was probably 850, maybe 860 horse-power, whereas now they’re over 900 horsepower. Even so, they’re a V6 engine compared to a three-litre, and they just don’t sound the same.
Nor do they feel the same. The V6 1.6 is turbocharged and has the electronic recovery system, which gives it 160 horsepower of electric power. When I was in Barcelona for Sky TV we compared my Barcelona Brawn pole-position lap – which was in a V8 – with Valtteri Bottas’s pole position in a 1.6 litre V6 at the same circuit. From the line to turn one, which isn’t that far, he had pulled about 10 metres on me just in the tiny little straight, because of how much more power he had.
On the approach and then through the corners, our respective speeds were similar. But then as soon as he accelerated out of the corner, he gained speed – simply because that’s the way it works with the electric power and turbo-charger. They’re faster.
So fast equals good, yes? True. But – and it’s big but for a driver – they’re not as nice and not nearly as much fun to drive. Whereas in the V10 and V8 era, you’d get on the throttle, sense the power coming in more gradually on the corner exits and feel at one with the car, knowing that you were absolutely in control of it, now it’s just bang, there’s power there, but you don’t feel like the one in charge.
Overall, though, and speaking more as a fan and pundit than as a driver, it’s the noise I miss most. Moving from V10 to V8 was a bit of a wrench, because they didn’t sound quite as good, and that carried us through from 2006 to 2013 – and then 2014 was the new hybrid era, which we’re still in, and I remember everyone was, like, ‘Oh my God, what have they done?’ Because the whole thing about F1 was the feeling of being about a mile away from the circuit and hearing the cars going round. It was beautiful. And if you had guests at a race weekend, you took them to the garage, and watched their reaction as soon as the car was started. They’d be like, ‘Oh my God,’ big grins all over their faces.
I understand the reasons why – don’t get me wrong, I’m an enthusiastic recycler, and I think it’s quite possible to simultaneously miss something and yet approve of its passing – but the fact is that it’s just not quite the same. I mean, I’m sure Mercedes are happy because they’ve won almost every race with the hybrid engines, but it’s just not that beautiful noise it used to be.
It’s the same right across the board. These days supercars now have a little speaker in them to make them sound more supercar-ish, but to me it just sounds fake.
Then you’ve got Formula E, where everything is electric. So obviously the cars aren’t very loud, but it’s a massive championship and all the manufacturers want to be involved because it’s the testing ground for what will soon be the dominant technology.
And that’s all good. But I still kind of wish that we could let Formula One have its beautiful-sounding engines.
So we all know what downforce is, yes? It’s grip, but grip that is generated via the aerodynamics of the car, whereas mechanical grip is what we have on our road cars – grip that is generated chiefly by the tyres.
I don’t know if it’s true of all racing drivers, but personally I feel like I have a complicated relationship with downforce, and perhaps now is the time to try and make sense of it on paper.
Firstly, I always felt in the past that it’s better to have mechanical grip because you know what you’re getting. I believed that it was simpler for everyone to understand, and that you can race more excitingly with mechanical grip, which allows proper wheel-to-wheel racing in a way that downforce does not.
After all, when you picture cars racing, you see images from films and TV or old-school motorsport: cars jockeying for position, drivers wrestling with the wheel, a scrappy synthesis of man and machine. The contemporary Formula One model, where cars make use of aerodynamics to sweep imperiously past one another, is anathema to all of that. To the uninitiated it looks like one car simply passes the other, and it can be difficult to understand why that has happened.
But that’s what I see with these rose-tinted spectacles I’m currently wearing. And having now raced in Super GT where mechanical grip is more powerful than the downforce, I actually find it tougher to understand what the car is doing. I find it much more difficult to do what I need to do to improve the balance of the car.
For that reason I struggle when it comes to setting up the Super GT car and really pushing it to the limit, whereas if we had lots of downforce, well, I know how that works. After 17 years I’m used to it.
And I really never thought I’d hear myself say that, because I always thought mechanical grip was better.
I first encountered downforce in Formula Three, having come from karting, which was mechanical grip, pure and simple, and I struggled at first. Moving on to F1 was good, to begin with, because the car I drove – the Williams FW22 – was such an easy car to drive. So easy, in fact, that I didn’t really put a lot of effort into learning about aerodynamics. It was only when I suddenly had a difficult car to drive – the Benetton B201 – and I really had to work on it. So yes, they did need to sit me down and teach me about aerodynamics and the best way to get lap time out of aerodynamics and it’s really important. It sounds silly but I remember thinking, Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me this earlier? It’s something you really have to learn because it seems so unnatural.
I can’t really advise on how to drive a car with lots of down-force. You need to get in one, which you probably won’t be able to do until you’ve mastered the mechanical grip of another category. It’s one of those weird catch-22 situations.
I’ve got a confession to make. Last year I bought a PlayStation. That’s not the confession. That’s just setting the scene for the confession.
I hadn’t had a games console for going on 20 years, but I bought it because I’d entered the Le Mans 24-Hour Race (more of which later) and I was due to go there and test. The idea is that you test for one weekend before racing the following weekend, and the fact that there are three guys in the team means you get hardly any circuit time – between eight and ten laps only – so I thought it’d be a good idea to take a Le Mans crash course via the wonders of video game technology.
So anyway. I expected to just switch on the computer, or console, or whatever they call it, and play like we used to do in the old days, when games came on a cartridge not a disc or a download, and you whiled away entire summer holidays playing Super Mario Kart, drinking tins of Fanta and burping the theme tune to Jaws.
But this thing took bloody ages to load, or upload, or download, or update, or whatever the hell it was doing. And then when I did eventually get to play it became apparent that I had to play it for 250 hours just to reach the Le Mans section of the game.
So the PlayStation was packed away, and instead I phoned up my mate down the road. This bloke has built a simulator in his living room. I mean it – you wouldn’t believe the amount of effort that’s gone into it. No word of a lie, you walk into his normal-sized living room, with its sofa, two chairs and a desk, and it all looks normal except for the fact that on the other side of the room is this sit-in simulator, with a shell that lifts up, and inside that a seat – a proper racing-car seat that you strap yourself into – and a 2D surround screen. You’ve also got a pedal box for your feet, all of which is properly sprung and dampened, a proper steering wheel that will give you feedback.
I think it’s still all played through a PlayStation, so it is in effect a glorified game console, but it’s a completely different beast from what I’d packed away at home. The quality and feel of it was just unreal – or should that be the other way around? It was totally real.
‘Could I borrow it?’ I asked him.
‘Borrow it?’ he said.
‘I don’t mean take it away. I just mean have a go in it.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you can get the kids off it.’
They were on it non-stop, apparently, but not playing a racing game. They had this other thing where they just drove around the English countryside. Not racing, just driving. They played it all day, by all accounts.
So anyway, we turfed them off, I got in, and I did at least get to experience Le Mans. I learnt the circuit layout. I figured out the banked corners and overall got a good feel for the track. It was, all in all, a decent way to get a taste of the circuit.
When I’d finished, I got out, and my mate asked me how it had gone.
‘Great,’ I said.
He was beaming with pride, and with good reason: his was a great simulator. Now it’s coming, the confession bit, because he said, ‘I bet it’s just as good as the ones you were used to at McLaren, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yeah, mate,’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? It’s right up there.’
Which was a lie.
Fair’s fair, though, it was better than the first simulator I ever used at Benetton, which was static. It was basically a racing car tub, like an F1 car without the suspension. You got in it the same way. The seat was the same. Steering wheel the same. You had a screen in front of you. But nothing moved, so you didn’t really get a feel for anything. There were no vibrations, nothing like that. It was just static.
I guess it was good to get used to the circuit, but aside from that, it didn’t really help me in any way: there was no feedback so you couldn’t work on set-up. Plus the room they put it in smelled of socks.
All in all, it was pretty useless, so I ended up giving that and all other simulators a wide berth wherever possible.
Arriving at McLaren in 2010 my heart sank when they were like, ‘Right, you have to drive the simulator.’
Maybe they’d got wind of my severe simulator aversion because they’d even put it in my contract that I had to drive the simulator before and after every race (as far as I know I was a pioneer in that regard, because everybody now has that clause in their contract).
‘We’ll work you gently into it,’ they said, ‘because everybody gets sick in the simulator.’
I was still thinking of the bathtub thing with the arcade-game screen. ‘Really?’ I said, ‘what sort of simulator have you got then?’
‘Oh, it’s pretty good,’ they said, ‘we’ve spent about thirty million on it.’
Okay.
So I go into this really dark room. It smells a bit musty, there’s no air in there, and there’s a carbon-fibre tub of the car you get into which is on widthways rails, so it goes side to side. Full-on massive surround screen. Toto, I’m thinking, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.
Besides that is a whole bunch of other screens for the various engineers: the simulator engineer, the tyre engineer, the engine engineer, the engineer engineer, who all sit behind the driver.
And they were right: everybody feels sick. Remember when you were a kid and you used to get in your dad’s car and want to throw up? It’s like that. Motion sickness, it is. The driver’s sick. All those poor engineers sitting behind the screens feel sick, too.
Still. Unappetising as it was, it did the job – the job being to successfully mimic all aspects of driving a Formula One car, even the G-force, which comes through a crash helmet you wear. This thing is connected to the machine in order to simulate G-force which it does so well that you think, If that goes wrong, it’s going to rip my head off.
Also, it has a system in it that makes it vibrate, so every gearshift you do, you get a jolt in the right manner. If you lock a tyre under-braking, you can feel it lock; with oversteer, you can feel the car slide, which is frankly amazing, because it’s very difficult to ‘feel’ a rear end that isn’t actually there. How can you feel wheels and tyres that don’t exist? And yet somehow you can.
They also have the real brakes, so even though there’s no wheel and thus no brake disc, there’s a calliper so it feels identical to the race car. It was so close to the real thing that when you crashed you’d close your eyes and take your hands off the steering wheel.
Even so, at first I was bit sniffy. ‘The brakes don’t feel right.’
Next time I went in there they had the brakes sorted.
They’d make a change to the suspension and you’d feel it. Later, when you climbed in the real thing, it would be exactly the same as the simulator and you’d be left wondering what kind of witchcraft they used to do that.
So it was a great simulator. I think most of them still aren’t as good as McLaren’s. It had everything.
And yet… it didn’t. Some days I’d get in it and be completely jubilant. ‘It feels really good; it’s identical to what the car feels like,’ and I’d be brimming with confidence that we could find a set-up that would work for the next race.
Sure enough, we’d have a great day in the simulator, use the set-up for the next race, Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt, and then the next time I went in there, it would feel utter shite, nothing like reality, and we could never work out why.
The team would be like, ‘Well, there’s nothing different, mate. It’s the same. It’s just you getting in it thinking it’s different.’
I’d go, ‘No, it’s different.’
Every driver was the same. We’d spend three hours trying to correlate with reality – all to no avail.
Then, of course, you had the fact that circuits were different. Or there would be changes to the tyre compound, and we’d have to correlate the simulator to the new tyres, which again you’d think was weird because it hasn’t got any tyres on it, but it does in the simulator.
It was one of the things that if the simulator was working then it was amazing, an invaluable tool. But when it wasn’t working? It just sucked time and money, frayed tempers, wore everyone out, stopped being any kind of tool at all and became a hindrance instead.
And it was funny, because I’d turn up at a race, and I’d speak to Nico Rosberg. ‘How much simulator have you done?’ He’d go, ‘Never used one,’ and then go out and win the race. Although to be fair he did have the quickest car.
There were certain drivers who despite being contracted to go in the simulator were jammy gits, managed to wheedle out and only went in it about twice a year – naming no names Fernando Alonso.
But frankly you couldn’t blame them. Who in their right mind would want to spend unnecessary time in this small, airless room, redolent with the promise of imminent vomit? My thoughts went out to the guy whose sole job it was to look after the simulator. He’d been my data engineer and then became the simulator engineer. I don’t know if that’s a searing indictment of how bad it was to be my data engineer or not. I dread to think.
Just the regular drivers and test drivers were allowed to use the simulator. Then you had other teams, such as Force India, who would pay to use it. Only then it all went hush-hush, because all our data would have to be kept separate from their data. Their engineers would ask our engineers, ‘How does this bit work?’ and our engineers would shrug and go, ‘Yeah, dunno…’
And now, with ‘eSports’ all the rage, competition simulator driving has really taken off. They don’t use the F1 set-up but they have rigs that are probably just as advanced as my mate has in his living room, and they take part in all sorts of competitions on games like iRacing, Project Cars 2, Gran Turismo, rFactor 2 and DiRT 2.0. They even have teams run by actual Formula One personnel.
Guess who runs a team? Fernando Alonso. I know, right?
So you’ve got your front wing and your rear wing. The job of the front wing is to help front downforce, as well as direct the down-force to the rest of the car and to the rear wing, the idea being that the two works as a package.
And my God they’ve changed over the years. When you look at the year 2000 cars, they’re beautiful because they’re so simple. But they’re also square; they’re boxes. Over the years they become more curvaceous and compact. You’ve got the engine in the back, all the radiators and everything and the designers are housing it in this little beautiful bubble, trying to make it as compact as possible, so that the airflow is better underneath and round the bodywork to the rear wing.
The front of the car is obviously most important because that’s what directs all the airflow round to the rest of the car. If the front doesn’t work, the rest of the car doesn’t work. If you look at a picture of a wing from 2009, it’s so simple. Just three flaps. A very simple front wing, and a bog-standard rear wing to match.
And the reason for that is not because the field of aerodynamics was in the dark ages in 2009 but because it was the first year of a new regulation. See, the thing is that the FIA are constantly introducing new rules, which limits what aerodynamicists are able to do, because otherwise downforce levels get crazy, overtaking becomes even more difficult, and the spectacle of the sport suffers (whole other arguments for another time here that we’ll neatly sidestep).
Now, in 2008, the cars were proper extreme. It was like the collective aerodynamicists of Formula One were all under the influence of the same bizarre hallucinogen. We had winglets everywhere. Wings upon wings. We had flicks and scoops and horns.
The following year, then, was like a Year Zero for wings. Regulations curbing their overuse meant that simple was once again in fashion. So what happened? The designers found a way to circumvent, bypass or otherwise sidestep the rules. Not breaking them. Oh no. Just bending them. Finding a way to gain an advantage while still obeying them. That, after all, is their job.
And so gradually you got this situation where the mad wings crept back, until the 2017 regulations allowed the teams to get even more imaginative, and the designers started dropping acid again (I’m talking to you, Mercedes T-Wing, which is in fact a pretty cool-looking wing).
Look at a wing in Formula One in 2019 and it’s just crazy busy. You look at it and you think, if one of those things break, the rest of the car looks like it would be undriveable, because it’s so integral to the car.
Again, the Mercedes wing is incredibly detailed. Just by looking at it, you can see the idea of it is for the airflow to go around the front tyre and then be sucked in behind the front tyre to the rest of the aero part, so it’s giving you front downforce, it’s helping all the way down the middle of the car, it’s helping the rear wing, it’s helping the full airflow. What’s called a Y250 vortex comes off the side of the front wing and connects everything.
That’s about as technical as it gets for me. I am not an aerodynamics expert, but I love the design of what they come up with. I love the fact that they’re not making the car beautiful to make it beautiful, they’re making it beautiful because that’s how it looks when you design a car aerodynamically. I’ve got a McLaren P1 road car and it’s stunning to look at, but it’s not designed to be beautiful, it’s just beautiful because that’s how it looks when the aerodynamics are working at their best.
When Ross Brawn bought out Honda and Brawn Racing was born in 2009, I found myself rescued from a potentially sticky career situation and sitting in a car, the BGP 001, that looked very, very tasty indeed.
We were a newcomer team, and despite the fact that in Ross we had an engineer who’d already won multiple Championships with Benetton and Ferrari, and despite the fact that every single person in that team had been racing for years, whether as an engineer, aerodynamicist, or a mechanic, nobody really expected us to be competitive.
But that’s because they didn’t know what we knew, which was that Ross had been working on something that would capitalise on a 2009 regulation change, having spotted a loophole in the rules. He’d put a ‘double diffuser’ on the car. A diffuser is a bit of underbody aimed at aiding the passage of air from underneath and out the back, converting it from the low, downforce-creating pressure beneath the car to the natural pressure of the outside air, and reducing drag at the back. And this one did that job, only twice as well.
Like I say, our rivals didn’t know about that. So when I then went on to win six of the first seven races of the 2009 season, I think it’s fair to say that we caught the competition napping and they spent much of the season playing catch-up.
History tells us that Brawn ended up winning the Driver’s and the Constructor’s Championships that season, of course, so all’s well that ends well. But the fact is that given our huge head start, it was a little bit touch and go at the end there. We didn’t fully capitalise on the massive gap we’d opened up on the other teams.
Why? Two words: wind tunnel.
Other teams spend something like £14m or £15m in the wind tunnel per year. At Brawn – new and comparatively underfunded – we were spending something like £500,000.
And time in the wind tunnel is so important. We may have started with a great car but development throughout any year is key and we weren’t doing that. Other teams did. It’s a huge strength at Red Bull, and sure enough they made up an enormous amount of lap time that season because they’d spent so much in the wind tunnel.
McLaren. Again, they were a second and a half slower than us at the first race but made up ground over the season, going on to beat us twice and almost winning the last race but for a brake failure.
Brawn? We changed the front wing once. Other than that, the design we started with was the one we finished with. Lucky it was such a good package.
A simulator doesn’t teach you much about the car. It’s mostly for the driver to get his eye in and help do set-up changes. Mainly it’s just a case of confirming what the data is already telling you. So you’re not actually learning anything. Whereas, a wind tunnel is everything, it really is, for the simple reason that aerodynamics is the most important thing in an F1 car. They will help the mechanical grip, the cooling of the engine, determine the visibility for the driver. Everything is determined by aerodynamics, because it’s all about downforce. And that comes from the wind tunnel.
Not really a bit of ‘kit’ as such, but so closely related that it might as well go here anyway. In terms of set-up, we’d do some of it in the simulator. Also, we’d carry it over from the previous race, or the team understands which circuits are similar and which are completely different.
Again, they run simulations – and I’m not talking about the simulator that we drive, but computer-based simulations – of what it should feel like with certain set-ups. It’s all very useful and we’d arrive at the circuit with a pretty good set-up most of the time. Put it this way, it would be very unusual for us to turn up and think, Hang on, we’re totally out of bed here and we need to change significant things.
Sometimes you’d have to change big things. Like maybe the suspension geometry – the various aspects that make up the suspension, like camber, toe and ‘caster angle’ – wasn’t working, which would take up to two hours. You make the changes and you think it’s okay. Oh, but it’s still a bit pants and you have to go back to the drawing board. Or the aerodynamics just aren’t working – we’re not getting the downforce that we expected. Why is that? And then they have to run through all the checks and sensors to find out what’s wrong.
A lot of this will be going on behind the scenes while we drivers are still munching on healthy snacks in our motorhomes. Then we get in the car, tell them how it feels, and the next phase starts: how can we make this car better for the race weekend?
I’ll take the car out. Oh, there’s too much understeer at high speed, traction’s terrible, so we’d add a front wing, change the ride height, whatever was needed.
It was mad, the amount of time we spend with the engineers developing the car over the weekend. But then for some races, it’s like, Hang on, this feels great, and you adjust the front wing one or two degrees and that’s it for the weekend. Sometimes cars work on certain circuits and not on others and that was the fun thing in the 2018 F1 season: some races Mercedes were amazing, and other races Ferrari were amazing and then you had Red Bull that were quick in other places. But this year, 2019, it’s all Mercedes. They’re quick everywhere, which is demoralising for everyone else because they don’t have a weakness. Or, if they do, they’re not showing it.
Sometimes you’ll get to the point where it feels great, but you wonder if it feels too great. Do we need to reduce downforce? If we did that we’ll be quicker on the straights but the trade-off is that we’ll be slower on the corners. And is that a trade-off we’re willing to make?
This happened at Spa, for example, in 2012, when I qualified on pole, and went on to win. The car already felt perfect but we still thought there were improvements we could make. Sometimes that can be a bad thing, of course – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but on that occasion it worked.
Spa’s probably my favourite circuit – just shading it over Suzuka – and it’s because it’s so smooth and flowing. By tweaking the car to fit the circuit and complement my style we got a perfect synthesis of the two. I’m grinning now, just thinking about it.
Funny. We never had any involvement with design. The only thing that I would work on was the cockpit. Is it okay to have this switch here? Can we put the fire extinguisher here? Where do you want your CD changer?
And for me, because I was the tallest driver: are the pedals okay here? Would you like them further away? Narrower? Further apart?
Aside from that? Nada. You got what you were given. As a driver your input was solely in the cockpit, the simulator and then after practice and testing. It doesn’t have enough rear down-force. It’s oversteery in high-speed corners. I want grip here, I want grip there. My rear’s feeling delicate, matron.
You’ll spend time in the wind tunnel talking about aerodynamics and they’ll design you a new front wing. Wahey, I’ve got a new front wing, you think.
‘It’s going to give us this amount of downforce at the front. You’ll have much more front grip as you turn into the corner.’
‘Awesome. So what will happen with the rear grip at the exit?’
‘You’ll lose grip at the exit, yes.’
Not so awesome.
You really need to keep your wits about you when you’re driving in order to take note of what’s wrong and what’s right about the car; equally you need to become adept at articulating that to the team. You’ll feed back to the engineers and in return you hear, ‘Well, okay, it’s in the pipeline, it’s coming in a few weeks,’ but that might not be soon enough for you, so you end up trading something else you want done in the hope that you’ll get your oversteer sorted a race earlier.
In short, there are a million things going on at once, developments being made all the time.
It’s a constant quest for perfection. For the rest of us, it’s about always trying to learn, and if you think you’re weaker than your teammate somewhere, you’re right into the guts of that. ‘Guys, show me why he’s so quick through that corner. Is it the set-up?’
‘No, it’s the same car you’re driving.’
‘Okay, well what’s he doing differently? I need to see this.’
So you look at the data – the throttle traces, the braking traces, the steering traces, gears, there’s everything you need to learn from your teammate, and suddenly you’re not so much a racing driver as a detective in a constant quest to be your best.
Question: what do racing divers think and talk about more than anything else? Yes, it’s tyres. And that goes for any class of racing, but especially Formula One. Are we talking about how much we love the tyres? How great they are? No, we’re not. We’re complaining about the tyres.
In F1 it used to be the case that we had Bridgestone and Michelin who were in competition with each other, meaning that some teams were on Bridgestone and some teams were on Michelin, which meant that the two manufacturers worked night and day to make better tyres, each of them trying to outdo the other, and because of this healthy competition they came up with softer, better, more consistent tyres. It was awesome.
Old timers like me can remember all the way back to 2004, which was a great year for tyre wars, so the cars were super quick and there was very little degradation of the tyres. They were great tyres because the manufacturers were fighting each other.
Nowadays – not so good. Since 2011 Pirelli has been the sole supplier of tyres for F1 – and because there’s no competition, there has, in my opinion, not been such an emphasis on development, and the tyres have arguably not been as good. Whatever the reason, I think that every driver in F1 has a whinge about the Pirelli tyres.
The problem is that nobody really understands them. We don’t get why sometimes you can get it in the temperature working range and it feels good while at other times it just doesn’t work. One race, the temperature for the tyres should be x, and in that range it’s really good. You go to the next race and in that range, they just don’t work.
As a result the tyres we have now are probably two to two-and-a-half seconds slower than we had back in the golden age of 2004.
In Super GT, we have four tyre manufacturers: Yokohama, Dunlop, Michelin and Bridgestone, which is great. They’re all trying to outdo each other so you go testing and it’s just non-stop tyres all weekend long. You’ve got brand-new tyres literally being flung at you the whole time (not literally, that would hurt, but you know what I mean) and it’s great; you’re testing 12 different types of Bridgestone all of differing construction. This one’s a bit softer. This one’s a bit stiffer. This one has a different tread pattern. This one plays a happy tune.
I love all that. Given that much choice you can really tailor your tyres to your specific needs, while the chances are you’ll be on completely different tyres from your competitor. Plus it’s just great fun trying out all these new sets of tyres – until you get to the end of testing and they want your feedback, that is. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? It’s like twelve sets of tyres, how am I supposed to remember all of them?’
But even if we’re not complaining about tyres, then we’re talking about them: what tyres to use, how warm they are. The tyres we call slicks are the tyres that are made for dry-weather conditions. They have no groove (which is why we’re not allowed them on road cars) and in wet weather you won’t get any grip. The water can’t go anywhere. It just touches the flat surface and you just slide, whereas with a grooved tyre the wet goes through the tyre and you get grip on the roads.
There are lots of variables, of course. The warmth, which you achieve initially with a tyre warmer and then by getting out on the track; the pressure, although there’ll be a minimum pressure you can run on the tyres, which Pirelli will give you because they don’t want you running it too low and risk damaging the tyre or getting a puncture.
Also, you have to run two different tyre compounds in the race. Every race weekend you have to run, let’s say, a soft tyre and a medium tyre or, if they’ve brought a medium and a super soft, you have to run one of each in a race. You can’t run just one set of tyres for the whole race, you have to run both, which means that some people might start the race on a soft, some people might start on a medium and then they get to the pit stop and have to swap over. It makes the race more interesting.
What I really like, too, is how the teams know how much tread is left on the tyre. They have some kind of gadget that actually tells them. It’s amazing. Plus of course you can see for yourself. The thing to look out for is ‘graining’, which is when the tyre is worn or damaged and you get a ripple effect, which in turn means a lot less tyre touching the circuit – because it’s rippled, you get a lot less grip. That happens mainly on the slicks.
If you get graining on the front, it cleans up. On the rears, it doesn’t often clean up, so if you start getting graining on the rear, you’re in trouble and you would have to pit.
A lot of it is about looking after the tyres. You might be on a strategy that involves pitting later, so you don’t just go flat out from the word go, because you’ll damage the tyres by lap five, so instead you’re looking after them by braking for a corner a little bit more gently, not putting too much heat into the rear tyre. You’ll exit the corner and the first throttle application will either be a little bit later or a little bit more gentle to stop wheel spin on the rear tyres. Or if it’s a front tyre issue, you enter high-speed corners being that bit more gentle with the steering or go in a little bit slower.
That’s what I loved about F1. It was always more than just being the quickest from A to B. So if my stint was 25 laps long I’d let the guy in front pull away, knowing that he was going to destroy his tyres. He might pull away and three or four seconds later the team would be, like, ‘Are you okay? Is everything okay?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, just looking after the tyres,’ and then towards the end of a stint I would start catching and catching and catching and maybe even overtake him before he stops for new tyres.
Another thing: marbles. This is what you get outside of the racing line. When the tyre degrades and it slides, you get bits of the used rubber flick off. We call that marbles, and they flick off all over the circuit, meaning that off the racing line there are marbles all over the track.
This means that if you have to make an overtaking move, it can be difficult, because you get on the marbles and they’re more slippery than the normal circuit. You’ve dived down the inside, you think, Oh, I should brake here, but the problem is the marbles, so you’ve got less grip than you think. Also, if you brake late for a corner, you run wide, you go on the marbles, you come back on, it takes two or three corners before you can clean your tyres and you get the proper grip back.
It also used to be the case that you could run lots of camber, which is the angle of the tyre affecting the surface area of the tyre that meets the circuit. If the tyre’s standing up straight, i.e., not much camber, you’ll have a lot of the tyre on the circuit on the straight but then the track turns and the tyre is at an angle and you lose grip. If you’re running lots of camber it means you get to the corner and you turn in and you get more front grip. By the same token, if the rear tyres have more camber, it’s more stable at the rear, so you go through a long corner, you get on the throttle and, if you have camber, the rear grip stays good, whereas if the tyres were stood up straight with no camber, you won’t have as much rear grip, so you’ll have oversteer.
That being the case, in F1 you try and run as much camber as you can, and with Michelin and Bridgestone you could play around with it a lot more; you could run different pressures and temperatures, you could mess around with everything.
Pirelli? Not so much. They’re, like, No, you can’t do any of that, because they’ve had tyre failures and they don’t want tyre failures. I guess it looks bad for the brand.
So they’ve limited everything. You can only go so far with the rear tyre camber, front tyre camber; you have to run a certain pressure, you have to run a certain temperature. This was another area we could really play with in F1, and suddenly it’s gone.
But wait, I’m about to get all fair’s fair and even-handed on your ass, because while there is indeed a lot of frustration aimed at Pirelli, you’ve got to say also that Pirelli is the only tyre manufacturer that’s willing to be there, and despite taking a lot of flak are still there, plugging away. And, after all, I do think they’ve improved. And the fact is, that we’re always going to whinge about the tyres, because they’re the most important thing in a way, they’re the things that are touching the ground, the only things that touch the ground.
Driving for Honda, I’d qualified fourth but we had an engine failure in practice and then I got a ten-place penalty, so I started 14th.
Yeah. I know.
So anyway, it was wet and it was all about fighting through. It was me, Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso all fighting the whole time because they’d been penalised, too, so like a bunch of naughty schoolboys we all started near the back and fought our way through, meaning that it was a hell of a battle to the front.
As the circuit dried out, it was about looking after the tyres, but still making the moves when catching the leaders. Then came the all-important tyre change, because once again we moved to slicks at the right time and that was it, I was in the lead and I was radioing in, saying, ‘What’s the gap for the guy behind me?’
‘Thirty-five seconds,’ they said.
I was, like, ‘Wow, okay, that’s quite a big gap,’ and then I just enjoyed the last ten laps of the race. I didn’t want it to end, it went by way too fast.
The last few laps, I’d backed it off and just cruised in and I was radioing into the team, ‘Is everything okay with the car? Do I need to do anything?’ They said, ‘No, it’s all okay,’ and I clinched my first victory.
This, you will remember, was the Championship year, me racing for Brawn, Silverstone the eighth round, and I was out in front, leading my teammate Rubens Barrichello by 26 points, with Red Bull Sebastian in third.
I arrived full of anticipation, thinking this could be my year, but we got there and it was cold and it stayed cold all the way through testing. My times were poor, Rubens was beating me, and I couldn’t understand why. How come I was being so slow and he was being so quick? Until the team pointed out that my tyre temperatures were way lower than his. Why couldn’t I get the heat into my tyres and he could? Because of the difference in our driving styles: mine, smooth and precise; his, aggressive. I ended up qualifying sixth (and only by the skin of my teeth). The race then became a case of me trying to work out how to drive on my tyres, which I did, but all too late and nowhere near the podium finish I’d been hoping for.
I got away in the lead and pulled a good gap. It was clear that Rubens, in second, would be damaging his rear tyres by following closely, so I just took it easy on the tyres on entry, accelerating gently, limiting wheel spin so that my tyres were in much better condition than his, because he was following so closely.
By the middle of the race, I’d pulled a good gap and then I backed it off for the last stint and just drove it home. But the funny thing is, however easy you go in Monaco, it’s still proper scary, because of the walls and in Monaco, especially when you’re leading, the circuit just seems to get narrower and narrower and narrower as you get more and more tired. I mean, you physically get tired, but mentally it’s so draining, the focus you need.