Piquet jr comments about Senna

[AlpineF1]

Nelson Piquet junior has been reported to have said -
“Someone like Senna would not have won anything in F1 today,”
link to the news story http://www.f1zone.net/news/ayrton-senna ... -jr/15351/
“He was very fast but he had no talent in terms of the technical and mechanical.”
this is the most ridiculous statement i've heard in a long time...

[thearmofbarlow]

Senna can't hear 'cause he has his world championships stuck in his ears.

[Jersey Tom]

Drivers say a lot of things. Best not to pay attention to a lot of it.

Maybe not specific to Ayrton but there is probably some truth to what Piquet Jr is saying... in that the further back you go in history the more drivers could probably dominate just by raw talent - get in the car and go. With increasingly tight competition the driver can't just be a driver - you have to be a part of the whole development process of the chassis.

I can't speak to how much Ayrton was a development driver vs pure race driver or whatever.

[Belatti]

I would have not expected more from this moron Piquet is, alike his father. I bet no one in the F1 miss them both.

[strad]

There is truth in what JT says...Wayyy back the car was only maybe 10...15% the rest was driver,,,as we moved forward it became more like 70% driver to today where they figure the car is 80 or 90%...AS we all know, today no top notch driver is going to drag even a third ranked car to the front whereas Nuvolari or Fangio or Villeneuve or Senna could make up for the faults of the car.

[schick]

This is the same Piquet who crashed in Singapore on team orders, I would suggest he, his old man, and Briatore are not worthy of discussion on any topic related to motor racing.......let alone Senna.

[AlpineF1]

There isn't any truth in it though... nobody can know how much Senna knew about the mechanical side of it all

[timbo]

AS we all know, today no top notch driver is going to drag even a third ranked car to the front whereas Nuvolari or Fangio or Villeneuve or Senna could make up for the faults of the car.

But all Senna titles came from the period when he had a very good car. Maybe not #1 in terms of speed, but no less than #2. And he also actively sought the possibility to come to the better equipped team.

Having said that, what Piquet jr. says is RIDICULOUS.
It was Senna who spent countless hour in debriefs, remembered the revs in every corner, sensed tyre pressure differences in a family van etc. There was no other driver at his time who had the same attention to detail. If he needed to learn how all the electronics of the modern car work in order to be competitive he'd do that, that's for sure. And he also had much more brain capacity to do that than that little moron just because he had infinitely more talent.

[AlpineF1]

Senna didn't need a top notch car to win remember Monaco 1984? that Toleman would be like force India in today's world...

[andartop]

AS we all know, today no top notch driver is going to drag even a third ranked car to the front whereas Nuvolari or Fangio or Villeneuve or Senna could make up for the faults of the car.

I thought that was exactly what Alonso has been doing this year from the start.

As for Piquet's comments, well, you know what they say about opinions...

[timbo]

Senna didn't need a top notch car to win remember Monaco 1984? that Toleman would be like force India in today's world...

Yes, he didn't. But that was one special race, 12 years later Panis won that in Ligier. I don't mean like it was nothing special, it clearly demonstrated his ability, but circumstances played in his favor.

[mike]

I would say that cars in the past rely more on the driver and the teams to make it faster, while these days computer data tells you everything. I remember in 2003 or something a season of computer data was around 3TB, that is laughable compared to today. I think what he was trying to say was, back in the days the driver feels how he could have gone faster with his mechanical knowledge available, where as today the computer does it all and drivers needs even bigger knowledge base to work with the engineers.

An example will be Bruno Senna saying how Ayrton could calculate the tyre pressures while he was driving. That was possible in the past as computers couldn't do a good enough calculation. Where as today, they have super computers calculating all that stuff accounting for more factors, so if a driver wants to change tyre pressure to go faster, he would have need to know a lot more to make even the slightest suggestion. And that will therefore, reduce the factor of driver affect on the performance of the car.

Another example could be how Schumacher drove the same corner and timed himself using different gears. It might be advantageous since computers couldn't know which way is faster, but if a computer can do that before hand there is no need for this talent any more and any driver and step into the car with an optimised setup.

[timbo]

It might be advantageous since computers couldn't know which way is faster, but if a computer can do that before hand there is no need for this talent any more and any driver and step into the car with an optimised setup.

And yet we all hear how race engineer would ask a driver how he feels about the car, and we know of occasions how an initial setup was scrapped after the Friday practices and the team had to start Saturday with the clean sheet. Driver feedback still means a lot, and Ayrton was a king of that.
There absolutely ZERO sense in what Piquet jr. says.

[schick]

To add a little background to the childish, inane remarks attributed to Piquet jr, one must remember both Piquet and Senna were Brazilian and Senna commanded great respect from his countrymen, not so, Piquet. I recall Piquet having accused Ayrton of not having any girlfriends and was suss? it was common knowledge they disliked each other intensely, perhaps Junior's genes didn't include his fathers talent, but did his potty mouth.

[mike]

It might be advantageous since computers couldn't know which way is faster, but if a computer can do that before hand there is no need for this talent any more and any driver and step into the car with an optimised setup.

And yet we all hear how race engineer would ask a driver how he feels about the car, and we know of occasions how an initial setup was scrapped after the Friday practices and the team had to start Saturday with the clean sheet. Driver feedback still means a lot, and Ayrton was a king of that.
There absolutely ZERO sense in what Piquet jr. says.

True that set ups can be scrapped after friday, but all the back ups are done in the sim as well, no driver today can sit down and tell you by number about every setting in the car. Back in the days the driver makes a bigger difference as computers can't generate better set up then the driver. Another thing is today's cars are much more technical then the cars before, I do think that drivers today has a better technical knowledge then drivers in the past. Senna at his time certainly has a better advantage in his technical knowledge, it he was born in 1985 I'm sure he could have been Adrian Newey.

In a way I agree its more difficult to dominate in F1 today, but I still think Senna will be special no matter what era he was in.