Racecraft is the basis of all racing. It’s how to overtake, how to brake, how to position your car correctly when you’re fighting for position; it’s about understanding racing lines and using your skill and instinct to find the quickest way around a circuit.
It’s also about dealing with the extra stuff that gets thrown at you. Like the weather doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Or maybe the car you’re driving doesn’t suit your style and you need to change up – in which case, you either adapt your style of racing to suit the car, or adapt the car to suit your racing style.
My driving style is, in a word, smooth. I try to drive as though I’m racing a 60cc go-kart. I like to brake and carry speed through a corner; I like to judge the racing line. Precision. That’s what it’s all about for me. I began that way in karting and – with a bit of necessary fine-tuning – carried it through to F1. I like to think I continue it now in Super GT.
I’m the same in a road car. Smooth as a pint of Guinness. Mind you, Brittny would have a thing or two to say about that. She thinks I brake too late, pulling up to the car in front, and while that’s technically true, it’s also fine because I might brake late but I don’t brake hard, and that’s because I don’t want people’s heads doing the nodding-dog thing in the passenger seat.
But, yes, fair cop. We do get close to the car in front and that’s Britt’s issue. Late and soft – that’s me.
A lot depends on what you’re driving. When I’m in her G-Wagen, it’s like a bucking bronco anyway, which is why I prefer to take the BMW 5 Series, because I can’t be dealing with driving around LA feeling like I’m doing that scene in Wayne’s World where they’re all head-banging in the car.
But anyway. When it comes to driving, that’s how I roll. The drawback is that if I’m in a racing car that doesn’t handle the way I want it to, I won’t be as quick as the likes of Lewis or Fernando, because I’m not one who can wring a car’s neck the way they can. If they’re driving a car with too much front grip, for example, they’ll be better at adapting to that than me. If you have too much front grip, the rear slides throughout, and I hate that feeling. Not to get all Carry On Formula One Driver about it, but I need a firm rear, matron. I need it stable so I can take that speed through a corner. A tiny bit of front sliding, that’s fine, because I know where to put the car at the corner, just as long as I can have confidence in my rear. And if I have that, and if I can fine-tune the car so that it works with my style, then I’m unbeatable.
I was always better in the wet. I’ve won 15 Grand Prix, and I reckon nine of them were wet. The reason is that I can feel the unusual conditions and I can really think on my feet or, in my case my bum, because that’s how I feel the car.
A lot of drivers struggle in the wet. They’ll look at the circuit and they’ll go, ‘Well, it’s a bit slippy in that corner, so I’ll slow down,’ whereas me, I like to arrive at the corner and decide on the fly, feeling the corner through the car and through the tyres, and that’s how I always gain time in those tricky conditions of when it gets wet through a race or if it dries out through a race and you’re on slightly the wrong tyre, so you could be in the wet on a dry tyre and I can always find the grip, whereas a lot of people can’t.
I know that that’s what frustrated Fernando when Lewis started in F1 as his teammate at McLaren. At the start of their partnership (if you can ever call teammates in F1 a partnership), Fernando would destroy Lewis, but Lewis would look at the data and do a bit of Sherlock Hamilton: Oh, Fernando’s braking there. Okay, I’m going to brake there. Fernando’s accelerating there. Okay, I’ll accelerate there.
And although by rights it shouldn’t be as easy as that, it somehow was for Lewis, so he’d just hammer the brakes where he thought was right: 100-metre board, bang, brakes, turn in, come out, and be as quick as Fernando.
Not quicker. But as quick. And this would bother Fernando. And because of that, and because Lewis got inside his head, Fernando made more mistakes, which Lewis didn’t, because he was the new boy, had no pressure, could make mistakes and no one cared. Whereas for double World Champion Fernando it was different. And Lewis ended up being quicker.
So yes, drivers definitely learn – even poach – from each other in terms of style, although it’s more to do with hard facts than technique, like you’ll see from the data that so-and-so has taken a corner flat. Hmm, you’ll think, I didn’t think it was quite flat through that corner, but he’s done it, so it must be okay, or He’s able to go flat there, but I’m not, so why is that? What’s different about his car? which sends you back to looking at the set-ups. Ah, he’s got more rear wing, maybe I should try more rear wing…
Learning. See? It always comes back to that. Which brings me onto…
My first pole position in Formula One was at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola in 2004. I’m in my BAR-Honda. I’m 24 years old. Just behind me is the World Champion Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari.
No pressure, then.
So I pull up to the start and over the radio my racing engineers tell me, ‘Right, JB, time to do the procedure.’
Which is the start procedure.
And it’s like that moment you’re at the cash machine, go to plug in your PIN and suddenly can’t remember it. Or when you walk into the shop needing a pint of milk and your mind goes blank.
I’ve just achieved my first-ever pole position. I’m ahead of Michael Schumacher, and I’ve forgotten how to start the bloody car. It’s arming the launch control – a procedure I’ve done dozens, no, hundreds of times. All year I’ve done it in the simulator, in practice and testing, so much so that it’s virtually a case of muscle memory.
Except that it’s gone.
And the lights are coming on, and normally the procedure should have begun by now and I’m thinking, Shit what do I do? I’m looking at the lights and I’m going all hot and fizzy and then boom it comes back and bam, bam, bam, I do the procedure, and pull away as the lights go out and…
Have the best start of my life.
Proper good. I must pull four car lengths ahead of Michael (who goes on to beat me into second, but still).
Despite the fact that I got a good start, it was more by luck than judgement, and it’s not something I’d wish to repeat in a hurry. You can be fast in testing and practice, you can ace qualifying, you can be as quick as possible. But if you get your start wrong, you can lose two or three places, and if you’re at the front of the grid and you lose places you find yourself caught up in traffic, and that can be disastrous. A good start isn’t just desirable, it’s essential, and as a result it’s something we practise in the simulator a lot. Apart from rolling it in to the harbour, much of those two simulator days prior to Monaco were spent on my starts. (And then what happened? I ended up starting from the pits anyway.)
What we call the start procedure begins way before that moment I’ve just described and involves doing a lot of prep beforehand. To make sure the clutch is working and warmed up correctly, you do what’s called a ‘clutch bite point find’, which is a case of understanding where the bite point is for when you release the hand clutch at the start, because that bit’s still manual. It’s the only clutch use that’s manual, because the only time we use the clutch paddles – there are two, usually – is for the start and for pit stops. For gear changes, it’s another paddle and it’s all done automatically.
Next, you do your tyre warm-up where the team has told you how many burnouts to do, because they know what temperature the tyres are at and what temperature they should be. You achieve a burnout by accelerating in first gear and spinning the wheels. The car has 900 horsepower, and each burnout will raise your tyre temperature by around six degrees. Usually, you’re asked to do four of them, the last one being just before you stop on the grid.
When you stop, although you’ll get less tyre temperature on the surface, it will still be there internally, and then you’re basically sitting there twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the rest of the grid to queue up. Hopefully, you’re waiting a long time for them to form up, because that means you’re at the front, which is fine – so fine, in fact, that you don’t even worry about losing tyre temperature, because after all it’s the same for everyone around you, and even though those at the back have warmer tyres it’s not like they’re going to overtake you. Well, hopefully not. Nope. You’re just glad you’re at the front. Open track – that’s what you want.
Next it’s announced that all cars are formed up, at which point you get ready to launch. All the way through my career it’s been different: between 2001 and 2003 we had a system called launch control, where you’d release the clutch, and then when the lights started coming on, go full throttle with your foot on the brake, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. And then, when the lights went out, you’d push a button and the car just went – it did everything as it should. Benetton were very good at that. They’d often make two or three places up at the start, just because of their brilliant launch control.
After the launch control era we had a manual system, and for this we had the two clutch paddles I’m talking about. What you’d do was pull up, put it in gear, stick your finger behind one clutch and pull it to about 60 per cent while pulling the other clutch paddle all the way in. Then you’d sit there, revving up to, say, 8,000rpm, waiting, the noise around you like the sound of the planet splitting open even with your earplugs in, an absolutely astonishing, primal-sounding noise.
And then the lights would go out and – boom – you’d dump the fully retracted clutch immediately, so you’d still have a large percentage of clutch not engaged as you pulled away, at which point you’d hear a beep and then release the second clutch fully and start going heavy on the throttle.
So that was pretty fancy. But then they banned that, so you’d have to find a way of doing the start with just one pedal, where you’d pull the clutch in, get the revs right, the lights would go out and then you’d release the clutch, it would hit your fingers, you’d hold it at about 50 per cent and then at the beep release it completely.
It sounds needlessly complicated, and it probably is. Most of all, it’s weird and funky trying to get your fingers in the right position, but it’s what you have to do, because that’s the best way to get a good start. Clutch control is paramount and getting your fingers in the right place is the first battle. After that it’s difficult to explain and tough to understand unless you’re actually sitting in the car – and even then it’s something that happens more by instinct, feel and racing mojo than anything else. Although you’re using different equipment and manipulating it differently, the principle is the same as it is in a road car: you know when you know. Ever tried to teach someone clutch control? If so, you’ll know what I mean. It’s all done by feel.
As far as the throttle goes, you’re told which revs to use, so you’ll have lights on the wheel, which are programmed to respond to your throttle use, and the idea is to get the lights to meet in the middle of the wheel, which means you’ve hit the throttle sweet spot. Over to one side, too much throttle; over to another side, too little throttle. If you’re 5 per cent out on the clutch pedal, you get a really bad start. Ditto if you react slowly. One-tenth late in a reaction works out to a loss of about 1.5 metres, and that’s a killer.
There’s so much else that can go wrong, too. Maybe somebody else has messed up their own start and stopped in front of you, which means you’ve got to turn the wheel and back off the throttle and that’s the worst thing you can do, because when you go back on and you get a massive amount of wheel spin, or maybe you’ve released the paddles too quickly, you don’t release them quickly enough, or you’ve come on the throttle too aggressively, or you’ve shifted up too early or too late…
In short, perfecting a start is not easy, but it’s those who make it look easy who end up doing the best. We’ve seen it in 2019 with the two Mercedes drivers: Valtteri Bottas has a bad start Lewis overtakes him and vice versa. In Barcelona, Bottas was on pole, had a poor start, Lewis ended up overtaking him and won.
So, if you were to ask me what the most important part of the whole weekend is, I’d be tempted to say qualifying but I’d be equally tempted to say the start, and then I’d settle on qualifying and change my mind the following day.
Tyres make a difference, of course. Soft or medium? A soft tyre will give you a six-metre advantage, meaning you’ll be six metres quicker reaching 100kms an hour. However, the medium tyre is a better race tyre. So you, your race engineer and the strategists are faced with the decision: do you play the long game and go for the medium tyres, or decide to start with soft, knowing that on the soft you have a better chance of overtaking at the start, which is the easiest place to overtake? This, my friend, is what’s known as a variable.
You always have to be gentle with the throttle. Be anything other than gentle and the wheels will spin. The trick is to apply it slowly, and if you go on and get wheelspin, you lift off a bit and then go back on even more gently.
The good thing is that in a Formula One car we have a throttle map. A throttle maps is set of values applied to the throttle use that will change the behaviour of the throttle, depending on the driver’s preference.
You can change the throttle map depending on the conditions. In the wet, for example, you’d adjust it to be a little less sensitive when you first apply the throttle, because otherwise you’d come out of a corner, touch the throttle and be in danger of losing the rear end of the car.
In the dry we play around with it. If you want you can have it mapped as a straight line all through the pedal, as it would be in a road car. But the way you’d normally have it in an F1 car is a little bit soft at first – that initial touch – so you can really get a feel for where the throttle pedal is. And that would be the first 20 per cent of your map, after which it would start picking up more aggressively and that’s when you get the torque and power.
It’s as much of an art form as using the brakes. For me, it’s exactly the same in terms of modulation. I’m sure that Lewis, for example, would probably say that skill on the throttle comes second to using the brakes. But that’s me. You’re always working the throttle in tandem with the brakes. You’re dancing with them both, modulating both at the same time. Well, I am, because that’s my style. Other drivers are very different.
Always best to start on pole, I find. The only thing is that you may find yourself vulnerable to an overtake at turn one. The guy behind can tow up to you all the way down the straight, sit behind you and, come turn one, may well be able to have a run at you.
That’s what happened to me in 2009, racing for Brawn in Barcelona. I had started on pole, with Sebastian second in a Red Bull and my teammate Rubens Barrichello third. Off we went at lights out, and my start was fine, but Rubens’ was better, allowing him to pass Sebastian then tow up to me and pass me on turn one. Fortunately, I went on to win thanks to a different pit-stop strategy (more on that in pit stops).
So, yes. In terms of Sunday, the actual race itself, the start and turn one are the most important. Stringing that particular one–two together can help make up for a bad qualifying session, because if you’re starting eighth on the grid and you get to turn one and suddenly everyone’s on the inside, you can take advantage of the inevitable bottleneck by coming around the outside, capitalising on the fact that they’re all slowing down in heavy traffic, and drive down the outside. You can brake later, going round and make up positions.
Then next year it’s different. Maybe the outside was good for an overtake last year, but this year, for some reason, everyone’s on the outside, so the inside’s better. Maybe two cars touch, and because they touch the guys behind are nervous of crashing, lift off, and that slows everyone down, and again because you’re further back you can take the other side and make up positions.
Having said all that, there really is no substitute for being up the front, because if you’ve qualified, say, tenth, there’s a much bigger chance you’re going to crash. Fourteenth is the worst. When you’re right at the back you can hang back and see what’s going on. But when you’re 14th, you don’t want to lose places to the cars behind, so you’ve got to push and you try and overtake which means there’s a big chance of crashing or damaging the car.
Both of these are bad. Crashing is bad, obviously. But damaging the car is even worse. If somebody drives into the back of you and damages your floor or your diffuser, it’s a lot of down-force gone, but you can still carry on, and it’s the worst indignity – up there with taking out your teammate and being overtaken on the outside. You’re just driving Miss Daisy for an hour and a half, wishing that you’d crashed and were in the wall, because at least that would be better than what you’re doing now, being lapped and cursing your terrible start.
In a racing car, you’re changing down as you come into the corner, which is what you should be doing in any car, except most people don’t think to change down. They get to the corner, go to accelerate, realise there’s no power and then change down gears.
In an F1 car, your braking and shifting go together, with one being a reaction to the other. You’re coming into a third-gear corner in eighth, which in an F1 car is top gear, so it’s brake then shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. There’s a safety mechanism fitted so that you can’t shift down by too much and over-rev the engine. It’ll only let you shift down when it knows that the revs won’t go above 12,500rpm.
You know which gear you need to be in for each corner. At Monaco, for example, there are three first-gear corners. Having said that, it’s not like you have them memorised. I mean, you know from previous experience, and you’re told, and you have all the data in front of you before you go out. But you get out there and it all happens by feel anyway.
Plus, it’s often the case that gears can change from practice to qualifying. Say you have a corner, and you’ve been practising in third gear on old tyres, you might give it a go in fourth in qualifying because you’ve got new tyres, you’ve got less fuel, there’s more grip on the circuit. It’s a risk because you might screw it up by going in fourth, but you might be another tenth quicker. Again, that comes with feel and instinct.
Journos would always ask me after a race what gear I was in for such-and-such a corner, and I’d be like, ‘Hmm, I think it was third, or it might have been fourth,’ because as a driver it doesn’t really matter, it’s about listening to the car. Like if you feel the revs are too low, you downshift. If you feel that it’s not going to pull when you get to the exit, or if it’s pushing too much, and you need more engine braking, then it means that you’re in too high a gear.
The whole process gives you a lot to do. You’ll be changing as you’re coming into the corner, and, at the same time, you’re hammering on the brake and hitting the throttle, with most of the downshift taking place when you’re still braking, and at the same time trying to balance the car when you shift that last gear. You’re doing all of this at 200 miles an hour, remember. And if you’re testing or qualifying then you’re also trying to take note of how the car feels, so that you can relay it to the team afterwards.
A lot of people can’t get their heads round this, but it’s one of the reasons why a race is so much easier – or, I should say, less mentally taxing – than qualifying and even practice. It’s because feedback’s not an issue. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to tell the team so you have more headspace to focus on your driving.
Either way, there are a lot of mental gymnastics involved, which is why it cracks me up when people say, ‘Oh we should bring back stick gear shifts.’ Yeah, right.
Go to the other extreme, and in 2001 all the teams had automatic gearboxes. It was all worked out on a computer and engineered so that it would shift down to certain gears on certain corners, but giving you, the driver, the leeway to override and change gear yourself if you fancied it for whatever reason. It was a bit weird to drive but I didn’t mind it because you still had ultimate control. Still, they got rid of it.
One last point. The gear shift is on the paddles, of course, and you can design how skinny you want it to be, how far away from the steering wheel, how thick it should be, do all of that. It’s great. You make it personal.
If, at high speed in a road car, you brake as hard as you can, you still won’t slow down as much as you will just by lifting off in a Formula One car. Forget touching the brakes. Just lifting off. And that’s all down to engine braking and our old friend down-force. Just lifting off you pull 1.5G. Hit the brakes as well and you’re going up to 5G.
And you’ll be doing it with your left foot. Right foot is throttle, left foot is brake. And for me my left leg works just fine as a braking leg, which if you’re a road car user might sound weird. I’m just used to it, because in F1, it’s always been left-foot braking. I can’t get enough power with my right foot either, because it’s just not used to putting that much power through the pedals, it’s only done the throttle pedal before.
Conversely, a brake pedal on a road car is a lot more sensitive. They’re not carbon brakes, so when you touch a road car pedal, you don’t have to brake very hard. Like if I were to do it with my left foot, I’d brake too hard, I’d be through the windscreen. Whereas, my left leg in a race car can control and modulate a lot of power well. Even though you need to use a lot of power on the left leg I have so much feeling with it. I can’t get the feedback I want from a road car.
People say, ‘Can you compare an F1 to a road car?’ No, you can’t, it’s completely different. Gears, steering, acceleration, balance, behaviour, everything. And of all those areas, the one that’s most pronounced is braking. Most people don’t understand why the brake pedal in a racing car is so hard. People get into F1 cars, reach turn one and go straight on because they didn’t realise they had to hit it so hard. It’s a very different feeling to your road car.
The first stab of the brake is the most important, because that’s when you have the most downforce at the highest speed and thus when you get the most braking force and pull the highest G. So that first hit is massively important in slowing the car down. If you arrive in the braking zone and you push it gently you won’t be taking advantage of the downforce and you won’t be stopping at the rate you need. Fine for a warm-up lap, perhaps, but not in a racing scenario.
Now, normally, if the tyres are up to temperature and you hit the brakes hard you won’t lock up. But if the tyres are not in their working range – so they’re a bit old or not at the correct temperature – then you’ll lock up. It’s what happens when you hit the brakes and the pads grab the disk. The front tyre locks and they smoke. That’s just carbon brakes for you, really. They’re very grabby until they’re up to temperature. And it’ll happen if the brakes are too cold, or if the car hits the ground as you brake because you’re running the wrong ride height or the tyre pressure is too low. You’ll hit the brakes, the front will hit the ground, you lock up, you’ve lost time, you’ve probably damaged the tyre and run wide. You messed up.
So, you’ve got to hit it hard and then after the initial hit, you back off. You shouldn’t ever hit the brake and then come off and then go back on, because if you’re doing that it means you’ve misjudged the entrance to the corner and you don’t want to do that because that’s BAD.
The perfect scenario is to hit the brake hard, come off the brake gradually, then turn in and go back on the throttle. If it’s a hairpin and you’ve done it right, you should be able to just hammer the brake, turn and then gradually apply the throttle, but mainly you’re constantly judging your footwork. Like during a race, when the tyres are getting old, you’ll be prone to a bit of oversteer on entry, so you’ll be using the brakes to balance the car all the way to the apex, then turn and exit.
Things go south if you brake too late. Normally, as I say, you have the first hit on the brakes and then slowly come off the brakes. But if you’ve braked too late, you hit the brakes and not only are you on the pedal for longer but you have to turn in while you’re braking, and at that point you’ve got problems, because when you brake in a straight line, the whole surface of the tyre is on the ground and everything’s fine. But when you turn and brake, there’s camber, which means there’s less of the tyre actually touching the road, and if you brake hard and turn in, you’re likely to lose grip, lock up the inside unweighted front, damage the tyre and go straight on.
It’s different with different types of tyres: Michelin, you can brake and turn in a little bit more, Bridgestone, you can’t. You’ve got to wait until you’ve done the braking and then turn in. So you really need to understand the tyres that you’re on as well.
It’s crucial to get your braking right, because it sets up the whole corner. You need to be brave on the brakes and have confidence in the car. You need to have confidence in yourself. You need to be able to read the circuit and car and take a gamble on a complicated set of factors that include your own skills, your fearlessness or lack of it, and you wait, wait, wait, and then – bosh – hammer the brake. And you do all of that in a fraction of a second.
Ideally, of course, you want to brake as late as you can, but the penalties are different. If you brake too early then you lose lap time, but that’s preferable to braking too late, when you’re probably going to drive off the circuit (see above). It’s always a fine line between being brave enough or being too brave.
When a driver’s trying to find the perfect spot to brake, they’ll always work up to it through practice. The problem is that in practice you’ll think you’ve found your perfect braking point, but by the time you get to qualifying two hours later, it’s murder getting back in the zone to find it again.
Your first braking point is the most important to get right for the whole lap. So, assuming everything’s in working order and that your tyres are warmed up, you get to turn one, you’ve done the wait, wait, wait thing, you hammer the brakes and – yes – you’ve braked at the right point, you get the weight transfer, you turn in, feel that front grip, get to the apex, get back on the throttle and hey presto you’ve taken the corner perfectly, and that’s your turn one, take a bow.
But if they threw that same corner at you five times, it’s never going to be exactly the same five times over, because you’re doing 200 miles an hour. You might think you’re braking at the same point, but you’ll always be a metre out, give or take.
In short, it’s very, very tricky. And that first braking point is really what makes a lap – certainly a qualifying lap, because if you get that right, you’re in a good place. Mentally, you’re sorted, you know that the car is working as you want it to, and you approach turn two knowing that the car will do what you expect it to do: the tyre pressures are right, the brakes are at the temperature you need them to be, and the ride height is correct. Everything is working tickety-boo. And so, in theory, yes, everything should go smoothly after turn one. In theory.
This, of course, is a psychological trick as much as a genuine racing phenomenon, but it’s true. After all, let’s look at what happens in the other scenario: you get to turn one, brake too late and go wide, you’ve lost two-tenths of a second – at best, probably more than that – as a result of which then you start overdriving, because it’s, like, Right, I lost time, I need to drive harder than I was going to.
Which is impossible. You’re never going to catch up time because why would you have been driving slowly in the first place? But you do it anyway. You overdrive and then you brake too late, you lose grip, lock up and it gets worse. All because you made a dog’s dinner of turn one.
In short, you need to get turn one right.
The racing line is the quickest way through a corner, a means of taking the corner that fulfils the following criteria: a.) you’re alive at the end of it; b.) your car is in one piece; and c.) you haven’t lost any time, and may even have gained time over your rival. In other words, it’s the shortest route around the corner and the route that lets you keep your minimum speed as high as possible.
My first-ever pole lap was Imola, 2004, in my BAR-Honda, and it’s one of my most perfect-ever laps. Go find it on YouTube. I’ll wait. I’ll be talking about the noise it makes in due course, but for the time being watch how I’m using the kerbs, trying to get the most out of the kerb without going on the grass, which is where you start losing time. Watch the racing line, in other words.
I’m not going to be big-headed about this and say that it’s a glorious symphony of braking, gear change and taking the ideal racing line. I’ll just leave you to come to that conclusion yourself.
You won’t get very far in F1 if you have no heart for the overtake, which generally speaking will happen in a corner. If you have more power and you have more straight-line speed, you can overtake on the straight, but normally the finish of the move is done under braking and on a corner, which is where all that stuff I was banging on about earlier comes into play.
Turn one in Abu Dhabi, for example: you could get a good tow on the guy and then as it comes to the braking point, duck out, brake a little bit later and, as long as you place your car up the inside, pretty much the move is done.
But if you misjudge and he turns in, you’ve got to back out of it, which is tricky, because you’re on the limit: there’s a good chance you’re going to lock up and run wide and maybe push him off the circuit as well. And you won’t win many friends doing that. Then there’s the risk that if you go in too deep and brake too late you’ll go too far and he can get the switch back on and overtake you on the exit. What do you do?
You need the guy you’re overtaking to respect you, because a lot of the time you would dive down the inside, he’d turn in on you and you’d crash. He’ll be hoping that you’re going to back out and you’ll be hoping that he’s going to back out, so you end up crashing.
But just as you’re trying to understand the driver, you don’t want him to understand you. For example, if you try and make the move at a certain corner and it doesn’t work, then he knows – or at least he thinks he knows – where you’re going to try and overtake him next and he’s going to block you; he’ll come down the straight and if he thinks you’re going to pull out, he’ll just pull out and sit on the inside, so you can’t get up in the inside of him for the corner.
The rule in a corner is that you’re not allowed to brake and then move when you see someone trying to pass you, and the reason for that is because the guy behind has started braking also, and if he’s trying to overtake you, he’s on the limit of his braking power, so if you move in front of him, he’s just going to drive over the top of you because he has no way of slowing down.
So that’s banned. In theory. But on the first lap of the race, anything goes. Even though the FIA can see on the data when you’ve braked and penalise you for it afterwards, drivers think they’ll get away with it because there’s so much going on in that mental first lap of the race when everyone’s adrenalin is so high.
Some will move by mistake, of course, just out of instinct. But all the drivers think and react differently, and there are certain drivers you know will not want to let you pass, even at the risk of crashing. Step forward Kevin Magnussen, who’s known as a tough driver because he pushes the limits. So when you come up behind him to overtake, you want to make sure you’ve got the move done, otherwise you’re going to crash.
Similar story on the straights, rule-wise. You can’t move twice when someone’s behind you. So, for example, if I try to overtake the guy in front, I’d go to the left and he would move to block me. He’s allowed to do that, but he’s not allowed to move back. It’s just a rule to stop dangerous driving and make the racing better.
You always get guys who play fast and loose though. Tell you who was a demon on the corners: David Coulthard. He was, like, Right, it’s my corner, I’m going to turn in, so I crashed with him a couple of times. He’s a really tough guy to overtake because he wouldn’t back out unless it was absolutely necessary. He’d just think, Well, if you’re alongside me, you’ve got the corner, but if you’re not, you’re going to have to back out and he’d just turn in. Most of the time you couldn’t back out, because you were on the limit.
Me, I was different. If the guy was coming up the inside, I’d be wary of him being unable to back out and so I’d give him room. It might not mean he’s going to get the move done, but you won’t turn in completely, you’ll give him space. My thinking was that if I turned in we’d crash, but if I turned in a bit later and gave him room, we wouldn’t crash, and I might still keep the position.
It’s the shorter way around, of course, and you’ll always try to go to the inside, but if you’ve tried it and failed and they’ve blocked you, you can give it a go on the outside, but more often than not you’ll fail around the outside.
Often it will look as though the overtake is complete but the car being overtaken resumes its position in front, and that’s because they’ve taken a shorter route through the corner. They’ve also been able to get on the power a bit earlier and they’re more in control because they’re in front, so they can push you off if they feel like it. Plus you’re on the outside. You can’t do anything. That’s why you ideally need to stick to the inside for overtaking.
DRS is a ‘drag reduction system’ that operates a bit like a turbo boost when activated in certain DRS zones around the circuit. Overtaking with the DRS system has made it less exciting because drivers mostly overtake on the straight now because it’s safer: you can use the DRS and power past.
If we didn’t have it, we’d have to take more risks, which is the way it should be, I think. When I watch an Indy Car race around a circuit like Austin, it’s great – so many overtaking moves and risky overtaking moves at that, because they don’t have DRS. Overtaking is supposed to be really tough, but when you get a move done – a proper move, not a DRS move, a proper move – it’s so rewarding. It’s like standing on the podium. It’s, like, yes. And if it’s on your teammate it’s even better. So, yes, boo hiss to DRS.
Sometimes you get caught napping. You’re like, ‘Oh, nuts, I should have seen that coming.’ You thought he wasn’t going to do it from that far back. Or you thought he was going to wait for the next corner.
But then it just happens, it comes out of nowhere. In NASCAR and Indy Car, you have a spotter. They’ll communicate to the driver, ‘He’s on your inside, he’s on your inside, he’s coming up, he’s just about to overtake!’ But not in F1. It happens too quickly. It’s, like, bang, done.
F1 is more exciting, though. It’s because you know it’s so difficult to overtake in F1 without DRS. So when you do make the move, it’s shit hot, and if you make it on someone like Michael Schumacher back in the day, or Fernando Alonso, then it’s really, really cool.
Still, we hate it, being overtaken. It’s embarrassing. But then you’ve also got to think, I’m racing against the best guys in the world, and if no one’s going to overtake me, it’s going to be a pretty boring race. It’s like a football player saying he’s never going to be tackled. You’ve just got to take it on the chin.
Even so, it is definitely tough when you get overtaken, especially when they put a really good move on you, like they’ve braked late and they’ve caught you napping, as we say, leaving you wondering why you didn’t cover the line, why you didn’t block, why you gave him the opportunity to overtake.
That can be a bit embarrassing. Being overtaken from around the outside – as can sometimes happen in Austin – now that is really embarrassing.
It’s not easy to overtake in any form of racing, but if you’ve fluffed it there’s no point in thinking what might have been. You’ve got to get straight back on it, try and make the move again and try and do it immediately. You harass him, annoy him and he’ll hopefully slip up, because he’s already rattled and it happens that people brake too late, lock up and then you can pull things out of the fire and get the move done.
It’s when you fluff a move and then you just sit behind the guy for the rest of the race – that’s when it really hurts, probably worse than getting overtaken, actually, because you had an opportunity but you’ve failed at it and now you’ve got to spend the rest of the race sat behind this car that you should be pulling away from.
The last race of Super GT last year, I was in third, with the Championship contender behind. Whoever finished in front would win the Championship. He sat behind me for 20 laps trying to overtake but he didn’t get past and that must hurt.
No kidding, my heart rate was through the roof knowing that if he got past me I’d destroyed the whole Championship for the team. He was probably faster, like a couple of tenths faster, but when you’re in front that doesn’t matter, especially when you’re both dealing with traffic, as we were. I was taking fewer risks because I was the guy in front, whereas he was behind, risking everything because, why not?
Even crashing is better than finishing behind. We won, and it took me at least two days to get over the sheer adrenalin rush of that race.
You’ve made the move and you’re past, but you’ve got a slightly worse exit because you’ve gone deep, and he regains the position. And I love it.
Those sorts of moves are great. The ones where you’re battling the whole way. Fifty per cent of the time I’d say you get the overtake done and that’s it, you never see them again, you just pull away and they’re a fast receding dot in your mirrors.
But the other 50 per cent of the time? That’s when it’s game on and you get the proper dogfighting – and it’s awesome.
This is another reason that the DRS is a drag. It’s because it’s got drivers judging where they make the overtaking manoeuvre. So say you have a hairpin followed by a straight, well, there’s no point overtaking a car into the hairpin, because you exit and the car behind’s going to get the DRS now – you can activate DRS as long as you’re within one second of the car in front – so he’s going to be able to pass you on the straight.
So, of course, you don’t do that move, you wait until the straight and then you’ll overtake him easily using your own DRS. It’s reduced the excitement. It’s taken away all that adrenalin of making a dive move, while the flipside is that when you’re the one who’s overtaken, you won’t really care because you know the DRS zone’s coming up and you can use that to get your place back. There’s just less fight from both sides.
You could argue that racing is better in a formula that relies on mechanical grip rather than downforce, primarily because you don’t lose mechanical grip when you’re behind another car, whereas with downforce, you do.
No doubt the world of aerodynamics makes car design more interesting because it increases the top speed, but doesn’t make the racing more interesting, it just makes it more difficult to overtake.
The reason is that you’re in a car where the wings and floor are producing downforce. Now if you’re behind a car, your floor won’t really be affected – that will still be producing downforce – but the wings are. It feels like you’ve taken the wings off the car when you follow another car, which, as you might imagine, makes it more difficult to overtake. You go through a corner and the guy in front of you has full grip whereas you have lost 30 per cent of yours, meaning that when you turn in, you’ve got more front slide, more rear slide, less stability, and then the gap opens again.
That’s why you have to know when to make your move – one of those skills that can’t be taught – and you have to take it. If he’s made a mistake, for example, you have to make your move, because as soon as he’s gathered himself he’s back to having more grip than you.
Your driving, meanwhile, will have to change to compensate for the fact that you’ve lost most of your grip, so if you roar into the corner right behind the car in front minus your front down-force, you have to pull out slightly and take a different line in order to try and recoup some of that lost grip from your wing.
So, for example, if it’s a fast right-hander, you’ll come down the straight and you’ll pull out slightly so the air can hit the front of the wing. Otherwise you’re going to turn in and find you have no front grip. In a low-speed corner, it’s not so much of a problem. You pull out, you have all the downforce in the world, so if you pull out to overtake, you’ve got the same downforce as him.
And then you have the drag. So you’ve caught him up, and you’re in his slipstream, meaning you’re carrying more speed than him, and then under-braking, you wait for him to brake, you brake a fraction of a second later, you pull out, dive down the inside. It won’t be the quickest line, but it doesn’t matter, because once you’re down the inside of him, he can’t turn in.
You mess it up sometimes. You might go wide and go off the circuit. Or you’ll lock up, because you’ve braked too hard, you get smoke, no grip as it slides and overheats. Plus a flat spot on your tyre which you’ll have either for the rest of the race or until you pit for new tyres.
But there are other times that you don’t mess it up. And those times are blissful. You’ve been setting up your manoeuvre from three or four corners before. You see what line the guy in front is taking and you’re purposely trying to set him up and trying to get good tow up behind him so that you can dive down the inside, or down the outside, if he’s blocking.
And then it’s just… awesome.
I overtook Michael into turn one, having started from the 14th. He didn’t want to let me past, and there were some sweaty moments before he yielded, but ultimately I was able to sweep past.
Action with any driver’s great, but with a legend like Michael – who at the time was driving a Ferrari – it’s that bit more special. He was bloody tough but – with me, anyway – he was very fair. He never took the piss when it came to racing. He’d push you to the limit but he would never push you over it.
Like I say, I started at 14th and went on to win that race in the wet – my first win in Formula One – and that overtake was maybe the sweetest of the lot.
Well, it was my greatest race, probably one of the greatest races in the history of the sport, and it was decided by this last-gasp overtake on Sebastian in the Red Bull. It wasn’t a brilliant bit of overtaking from me: Sebastian was too focused on me in his mirrors and ran wide, and as long as I didn’t do the same I was past him – and it probably wasn’t as significant as the earlier lap in which I passed both Michael Schumacher and Mark Webber in the same move – but in the context of that particular four-hour race, not to mention the fact that it nicely bears out Rule 6 (being irritating can pay dividends), it was a doozy.
There are heaps of different types of moves. There are DRS moves, slingshots, braking manoeuvres… then there are those times when you get a superior corner exit, so you’re getting a run on the car in front, and this one was a bit like that. Basically, I got better traction out of the previous corner. Why? Because it was a wet / dry race, we’d just put slicks on, I’ve got the tyres working better, saw a dry line and was able to get a good run on him out of the corner, putting his Red Bull squarely in my sights for the next corner. He saw me coming and tried to block but without as much conviction as he should have done, and I was on the inside, where it didn’t matter if I braked a little too early.
Look at this overtake on YouTube and you’ll see that most of the move is made on the straight here. I’m using his slipstream before pulling out and diving down the inside for the corner. This is Michael in a Mercedes, though, and he makes it very difficult for me.
So this was my return and although it was only a practice session, according to commentators it was still ranked as one of the weekend’s best overtakes. Lewis and I came out of the tunnel almost neck and neck, but I was the one who braked later going into the chicane, dived down inside of him, used the kerbs and came out just ahead. My last-ever overtake in Formula One, sniff.
This is something that can differ quite considerably from car to car. I’m talking about the different years of car, but also different cars on the grid.
At McLaren in 2014 we went through a year where the visibility was poor. They had lifted the carbon cockpit from the steering wheel to the nose so they could get a better aerodynamic flow on the underside of the cockpit. As a result, the straight-ahead visibility wasn’t too bad but the peripheral visibility was limited, so picking your turn-in point to a corner ended up being a bit of a guessing game.
I was, like, ‘Guys, I can’t see anything.’
‘You can’t see anything?’
‘Not unless all you want me to see is the tyres, no.’
By that stage, of course, it was a bit too late to go back to the drawing board. Instead they just told me ‘you’ll get used to it’, like it was just a prickly sweater, and not something that I had to drive at 200mph around Monaco.
I’m not sure that I ever did get used to it, though, and I don’t think I was as precise in that car, purely because I had those visibility issues.
By Monaco I had asked for an extra piece of the seat to get me higher so I could see over the tyres, but then it just felt uncomfortable, as though I was sitting on top of the car. Ick.
So many of the issues around driver positioning are down to aerodynamics. The engineers are trying to design the car to where they think it’s best for aerodynamics, and they tend to be afflicted by (wind) tunnel vision, so they forget about the driver a bit.
After that season we had a bit of a sit-down at McLaren – the drivers, the engineers and managers – and we drivers pointed out that any aerodynamic improvement was being cancelled out by the subsequent loss of confidence that comes from not being able to see.
Fair play, they were really good at listening to what the drivers had to say, and things changed so that we’d do the seat fitting at the factory before the tub was actually built; you’d sit in a mock-up, like a 3D-printed plastic thing identical to the proposed carbon-fibre tub, and they’d adjust things around you.
My biggest issue was inside the cockpit, because I’m taller than the average driver, the average being about five foot six, five foot eight, whereas I’m six foot. A little driver’s fine, it’s just about how much padding you have to put in the seat or in the car to make your seat up. A tall driver, you have to work bloody hard, days and days, to make sure that it fits correctly.
For instance, in the cockpit of the car you have a safety check. They pass a template around you to check that you’re safe within the tub. For me, my legs were hitting the carbon fibre of the cockpit if I sat in my preferred position, so they had to move my bum back, which made me more upright, which was not a position I liked. It was a bloody nightmare. We got it right in the end and that was fine for a while. Oh, but then came the issue of where does all the stuff go? They had to put stuff in the car, like electronics boxes and wires, the fire extinguisher. And they installed all that but did that thing of forgetting about the driver again, until I said, ‘Guys, I can’t move my arms.’
They stood there scratching their arses, I mean chins. ‘He can’t move his arms. Does he need to move his arms? JB, do you need to move your arms?’
‘Not really…’
‘Well, that’s great, then, problem solved.’
‘…as long as I’m not called upon to corner at all, seeing as I can’t steer.’
‘But do you think that’s how you drive?’
Deep breath. ‘Yes, that’s how I drive. It’s not a train, it’s a car.’
That convinced them, the train argument, and we came up with a compromise, where they left areas for my arms in which to move. I was a bit dubious at first, because there were still lumps and other obstructions that restricted my movement, but as it turned out they were right and once we’d jiggered things about a bit, I was mostly fine. I’d hit my elbow occasionally, of course – more than one car was guilty of being a real elbow hazard – I had to wear an elbow pad a lot of the time, and I found myself taking corners with my elbow in a weird position.
It was always funny how you’d find yourself driving around your position in the car. You’d spend the first part of the season getting used to it, the next few races thinking you’d cracked it, and then you’d go off for the break, come back again and find you’d lost all that residual muscle memory
I’d do exactly that and be like, ‘Oh my God, what have you done? It feels terrible.’
And they’d go, ‘We haven’t done anything…’
Which meant I’d have to get used to it all over again.
Then you’ve got your wing mirrors. Key word there is vibration. As a result of which the other key words are. ‘You can’t’ and ‘see a bloody thing’ – unless you count a distant blob as meaningful.
The thing is that if the wing mirrors are connected to the cockpit, it’s not too bad, you can kind of see. And by ‘kind of see’ I mean that you’re able to determine if there’s someone behind you and whether he’s going to the right or left, so that’s fine for a while.
But then they went through a period where for aerodynamic reasons, teams were connecting the mirrors to the side pods. It was in response to a rule change in 2009, and all the teams did it. The first time they did that at McLaren, I pissed myself with laughter, because I could not see a thing. Like zero. Ground, sky, ground, sky, ground sky. It was just super, super high-frequency vibration. Reason being that the side pods aren’t solid; they’re carbon fibre, but they move, they shake around, they’re just not designed to be as stiff as the cockpit.
As a result, there were accidents, of course, and I think a complaint was made to the FIA, which led to the FIA asking all the drivers, ‘Are these mirrors okay?’
McLaren were like, ‘We can’t change it now and it’s better for aerodynamics.’
So to the FIA I was like, ‘Yes, they’re fine,’ and of course all the drivers swore blind that they could see perfectly, when in fact they couldn’t see a thing.
Best of it was that the FIA would sit us in the car, stand behind us and say, ‘Can you see me?’
No lying needed. ‘Yup, I can see you perfectly.’
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
‘That’s not very polite, you’re holding up two fingers, and not in the Winston Churchill way.’
(They love a joke, do the guys from the FIA.)
So anyway, it didn’t take long for the FIA to cotton on to the fact that the teams were all telling porky pies, and the pod-mounted wing mirrors were banned in 2010. Good riddance.
Safety cars are tricky. Obviously, the clue is in their name: they’re a safety feature. But boy, do they have a tactical impact.
The idea of a safety car is that it appears during a ‘caution period’, either because there’s stuff that needs clearing from the circuit, or because the weather’s so shit that normal racing is dangerous.
The rules differ depending on the terms of deployment, but you’re not allowed to pass the safety car or, more pertinently, each other, while it’s out. The safety car, a Mercedes, will go at between 120mph and 150mph, which is pretty fast but still agonisingly slow compared to the speed of F1 cars, which should be going at over 200mph (top speed ever, by the way, is 231.5mph, recorded in a 2005 testing session by Juan Pablo Montoya in a McLaren-Mercedes), so what happens is that the field behind the safety car bunches up. Any lead you have? Wiped out. Were you trailing? Suddenly you’re not. If you were the one who’d opened up a ten-second lead on the rest of the pack then it’s a disaster. For the rest of the grid it’s almost like resetting the race.
A lot of drivers use it as an opportunity to pit because you rejoin the race with new tyres or whatever and everybody’s still going slowly. In Australia in 2015, I was coming around the second to last corner, saw that there was an accident, worked out that there would be a safety car and at the last minute was like, ‘Guys, I’m going to pit, I’m going to pit,’ and I threw the car to the right-hand side to get in the pit lane, only just missing a cone by the skin of my skinny-skin-skin, changed my tyres, got back out on the back of the safety-car train, and because I was in and out of the pits quickly other drivers when they pitted came out behind me.
As a result of that (rather quick-thinking if I do say so myself) manoeuvre, I was able to make up four places.
You don’t have to pit, of course. Many do, and will adjust their strategy to accommodate the circumstance, but if it deviates too far from your chosen strategy you may simply decide not to. In this case, your job is to stay behind the safety car, fighting the loss of your tyre temperature, which you do by weaving and braking on the throttle, which puts heat into the disc and in turn, puts heat into the wheel which puts heat into the tyre.
It’s something we do before starts as well, a tactic we’ve learnt to do over the years. We did lots of different tests with our tyre guys. The best way of braking in order to put core temperature into the tyres was to hammer the brakes. Bang, bang, bang, really quickly.
Lastly, let’s spare a thought for the poor sod leading, because if you’re out in front, a safety car is the worst thing ever. You hate it with a passion, it’s horrible. Not only does the gap close, but the chances are you will have been on a completely different strategy. So you might be on tyres that are much older than the car in second – he’s on a two-stop strategy, you’re on a one-stop strategy – you might even have had a 30-second lead on him, but he’s just pitted, come out with new tyres, he’s 30 seconds behind, and then a safety car comes so the gap closes up and he’s now right behind you on brand-new tyres and you’re screwed, basically.
Shanghai, 2011. In testing, we at McLaren had performed practice pit stops, as was usual. The only thing was that in practice the crew had been wearing black, but for the race itself they had changed into silver suits.
I knew that they’d changed, of course. It’s not like they crept off in secret to do it – an amusing trick to play on Jenson. But the fact that they had changed suits had momentarily slipped my mind, what with me being busy driving eight million dollars’ worth of car at over 200mph, leading the race with Sebastian’s Red Bull in second, and then being called in to pit, slowing down to the pit limit of 50mph under considerable G and braking for the line, and… Pulled up short into Sebastian’s box, which was first along the pit lane, because Red Bull had won the Championship the previous year.
Worse still, Sebastian was trying to pit behind me. All credit to Red Bull, they saw what I’d done, reacted quickly and waved me through into the right pit box.
Believe me, it is easily done. Like I say, you’re braking, you’re looking up for the pit box, expecting to see a certain colour, and you don’t realise that the reason they’re standing there with a trolley ready and waving at you is not actually for you but for Sebastian behind – and so you pull up.
But I was mortified, and no doubt very unpopular with Sebastian and Red Bull as a result. To make up for it I shall now provide them with a free advertisement. Red Bull… gives you wings.
Mind you, any popularity with Sebastian and Red Bull was temporary. Because of what we shall now call the Pit Stop Bollock Drop, he was able to get out of the pits first. Next thing you know, Lewis pitted on the next lap, selected the correct pit box and got out in front of me as well. So I was third.
All in all, it was a little bit frustrating and embarrassing – more embarrassing than anything else. Some bloke even did a ‘should have gone to Specsavers’ parody on YouTube.
Why do you pit? Because you need a new wing or new tyres, or a change of tyres because of degradation. That could be because you want to use wet or dry or try a different composition. I should mention the little doohickeys they have to tell whether you’ve got enough tread on the tyre to last the race. They can monitor to see if you’re going to get through to the canvas of the tyre, which is the underpinning of the tyre, before the end of your stint, and be like, Hang on, you’ve got to take it easier on that tyre, because you’re going to destroy it.
Hopefully, it won’t ever get that far, of course, because when it gets to the canvas, you have no grip whatsoever and as a safety precaution Pirelli will say no, you’ve got to pit.
For most of my career, you might also be pitting for fuel, which is one of those things that has required various different strategies throughout the years.
Some people would start with a full tank, 100kg of fuel; some would start with 50kg of fuel, which on the one hand made you much quicker, but on the other meant that you were going to have to pit earlier and maybe more frequently.
It was one of those great things that you could do to make your race fun or if you found yourself starting in tenth. Like, you could make it more interesting by doing a one-stop race when you knew that other people were doing a two-stop because nobody wanted to start with full tanks, but you risked it because the one-stop works and if you’re starting in tenth then what do you have to lose? Apart from making a fuel of yourself. (See what I did there?)
There was also a period where you had to use any fuel you had in the car. You filled up, did your qualifying and then afterwards everyone found out how many laps of fuel you had left for the race itself, a bit like pinning test results on the board at school.
So let’s say if you did qualifying with 40kg left in the tank, that’s what you’d start the race with. So if you qualified on pole with 40kg but the guy behind you had qualified with 60kg, it’d be all, ‘Uh oh,’ because that would be an extra ten laps he could do on his fuel. You’d be quicker to start the race, but he might have to stop less than you.
That was really good. I really enjoyed that type of racing, it was fun doing qualifying, which was great anyway, and then afterwards you’d be waiting for the results to come in, saying, ‘Oh, bollocks’, because your rival’s got five more laps’ worth of fuel than you. We’d base our strategies around it. We’d have to coincide refuelling with tyre changes, so if we knew that our tyres would be destroyed after ten laps, you only put ten laps of fuel in.
Now, they don’t stop at all for fuel. Mid-race refuelling was banned for good in 2010 as a safety precaution, which is a bit of shame – Google ‘Kimi Räikkönen pit-stop fire 2009’ for at least part of the reason why. Basically, you just change tyres during a pit stop, which is a bit boring in my book. How many times we stop depends, but normally it’s the same for teammates. So if, for example, Mercedes get off the line in Barcelona, and they’re one–two, the guy in second is probably going to finish second, because he’s not going to be able to overtake his teammate by using a different strategy – he won’t be allowed, which takes away strategy and excitement. And, of course, if the two drivers do end up on different strategies, then there are ructions.
Case in point: Barcelona, 2009, the Spanish Grand Prix. I went off the line, but was overtaken by Rubens, my teammate. At the beginning of the race we were both on a three-stop strategy because that, according to the strategists, was the best, quickest strategy, but having been overtaken by my teammate, I was in the mood to try something different and got on the radio to the team.
‘Okay,’ they said, ‘ditch the three-stop strategy, we’ll let you try two. You’ll be slower, because you’ll be heavier, but you won’t have to stop three times, you’ll just stop twice. The strategists say you’ll still finish second.’
‘I want to take the risk,’ I said.
The idea was that instead of getting 50kg, I’d get 90kg. ‘Look after the tyres,’ they advised, ‘be consistent, keep up your lap times, see what you can do.’
And I did, and I ended up winning by 13 seconds. Fortune, as they say, favours the brave and it was a risk – a gamble that relied on me being able to keep up fast lap times and on Rubens perhaps slowing down a little.
Afterwards, however, Rubens was a little miffed. He’d been with Ferrari when Ferrari had unabashedly given Michael Schumacher number one status and was making all sorts of noises about jumping ship if a similar situation arose again. Who could blame him? Any suspicion that there were team orders in play must surely have been put to rest by the fact that he got past me in the first place, though.
These days you can start with a maximum of 100kg of fuel. But say you run 90kg of fuel, you’re going to be quicker, because 10kg of fuel is worth three-tenths per lap. In other words, if you’re able to run only 90kg in the race instead of 100kg, every lap will be three-tenths quicker.
So that’s good on the one hand. But then you have to play the percentages. You’ll need to save fuel by braking early and lifting off for some corners, and hope that it adds up to enough that you’ve got sufficient fuel for the end of the race.
When I won Suzuka in 2011, I had basically run out of fuel. I had two laps to go and they said, ‘You’re not going to make it, you’re not going to make it, you have to lift everywhere.’
At this stage I had a ten-second lead, but now I was having to go easy on brakes and throttle in order to conserve fuel, being super-aware that behind me Fernando in a Ferrari was closing the gap.
Sweating.
Arse cheeks clenched as tight as my teeth.
And I crossed the line in first with a half-second lead and immediately ran out of fuel.
Mind you, the team don’t come right out and tell you how you’ve got to handle your fuel. We’re well aware that people are listening in, so they use code, so it’s like ‘Fuel One’, ‘Fuel Two’, ‘Fuel Three’, and so on.
‘Fuel One’ would be, You have to brake 20 metres later at turn one, turn seven and turn 12.
‘Fuel Two’ would be, You have to brake 20 metres later at turn one, five, seven, nine and thirteen, and then ‘Fuel Three’ would be, You’ve got to lift off 50 metres for every corner.
And because you’re saving fuel, you’re also looking after the tyres and the brakes, so sometimes you don’t actually go much slower. It’s judging what’s better for overall lap time, what’s better for overall race distance.
Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed that part of it. The problem was that the Honda engine was a bit thirsty, so we would use more fuel than other people. So sometimes we’d fill the tank up completely and still would have to save fuel every lap.
I remember at Melbourne 2015, the first year we used a Honda engine at McLaren, I was working so hard to conserve fuel that I ended up finishing two laps down. I was braking so far ahead of the 100-metre braking board that I was just floating into corners. It’s a weird feeling.
Incidentally, if you did a double-take at the thought of other teams listening in to our talkback, then I’ve got news for you: it happens all the time. Of course, the broadcasters are able to listen to all of the teams’ radio chatter all of the time, if they so please, but so can the teams. (Or, I should say, they certainly used to – because I’m sure it doesn’t happen now.)
It was awesome – you’d hear all the secret stuff. They brought in people who could hack the radios, but nobody seemed to mind because we were all doing it; it was like an open secret in the sport.
Same with the spies. All the teams would have cameramen walking down the pit lane pretending to be fans and getting pictures in the garage of the new parts of the car and things like that.
These guys would stand, like, 50 metres away and still be able to get pictures that looked as though they were standing right next to the car. We used to have people looking out for them, who would then stand in their way. They soon worked out who were the genuine fans and who were the spies.
I remember a time with Brawn when we were debuting a new car, and we’d pull the garage shutters down, put screens up. Some of the photographers were pretty shameless, they’d just dangle their camera over the top of the screens and click away in the (usually vain) hope of catching something useful. At some of the circuits – Barcelona, for example – they have balconies above the garage and so the photographer would station themselves on those, lean over and snap away.
They’d pretend to be press photographers, of course. After a while the whole practice got a bit out of hand, and so the teams and the media came to an understanding that any pictures would have to include personnel. So what you had then was the driver standing in front of the car, arms folded, doing his driver pose, cameraman clicking away.
And then you’d see the camera lens move a little as the cameramen tried to get whatever part he’d been asked to focus on. And the driver would see, and he’d subtly alter his position to cover up the interesting part. So the cameraman, under the guise of trying to get a fresh angle or a different shot would crouch and move, and the driver would shift again, and the whole time they’ve both got these fixed grins, going through the motions. It was hilarious.
Which brings us back to pit stops. In NASCAR they have specific pit-stop guys, whereas in F1 the mechanics who are working night and day on the cars are also doing the pit stops. It’s amazing and it’s become quite a competition between teams. You get the fastest pit-stop award: two seconds to change four tyres.
Things are different again in Super GT, where we come in, they plug in and the car goes up on its own, raised by internal jacks.
So in F1 you’ve got the lollipop there, which stops you, or lights, and then the car goes up on the jack thanks to the trolley man, plus the tyres are heavier and difficult to manoeuvre, and they’re still doing two-second pit stops. It’s staggering. It really does put the team in the formula, because it’s the one time that we as drivers are very literally bystanders, or bysitters, if you want to be pedantic about it. These guys have to stand in the pit lane with a car hurtling towards them and then do the job in two seconds flat, running the risk of being lampooned as a bunch of hapless slow-coaches if they take any longer than that.
Meanwhile, as drivers all we have to do is stop in the right pit box – and like I say, we don’t always get that right.
I’ve already sung the praises of the garage crew, so let’s hear it for some more of the unsung heroes of Formula One: the strategists. Whatever these guys get paid they’re worth more, because it’s a tough job and all they get is shit for it.
What do they do? Good question. Dunno. Okay, I do. What they do is run different scenarios and base strategies upon it and from these they’ll form a race strategy that they present to you, the driver, and your race engineer.
Typically, you’ll have two strategists at the circuit and then a load more back at base, and between them they run the race something like 800 times, conjuring differing race strategies based on each scenario: what would happen if you pitted on Lap 14, if you pitted on Lap 20, if you pitted on Lap 25? What would happen if you had this much more pace compared to the cars around you, or they were this much quicker than you? Where would you finish?
No kidding, the sheer volume of differing possibilities they run through is unreal. What you’ll do, how you’ll do it, whether or not an escaped giraffe will maraud through the paddock. You’re in awe.
‘Right, JB,’ they’ll announce eagerly, as though about to give you the greatest gift in the world, ‘if the race runs smoothly and you have the pace we expect you to have, you’re going to finish… eighth.’
And you’re like, ‘Great. Eighth. That’s… great.’
Or else they’ll say, ‘We’ve run the race a zillion times and you should win by ten seconds, easy,’ and you gulp because the pressure’s on but at least you have a chance of winning, before they add, ‘But that’s if everything goes to plan, because if X happens, you won’t win.’ The idea being that they’re ready for anything, every possible scenario.
This is all ‘in theory’, of course, because as we all know – and in fairness, so do the poor old strategists, whose entire existence is one long procession of thwarted outcomes and unexpected resolutions – life has a pesky way of not sticking to the script. Things never turn out the way you expect, because nothing ever goes to plan. As a strategist you can legislate for your own driver (and even then…) but not for all the other drivers on the grid.
And what they also find most difficult to predict, of course, is the weather. Like all of us they’re looking at the weather forecast, and like the rest of us they’re wondering if it’s going to do what it’s supposed to do.
In certain circuits it rains from only one direction, which is quite weird. Fuji, if you see the clouds over the volcano Mount Fuji, and they’re dark clouds, you know it’s going to rain in a certain amount of time, which is quite funny. All the Japanese know that, nobody else does.
Other races, if it’s cloudy in a certain area, you know it’s going to rain. Spa’s like that, too. The teams station guys at turn five, all the way down the back straight, which is about 2.5kms away from the pit lane and garages, and they stand there just to keep an eye on the weather, because that’s the direction the weather will come from, and if they say it’s starting to rain, then you know it’s going to be coming down properly in ten minutes.
Tell you this much, though, one way of knowing that you’re at a Grand Prix, apart from the noise, the stands, the sponsorship, is that a lot of people in branded polo shirts will be looking up at the sky.
Myth: People think I prefer it in the wet.
Truth: Even though, I’m probably better in the wet I still prefer it to be dry.
I think the fact is that I just deal with the wet better than others. Apart from my second-to-last race in 2016, which I’ll come to, I get excited when it starts raining because I know that we can mess around with the strategy and try different things.
The other extreme is unbelievably hot like, unbelievably hot, melting the tyres almost. Those are tough races, Bahrain is always very hot. But perhaps the hottest I ever recall was one time in Germany. It was 40 degrees. Celsius.
As drivers we were having freezing cold water poured on the veins of our arms (pro tip: cold water on the veins cools you down); we were wearing cool vests; we were keeping our heads wetter than a baptised baby’s; we were drinking lots and staying hydrated; we had people holding umbrellas over our heads, wafting little handheld fans at us and singing songs of glaciers and polar bears; we had literally the whole team focused on keeping us cool.
And the poor grid girls were dropping like flies in the heat.
As for the race, it makes it very different, because you really have to be careful with the tyres. Most of the time your problem is keeping the heat in your tyres but in heat like that the opposite is true because they overheat very quickly, and while you might think that a hot tyre being a sticky tyre equals A Good Thing, it’s not if gets too hot and it blisters, then you get chunks of it flying off, you’re sliding everywhere and you’d have to pit for new tyres. That particular race in Germany ended up being a four-stop race for most of us.
In the heat you’ll move towards the harder of the tyres that you’re allowed to use, because they blister less and are better in the heat. We test different tyres at different temperature ranges, so we know that such and such a tyre will work in 25 degrees circuit temp, this one’s 40 degrees circuit temp. Even though it may be the same compound, it will work differently with different temperatures.
Then there are races that are cool, and the opposite is true: you’re struggling to get tyre temperature.
The worst thing in a cool race is that you’ll be 15 laps into a stint with worn tyres – a ‘stint’ being the period of time you spend on a set of tyres – and then you get a safety car going slowly. At Spa, it’s often cold, but the thing with Spa is that you’ve got a lot of high-speed corners, so you can get heat into the tyres. It’s the circuits that don’t have the high-speed corners that are more tricky. Other cold circuits? Australia can be cold. Silverstone, Austria. A beautiful circuit, it’s stunning, the Austrian race. A tiny little circuit, but beautiful surroundings, it’s really pretty, very green. But it’s very cold.
Plus it’s full of Red Bull fans.