Tony Lockhart
Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
It’s always a matter of working your way around the rule book, whether you’re in the 24 Hour Citröen 2CV race, Le Mans or F1. And if you don’t do it, you’ll be at the back.
The cars are close. Very close at some circuits. When you remember that the only parts the cars have in common are the tyres, it can be quite surprising to see that the top ten might qualify within well under a second of each other, and that difference is partly due to the nut behind the steering wheel. So you have ten teams designing their cars from the ground up, within the rules but with a fair amount of aero and chassis freedom, independent of each other, and in the time it takes to say “Jim Clark was Great” the whole field of twenty cars could have passed you by and be braking for turn one.
Yes, Red Bull have a supremely talented aerodynamicist, and if he ekes out a few tenths of a percent of lap time here and there, he’s worth his money, done his job.
Are the budget cap rules flawless? No. But Ferrari spending multiples of the mid-field team budgets was deeply flawed too.
I suppose we should just ask ourselves what is F1 about. For me, it should be about a team, and I stress ‘team’, showing what it can do.
The cars are close. Very close at some circuits. When you remember that the only parts the cars have in common are the tyres, it can be quite surprising to see that the top ten might qualify within well under a second of each other, and that difference is partly due to the nut behind the steering wheel. So you have ten teams designing their cars from the ground up, within the rules but with a fair amount of aero and chassis freedom, independent of each other, and in the time it takes to say “Jim Clark was Great” the whole field of twenty cars could have passed you by and be braking for turn one.
Yes, Red Bull have a supremely talented aerodynamicist, and if he ekes out a few tenths of a percent of lap time here and there, he’s worth his money, done his job.
Are the budget cap rules flawless? No. But Ferrari spending multiples of the mid-field team budgets was deeply flawed too.
I suppose we should just ask ourselves what is F1 about. For me, it should be about a team, and I stress ‘team’, showing what it can do.