Try and fail? Never try, never fail? What price becoming an immortal?
Bend it like Beckham or miss like, well, all those that never made the team. Churchill noted that he and his war cabinet would have been in the dock at Nuremberg had they come second. History is generally written by the victor, or failing that the one who dies last.
So, to the fractions by which races are won or lost, heroes made or fools condemned. 42kg for a set of racing tyres, that being the best figure your scribe could find, being sans-rims. 1.5kg is 3.6% of this total weight. Then the total package. 798kg, sans-fuel. 1.5kg is 0.188% of this total figure. Umm. Common consent in the F1 universe (yes, I know, funny idea...) is that a set of tyres can wear down as much as 3kg over a long stint. With 3kg being 0.376% of 798kg. Not exactly the sort of numbers one sees when discussing panel gaps on a 1970's Jaguar. Back in the days when plus or minus 25% was more-or-less spot on.
So 1.5kg not on my car? An advantage of around 0.05 seconds per lap, or around 2.5 seconds over a full race distance. Is that useful? Well with the top speed reached around Spa being around 320 kph that 2.5 seconds adds up to being 223 metres down the road. That's well out of DRS range. So yes, these tiny numbers matter in F1.
Ronnie Peterson used to get his girlfriend to time him with a handheld clockwork stopwatch, a clipboard, paper and a pencil. As, no doubt, did many drivers. Colin Chapman used a mechanical stop watch. Given human reaction time is around 0.2 seconds (that's two tenths) and we now record F1 lap times to 0.XXX whereby each X is a tenth, then a hundredth and then a thousandth. Back in Ronnie's day "the closest half a second" was as good as it got. The timing machines of the day could not note the passing of a thousandth of a second.
So 2.5 seconds over 40 laps could not have been measured in Ronnie's day. Today we have a weight problem of 1.5kg being 0.188% of an error. Given an average lap time around 1 minute 48 seconds for Spa, being 108 seconds, a 0.188% error would be 0.2 seconds, or about 17.8 metres along the track at full racing speed. Let's call that around two car lengths. Ummm.
So 1.5kg might gift you two car lengths over a lap at Spa. A level of error and advantage that Ronnie and his racing mates could never measure. As such they didn't worry about it.
Yet now it is surprising that Sir Lewis has not removed all his body jewels for the simple fact that it is an instant weight loss, with an instant measurable gain on track. Short hair anyone?
Tonsils? Appendix? Second kidney? Ear lobes? Hundreds of grams going begging! No wonder they only place those half a kilo precision watches on their wrists after the race! (Yes, Rafa plays with his Richard Mille strapped to his wrist, but that's because he is a hero of a different kind).
Mercedes have post-race stated they think it was a combination of tyre wear, fluid loss (the car, not George - that's another story), and plank wear. Ah yes, the almighty plank of God!
To quote the FIA (puts on old blazer with elbow patches before placing cotton wool in cheeks...) and then intoning... The plank shall...
1. extend longitudinally from a point lying 330mm behind the front wheel centre line to the centre line of the rear wheels
2. be made from a homogeneous material
3. have a width of 300mm with a tolerance of +/- 2mm.
4. have a thickness of 10mm with a tolerance of +/- 0.2mm.
5. have a uniform thickness when new.
6. be fixed symmetrically about the centre line of the car in such a way that no air may pass between it and the surface formed by the parts lying on the reference plane.
Used to really be made of wood (Jabroc, being a high density laminate of beechwood) but in F1 is now a non-flammable fibreglass called permaglass. Of a 10mm thickness, within a 0.2mm tolerance. OK, that's somewhat precise is it not dear reader? How much wear does dear Aunty FIA allow? Just a measly 1mm. Umm. So 1mm of a fibreglass composite. Gee. That must weigh all of... OK, let's say one square metre at 1mm depth, which gives us around 305 grams for that square metre. So 10% of that is... 30 grams. Give or take.
Then we have around 1.8 litres of oil. Let's assume you can lose 40% of that before trouble hits. 0.4 times 1.8... that's 720 grams or around the mass of liquid in a pint and a half of lukewarm shandy.
So we add 720 grams of oil loss, 30 grams of plank loss and then we need to find another 750g of tyre wear loss. Given that the generally accepted view is one can lose 4kg of tyre mass over a racing stint it is perfectly reasonable to think George lost 750 grams of tyre matter. That's a modest 187.5g per tyre. A typical espresso coffee cup weighs around 125g empty. So add a dash of fresh hot caffeine and you've got your 187.5g.
Then he went really long... which could be another 750g. Let's recall that 1.5kg is a modest 0.188% of total car mass. A bee's dick of precision F1 could not have measured a couple of decades ago. What does history say?
Has anyone else ever messed this up? Well yes.
Michael Schumacher 1994 Belgian GP. He span at Pouhon. Big miss, lots of scars on the old plank. Yet it was judged he had worn down his plank over race distance, not in that one incident. Umm.
Then we have the 2023 United States GP. Both Sir Lewis and Charles Leclerc got tested and failed for excessive plank wear. So it is a thing. And Aunty FIA loves a simple metric she can measure, regardless of the logic. We can now measure it, so we will punish you for it.
Summary? George dared to win... and lost. It was by fractions. Fractions that could not be measured 50, 30 or 25 years ago. Yet now we measure them. Does this give us better racing?
He who dares wins? Or, he who does not test the envelope wins? Dear reader, which do we want? How special do we want our heroes? How enforced do we want our rules? Rework the rule to state "...a car must be within 1% of the allowed weight at race end?" That would give people a massive 7.98kg to play with, which given the current issue around 1.5kg sounds like a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.
On hot, hard races the anticipated driver fluid loss, aka sweating, is 3kg to 4kg. These guys are working hard in flame proof overalls with no air conditioning or massage seats. I've not seen drivers as tired after Spa since the Nigel Mansell "carry me direct to my grave" days of post-race exhaustion.
A pair of Ray Ban Aviator's weighs around 31g, while the classic Wayfarer is a bloated 45g. The legendary Omega Speedmaster is around 117g (model, glass, and bracelet dependant blah, blah...) So, 1.5kg is around 12 cups of (empty) espresso, 33 pairs of Wayfarers or a cheeky 12 Speedmasters, or for those of a simpler taste... the McDonalds Big Mac is a 220g beast. So George messed up by six Big Macs, or significantly less than the weight of your average Pitpass feline.
Did this weighty matter add to or subtract from the glory of the race? That, dear reader, depends on the level of pedant which lives in your head and your heart. Your humble scribe gets that rules need to be bounded and applied, but was this a measuring stick too far, or an obsession justly applied? George might want to keep an emergency Richard Mille (or two) in his race suit in future, you know, just in case.
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here
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