F1 Performance: is it the car, is it the driver?

[bhall]

Now then,

How about a rotational system whereby each driver gets a go in a different car?

Max Mosley suggested as much a few years ago, and my natural inclination is to believe that anything he's put forward is probably a bad idea. ...sorta like if a dude in an SS uniform suggests a shower.

EDIT: Yet again starting a new page...

[turbof1]

Now then,

How about a rotational system whereby each driver gets a go in a different car?

Max Mosley suggested as much a few years ago, and my natural inclination is to believe that anything he's put forward is probably a bad idea. Sorta like if a man in an SS uniform suggests a shower.

EDIT: Yet again starting a new page...

If it helps I could arbitrarily remove some posts on the page before, though people complaining about how unfair it is that their posts are removed, will be forwarded to you. That or you could keep enjoying the f1t curse.

[bhall]

It feels like having a conversation with someone in a crowded room and everyone suddenly shuts up but you. Not the end of the world, but it makes me a bit self-conscious.

To be fair, though, I'm very weird. So...

[Cam]

I think F1 has always been a balance in terms of Driver vs Car importance, always skewed towards the Car. The driver has to have the credentials to be in the best car, so many times the cream rises to the top.

There have been many instances where a Driver not considered one of the leading pack has won the title, but always with a very good car.

[...]

Yep. Keke Rosberg and Jenson Button are two names that immediately spring to mind.

Yes, I've used Button as an example of right driver in the right car before too, and I'm sure not many would disagree with that.

This discussion has moved away from where it originally was. We seem to be trying to point out that any driver in a Marussia will not win a WDC - which is correct (so far). You can put the best driver ever in that car and it'll never win simply as the car does not have the ability to beat a Merc - so the driver makes no difference - that much we can all agree.

The original discussion was about how Vettel only won because of the car and that any competent driver in the same car would also win. It's this facet I'm trying to single out.

Each car has a different DNA and finds it's speed differently. Each driver helps to develop this car towards his own style. So when you get a driver that's been in a team for a few years, that car then has fundamental characteristics that the driver has 'embedded' into it. For example - some drivers like understeer, better balance, oversteer etc. Also, some cars develop to be better with top speed at the cost of traction, others find speed through corners and have better traction, low top speed, etc. Over that same time, the driver has changed bit by bit to accommodate the core abilities of the car. So in this instance, each car has a different 'style' to getting the most out of it and through development time, both of the driver and the car, we see a convergence of performance where both come towards the peak.

So you take that same driver that has been changing a car to suit his style for the last X amount of years and put him in a car that fundamentally works differently to how his 'habit' expects - and I doubt he'll be 100% in it. Habits take a while to break, to modify and while it can be done, it takes time. While being in a RB7, for example, he should be competitive, but enough to win a WDC?

[bhall]

There are quite a few F1 drivers who found success in pretty short order after joining a new team.

Prost won his first time out in a McLaren. Piquet won his first race with Williams. Likewise, Fangio, Mansell, Andretti, Raikkonen, and Alonso did so with Ferrari. Moss won his first time behind the wheel of the T43. Scheckter won the first time he drove for Wolf. Button won his first race with Brawn.

Stewart (Tyrell), Fittipaldi (McLaren), and Senna (Lotus and McLaren) each won their second race with a new team.

Lauda (McLaren), Reutemann (Brabham), Hill (Ferrari), and Alboreto (Ferrari) each won their third time out in new digs.

J. Villeneuve won his fourth race at Williams.

Shall I go on?

It's always the car.

[Cam]

Yes - but over a season and in comparison with their team mates?

I guess I'm struggling to come to terms that a driver has little outcome on the results. When I look at other high performance areas, e.g. fighter pilot, the vetting process is extreme to ensure the best result. The jet's performance is the same as the car, yet the pilot has to make some kind of difference - otherwise every pilot in the same jet would have the same results?

[bhall]

I don't think you can really compare race car drivers to fighter pilots. That each operates a high-performance machine is just about the only similarity between them, and even that's a bit of a stretch given the nature of their roles. (But, there is a reason why countries often spend mammoth sums of money to have the best possible hardware.)

I think maybe the visibility of F1 drivers is what causes so many people to overestimate their importance, and I mean that in a literal sense. With open-cockpit cars, there are no obstacles between fans and their favorite drivers. We can actually see them work in their "offices."

Plus, teams tend to market the --- out of the drivers. You see their names and faces everywhere.







Ferrari even supplies Alonso with a veritable throne.



I say that because this doesn't seem to be much of a problem in sports car racing. I mean, have you ever heard anyone extoll the virtues of Tom Kristensen, outstanding driver and nine-time overall winner at Le Mans? Or do people tend to praise Audi's success at Le Mans?

Just a thought.

Don't get me wrong, though: F1 drivers have to be pretty damn good just get to get in the door, and only the best among them tend to succeed in the long run. But wins, losses, Championships, or whatever, don't say all that much about a driver's ability, because it's the cars themselves that dictate what a driver can possibly achieve without an outside influence. That means a driver with the best car really only has to beat his teammate to win on pace; absent any help, the other drivers don't have a chance.

EDIT: This is how lap times look when the role of the car is minimized.




And this is how they look when the car matters.



The spread widens from ~1.2s to just over 5s.

[Cam]

Yeah the INDY car is quite a good example - being a spec (I think) series - the driver is probably more important in that role?

Yes, I agree the focus on the driver in F1 is over-blown, but they still steer the car - and although I believe F1 drivers are little more than wet ballast - the difference between a car performing well and not performing as well can still be down to the driver. Kovelinen in that lotus one off drive was a good example on how to fail in a pretty good car. So I guess we can both show examples to support both theorys.

Picked this up from another thread, pertaining to Alain versus Keke:

As ever, it all depends upon circumstance and conditions. Back in the turbo days, the oversteering Keke Rosberg could not hold a candle at McLaren to the understeering Alain Prost – and for John Barnard, the team's technical director of the time, the reason was very simple: "Alain would set the car up in a way that to any other driver would feel like it had massive understeer, but he had a way of getting the car into the corner early [with his overlapping of braking and cornering], which for a turbo was fantastic, because it meant he could get early on the power and we could give him some traction. Keke, by contrast, was last of the late brakers and really liked to turn the car very quickly. To do that you need a set-up that's a bit light on rear grip – and that just wasn't the way with these cars because it meant you didn't have the traction to use all that huge power."

So we have the same car, but 2 very different drivers - one of whom does well, the other not so much. How do you explain this?

[bhall]

Mr. Not-So-Much wasn't a very good driver.

Now explain Mr. Not-So-Much's World Championship win four years earlier.

[Oakstreet]

There are quite a few F1 drivers who found success in pretty short order after joining a new team.

Prost won his first time out in a McLaren. Piquet won his first race with Williams. Likewise, Fangio, Mansell, Andretti, Raikkonen, and Alonso did so with Ferrari. Moss won his first time behind the wheel of the T43. Scheckter won the first time he drove for Wolf. Button won his first race with Brawn.

Stewart (Tyrell), Fittipaldi (McLaren), and Senna (Lotus and McLaren) each won their second race with a new team.

Lauda (McLaren), Reutemann (Brabham), Hill (Ferrari), and Alboreto (Ferrari) each won their third time out in new digs.

J. Villeneuve won his fourth race at Williams.

Shall I go on?

It's always the car.

Interesting thing is that all your examples are of drivers starting with a new car at the beginning of a season. I can remember replacement drivers damaging their career by not performing in gp-winning cars (badoer @ ferrari, fisichella @ ferrari, kovalainen @ lotus). Is this also only the car then? Or is that 'proof' a driver changes the car to their driving style, no other can match that combination.

[SpainFAN]

Mr. No-so-much had the darn best package out there... 40-50 sec gap with him not pushing it... look at the mercs this year, same level of dominance.
And drivers are human so one day one could be on a off-day and make many mistakes and it could look like Mr. Better is now Mr. Not-so-Much in reference to his team mate.

BTW, I think you can definitely compare F1 Driver to Fighter Pilots, same level of high tech and clearly a very different outcome depending on who is on board. If you look around, clearly the US and Israel come out on top for their pilots, why? Look at their hours of training. Elsewhere same equipment does not yield same level of performance, hence the pilot making the difference and it's all correlated to the hours of flight training they have, which correlates to the military budget to pay for those hours... Cool thing about fighter pilots is, they don't have a different airplane that performs better than the other to complain about, "it's all you" in there giving your best.

Remember "Outliers" aren't necessarily born that way, it's their hours of experience that get them there.

[bhall]

Interesting thing is that all your examples are of drivers starting with a new car at the beginning of a season. I can remember replacement drivers damaging their career by not performing in gp-winning cars (badoer @ ferrari, fisichella @ ferrari, kovalainen @ lotus). Is this also only the car then? Or is that 'proof' a driver changes the car to their driving style, no other can match that combination.

You gotta read through this whole thing to understand the context here.

No one has ever said that drivers don't play a role a car's performance, only that a car's capability puts a hard limit on what any driver can possibly achieve with it. Teammate comparisons are entirely valid, because teammates share the same car, and thus the same limit. But, if their car isn't as capable as others on the grid, neither driver will win anything without some form of external assistance.

@ SpainFAN: Fair enough.

EDIT: It feel like this thing is just going around and around in circles. So, I'm gonna stop now.

[Kiril Varbanov]

Certainly, it's mostly down to the car. Expressing this in percentage isn't really viable, IMHO, as in 70% down to the car and 30 for the driver - that's speculation. There are many examples, one of which is Button.

Quite soon I shall have a real doctor as a guest author on http://f1framework.blogspot.com explaining the psychological side of the driver.

[FoxHound]

Adrian Newey coming out of skunkworks to say a few words.

"Seb has a very particular way of driving, and if we can get the car to suit that driving style, then he’s very effective. If we can’t then he’s not able to exploit that. So it’s a work in progress.We can’t replace the blown diffuser obviously, but Sebastian was quick before they came along. It’s a re-learning curve."

http://adamcooperf1.com/2014/06/03/adri ... -driving/?

[FoxHound]

Max Mosley suggested as much a few years ago, and my natural inclination is to believe that anything he's put forward is probably a bad idea.

But it would not dispel the idea that drivers are the performance differentiator? Max Chilton bagging pole in a Merc and Hamilton languishing down in 20th will quickly show that.
Even if only once a year....non championship, with the top guys getting the worst and the bottom guys getting the best. Could even become a showpiece like Monaco, only with racing.