29/10/2024
FEATURE BY MAX NOBLE
Dear Lord! Things can be adjusted on the Red Bull car, sorry, I mean package!
Zak Brown is horrified! Clearly not fresh from a walk of his own factory floor, he has cried foul over Red Bull being able to, well, adjust things on their racing machine. Surely, if the title race remains tight, he will scream about the lack of a riding mechanic on the Red Bull next. Where is that second man!?
Has Zak noticed that wheels come on... and off? That steering wheels can be removed. That, gasp of disbelief, the driver is strapped into the car during the race, yet is able to release the belts and climb out at race end... unassisted! What's a papaya-coloured team principal to do?
While the FIA has increased the number of standard components, and mandates the living heck out of those open to some innovation, they all still need to be bonded, screwed, clamped, and generally held in place. Colin Chapman famously stated that any race car that didn't disintegrate as it crossed the finish line was over built, yet even he knew the thing needed to be all of a piece at the start.
Now, don't get me wrong dear reader, I'm aware that drivers do not have 24-way adjustable power seats with massage and cooling. Nor do they have surround sound systems with subwoofer and active noise cancelling. Indeed, they barely have wing mirrors. But what they do have is a package which is built from a rather large number of components.
It is estimated there are around 14,500 components within an F1 car. Thousands within the engine and energy recovery units and the rest scattered all around. We have front and rear wings, barge boards, under floor, halo, suspension at each corner, brakes and cockpit environment. For anyone who has ever tackled an Airfix model, you know the idea of gluing 14,500 components into place could take years. It took a significant chunk of my puberty to finish an Airfix Spitfire and a P-51 Mustang. Even being generous I think neither came in over a few hundred parts. Please don't ask about the agony which was the painting. Your scribe still has nightmares about being asked to paint anything in the swirling camouflage style of a typical Spitfire. It was my darkest (childhood) hour.
Thankfully mother moved me on to Meccano one Christmas, and my spanner waving days commenced. While many things were built, none had 14,500 parts to bolt together. Articulated trucks and cranes with working winches, many had adjustable or moving parts. With my little set of Meccano tools I'd cheerfully raise tray backs, move crane arms and generally put my little world in order.
So it is in modern F1. I'm sure many of the current pit crew have toyed with models (the plastic and metal types, not the human version...) prior to graduating to the design wonder which is a modern F1 car. Now they need to focus on the precise alignment, perfect bonding and smooth, accurate setup of those 14,500 components. That's 14,500 opportunities to get it wrong. Just ask Mercedes about their bouncing disaster of a car. Each one only out by a fraction? If one is 0.1% out on each of 14,500 components, the compounded error could be 1,450% wrong! Of course, some errors could cancel others out, a bit of a plus and minus situation, but in a sport where places are won by fractions of a second over a two hour race even a modest 1.45% compounded error would be a horror.
Again, look at how Mercedes wielded the spanners in Austin to go from heroes to zeroes over the course of the weekend. Many adjustments - most in the wrong direction. 14,500 parts, with each connected to at least one other part - otherwise it would fall off the car - that's a minimum of 7,250 interface points. Yet many parts connect to several others, so the actual number of interfaces will be higher. Such interfaces as the chassis and the halo are clearly built to be as solid as Lewis' bank account and do not have adjustment points. Others, such as the front and rear wings, and especially suspension, have multiple adjustment points. Again, just ask Mercedes.
So Zak ponders why a seal is required over the T-tray (should that be tea tray...?) adjuster in the Red Bull as "it can be reached with a partially disassembled car". Yet, suspension, wings, driver's seat, side-pod openings... all are easier to reach on a car than something buried in the foot-well behind other items. Why is Zak not demanding seals on all of those, or having an outrage attack that these adjustment points are "...just left sitting there waiting for a spanner?"
Possibly because the FIA administer Parc Ferme rather well. Cars sealed off, closed-circuit video cameras, no team members allowed in... it is simply not possible to go in and reset the entire suspension as one will surely be caught. So is it therefore not certain that a highly flexible pit crew member diving head first into the foot-well with a brace of Allen keys, a monkey wrench and a set of spanners would not be spotted? "I think I dropped my keys!" Would probably not be an excuse the FIA would believe from said spanner waving monkey after fifteen minutes of frantic spanner work in the middle of the night.
So Zak, in the first F1 championship battle of his career, is grasping at every straw the winds of change blow past his office door. Bib-gate, front-gate, waste-gate, open-gate... Zak is working his way through them all in a bid to get his man to the line an inch in front of V. Max. Meanwhile V. Max is driving in a manner which would probably have Senna, Prost, and Schumacher all saying: "Well. Do you want to win or not? We know what it takes..."
As did Colin Chapman. As does Bernie from his team ownership days.
The rules, along with your competitors, are there to give you a framework to fight against. Otherwise why not turn up with an F15E Strike Eagle to blitz the track while sending air-to-surface missiles into anyone annoying you? V. Max wins because he pushes to the limit. Red Bull gives him a winning car because they push to the limit. Mercedes are living in a set-up nightmare right now... because they push to the limit. Zak is simply electing to push the whine-n-moan option to the limit. Well it's not as if Toto or Christian never complained. Strength to Zak as he learns the dark art of protesting... just enough. With just a sprinkle of fighting words which stop short of inducing law suits.
Zak is learning how to do this at the top level. Cars can be adjusted in 10,000 ways. Heck. I changed how I set the tyre pressures on my road cars after a wonderful article by LJK Setright outlining how he found a modest increase of tyre pressure transformed the handling of his Honda. He was a huge Honda fan back in the days when many were still calling them "Jap Crap". He was right, years ahead of his time. The others have been proven wrong eventually.
Zak is no fool. He owns many a car. I'm sure he is well aware that many of the parts on them can be jiggled, adjusted, tightened, relaxed or generally played about with. He also knows that F1 teams have been known to push the limit of the rules and that if one says nothing, one gets nothing.
So with his shiny quiver of spanners strapped to his hip, he is darting into battle loosing Parthian shots at any who threaten Lando's awkward pathway to the championship.
Expect crudely sharpened spanners to be lodging between many more shoulder blades before season's end. If ever there was a time for McLaren to be throwing spanners into as many other's good works as possible, that time is now.
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here