I’m the same in a road car. Smooth as a pint of Guinness. Mind you, Brittny would have a thing or two to say about that. She thinks I brake too late, pulling up to the car in front, and while that’s technically true, it’s also fine because I might brake late but I don’t brake hard, and that’s because I don’t want people’s heads doing the nodding-dog thing in the passenger seat.
But, yes, fair cop. We do get close to the car in front and that’s Britt’s issue. Late and soft – that’s me.
A lot depends on what you’re driving. When I’m in her G-Wagen, it’s like a bucking bronco anyway, which is why I prefer to take the BMW 5 Series, because I can’t be dealing with driving around LA feeling like I’m doing that scene in Wayne’s World where they’re all head-banging in the car.
But anyway. When it comes to driving, that’s how I roll. The drawback is that if I’m in a racing car that doesn’t handle the way I want it to, I won’t be as quick as the likes of Lewis or Fernando, because I’m not one who can wring a car’s neck the way they can. If they’re driving a car with too much front grip, for example, they’ll be better at adapting to that than me. If you have too much front grip, the rear slides throughout, and I hate that feeling. Not to get all Carry On Formula One Driver about it, but I need a firm rear, matron. I need it stable so I can take that speed through a corner. A tiny bit of front sliding, that’s fine, because I know where to put the car at the corner, just as long as I can have confidence in my rear. And if I have that, and if I can fine-tune the car so that it works with my style, then I’m unbeatable.
I was always better in the wet. I’ve won 15 Grand Prix, and I reckon nine of them were wet. The reason is that I can feel the unusual conditions and I can really think on my feet or, in my case my bum, because that’s how I feel the car.
A lot of drivers struggle in the wet. They’ll look at the circuit and they’ll go, ‘Well, it’s a bit slippy in that corner, so I’ll slow down,’ whereas me, I like to arrive at the corner and decide on the fly, feeling the corner through the car and through the tyres, and that’s how I always gain time in those tricky conditions of when it gets wet through a race or if it dries out through a race and you’re on slightly the wrong tyre, so you could be in the wet on a dry tyre and I can always find the grip, whereas a lot of people can’t.
I know that that’s what frustrated Fernando when Lewis started in F1 as his teammate at McLaren. At the start of their partnership (if you can ever call teammates in F1 a partnership), Fernando would destroy Lewis, but Lewis would look at the data and do a bit of Sherlock Hamilton: Oh, Fernando’s braking there. Okay, I’m going to brake there. Fernando’s accelerating there. Okay, I’ll accelerate there.
And although by rights it shouldn’t be as easy as that, it somehow was for Lewis, so he’d just hammer the brakes where he thought was right: 100-metre board, bang, brakes, turn in, come out, and be as quick as Fernando.
Not quicker. But as quick. And this would bother Fernando. And because of that, and because Lewis got inside his head, Fernando made more mistakes, which Lewis didn’t, because he was the new boy, had no pressure, could make mistakes and no one cared. Whereas for double World Champion Fernando it was different. And Lewis ended up being quicker.
So yes, drivers definitely learn – even poach – from each other in terms of style, although it’s more to do with hard facts than technique, like you’ll see from the data that so-and-so has taken a corner flat. Hmm, you’ll think, I didn’t think it was quite flat through that corner, but he’s done it, so it must be okay, or He’s able to go flat there, but I’m not, so why is that? What’s different about his car? which sends you back to looking at the set-ups. Ah, he’s got more rear wing, maybe I should try more rear wing…
Learning. See? It always comes back to that. Which brings me onto…
1. STARTS
My first pole position in Formula One was at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola in 2004. I’m in my BAR-Honda. I’m 24 years old. Just behind me is the World Champion Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari.
No pressure, then.
So I pull up to the start and over the radio my racing engineers tell me, ‘Right, JB, time to do the procedure.’
Which is the start procedure.
And it’s like that moment you’re at the cash machine, go to plug in your PIN and suddenly can’t remember it. Or when you walk into the shop needing a pint of milk and your mind goes blank.
I’ve just achieved my first-ever pole position. I’m ahead of Michael Schumacher, and I’ve forgotten how to start the bloody car. It’s arming the launch control – a procedure I’ve done dozens, no, hundreds of times. All year I’ve done it in the simulator, in practice and testing, so much so that it’s virtually a case of muscle memory.
Except that it’s gone.
And the lights are coming on, and normally the procedure should have begun by now and I’m thinking, Shit what do I do? I’m looking at the lights and I’m going all hot and fizzy and then boom it comes back and bam, bam, bam, I do the procedure, and pull away as the lights go out and…
Have the best start of my life.
Proper good. I must pull four car lengths ahead of Michael (who goes on to beat me into second, but still).
Despite the fact that I got a good start, it was more by luck than judgement, and it’s not something I’d wish to repeat in a hurry. You can be fast in testing and practice, you can ace qualifying, you can be as quick as possible. But if you get your start wrong, you can lose two or three places, and if you’re at the front of the grid and you lose places you find yourself caught up in traffic, and that can be disastrous. A good start isn’t just desirable, it’s essential, and as a result it’s something we practise in the simulator a lot. Apart from rolling it in to the harbour, much of those two simulator days prior to Monaco were spent on my starts. (And then what happened? I ended up starting from the pits anyway.)
What we call the start procedure begins way before that moment I’ve just described and involves doing a lot of prep beforehand. To make sure the clutch is working and warmed up correctly, you do what’s called a ‘clutch bite point find’, which is a case of understanding where the bite point is for when you release the hand clutch at the start, because that bit’s still manual. It’s the only clutch use that’s manual, because the only time we use the clutch paddles – there are two, usually – is for the start and for pit stops. For gear changes, it’s another paddle and it’s all done automatically.
Next, you do your tyre warm-up where the team has told you how many burnouts to do, because they know what temperature the tyres are at and what temperature they should be. You achieve a burnout by accelerating in first gear and spinning the wheels. The car has 900 horsepower, and each burnout will raise your tyre temperature by around six degrees. Usually, you’re asked to do four of them, the last one being just before you stop on the grid.
When you stop, although you’ll get less tyre temperature on the surface, it will still be there internally, and then you’re basically sitting there twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the rest of the grid to queue up. Hopefully, you’re waiting a long time for them to form up, because that means you’re at the front, which is fine – so fine, in fact, that you don’t even worry about losing tyre temperature, because after all it’s the same for everyone around you, and even though those at the back have warmer tyres it’s not like they’re going to overtake you. Well, hopefully not. Nope. You’re just glad you’re at the front. Open track – that’s what you want.
Next it’s announced that all cars are formed up, at which point you get ready to launch. All the way through my career it’s been different: between 2001 and 2003 we had a system called launch control, where you’d release the clutch, and then when the lights started coming on, go full throttle with your foot on the brake, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. And then, when the lights went out, you’d push a button and the car just went – it did everything as it should. Benetton were very good at that. They’d often m
ake two or three places up at the start, just because of their brilliant launch control.
After the launch control era we had a manual system, and for this we had the two clutch paddles I’m talking about. What you’d do was pull up, put it in gear, stick your finger behind one clutch and pull it to about 60 per cent while pulling the other clutch paddle all the way in. Then you’d sit there, revving up to, say, 8,000rpm, waiting, the noise around you like the sound of the planet splitting open even with your earplugs in, an absolutely astonishing, primal-sounding noise.
And then the lights would go out and – boom – you’d dump the fully retracted clutch immediately, so you’d still have a large percentage of clutch not engaged as you pulled away, at which point you’d hear a beep and then release the second clutch fully and start going heavy on the throttle.
So that was pretty fancy. But then they banned that, so you’d have to find a way of doing the start with just one pedal, where you’d pull the clutch in, get the revs right, the lights would go out and then you’d release the clutch, it would hit your fingers, you’d hold it at about 50 per cent and then at the beep release it completely.
It sounds needlessly complicated, and it probably is. Most of all, it’s weird and funky trying to get your fingers in the right position, but it’s what you have to do, because that’s the best way to get a good start. Clutch control is paramount and getting your fingers in the right place is the first battle. After that it’s difficult to explain and tough to understand unless you’re actually sitting in the car – and even then it’s something that happens more by instinct, feel and racing mojo than anything else. Although you’re using different equipment and manipulating it differently, the principle is the same as it is in a road car: you know when you know. Ever tried to teach someone clutch control? If so, you’ll know what I mean. It’s all done by feel.
As far as the throttle goes, you’re told which revs to use, so you’ll have lights on the wheel, which are programmed to respond to your throttle use, and the idea is to get the lights to meet in the middle of the wheel, which means you’ve hit the throttle sweet spot. Over to one side, too much throttle; over to another side, too little throttle. If you’re 5 per cent out on the clutch pedal, you get a really bad start. Ditto if you react slowly. One-tenth late in a reaction works out to a loss of about 1.5 metres, and that’s a killer.
There’s so much else that can go wrong, too. Maybe somebody else has messed up their own start and stopped in front of you, which means you’ve got to turn the wheel and back off the throttle and that’s the worst thing you can do, because when you go back on and you get a massive amount of wheel spin, or maybe you’ve released the paddles too quickly, you don’t release them quickly enough, or you’ve come on the throttle too aggressively, or you’ve shifted up too early or too late…
In short, perfecting a start is not easy, but it’s those who make it look easy who end up doing the best. We’ve seen it in 2019 with the two Mercedes drivers: Valtteri Bottas has a bad start Lewis overtakes him and vice versa. In Barcelona, Bottas was on pole, had a poor start, Lewis ended up overtaking him and won.
So, if you were to ask me what the most important part of the whole weekend is, I’d be tempted to say qualifying but I’d be equally tempted to say the start, and then I’d settle on qualifying and change my mind the following day.
The eternal tyre conundrum
Tyres make a difference, of course. Soft or medium? A soft tyre will give you a six-metre advantage, meaning you’ll be six metres quicker reaching 100kms an hour. However, the medium tyre is a better race tyre. So you, your race engineer and the strategists are faced with the decision: do you play the long game and go for the medium tyres, or decide to start with soft, knowing that on the soft you have a better chance of overtaking at the start, which is the easiest place to overtake? This, my friend, is what’s known as a variable.
Easy on the throttle
You always have to be gentle with the throttle. Be anything other than gentle and the wheels will spin. The trick is to apply it slowly, and if you go on and get wheelspin, you lift off a bit and then go back on even more gently.
The good thing is that in a Formula One car we have a throttle map. A throttle maps is set of values applied to the throttle use that will change the behaviour of the throttle, depending on the driver’s preference.
You can change the throttle map depending on the conditions. In the wet, for example, you’d adjust it to be a little less sensitive when you first apply the throttle, because otherwise you’d come out of a corner, touch the throttle and be in danger of losing the rear end of the car.
In the dry we play around with it. If you want you can have it mapped as a straight line all through the pedal, as it would be in a road car. But the way you’d normally have it in an F1 car is a little bit soft at first – that initial touch – so you can really get a feel for where the throttle pedal is. And that would be the first 20 per cent of your map, after which it would start picking up more aggressively and that’s when you get the torque and power.
It’s as much of an art form as using the brakes. For me, it’s exactly the same in terms of modulation. I’m sure that Lewis, for example, would probably say that skill on the throttle comes second to using the brakes. But that’s me. You’re always working the throttle in tandem with the brakes. You’re dancing with them both, modulating both at the same time. Well, I am, because that’s my style. Other drivers are very different.
Pole, turn one
Always best to start on pole, I find. The only thing is that you may find yourself vulnerable to an overtake at turn one. The guy behind can tow up to you all the way down the straight, sit behind you and, come turn one, may well be able to have a run at you.
That’s what happened to me in 2009, racing for Brawn in Barcelona. I had started on pole, with Sebastian second in a Red Bull and my teammate Rubens Barrichello third. Off we went at lights out, and my start was fine, but Rubens’ was better, allowing him to pass Sebastian then tow up to me and pass me on turn one. Fortunately, I went on to win thanks to a different pit-stop strategy (more on that in pit stops).
So, yes. In terms of Sunday, the actual race itself, the start and turn one are the most important. Stringing that particular one–two together can help make up for a bad qualifying session, because if you’re starting eighth on the grid and you get to turn one and suddenly everyone’s on the inside, you can take advantage of the inevitable bottleneck by coming around the outside, capitalising on the fact that they’re all slowing down in heavy traffic, and drive down the outside. You can brake later, going round and make up positions.
Then next year it’s different. Maybe the outside was good for an overtake last year, but this year, for some reason, everyone’s on the outside, so the inside’s better. Maybe two cars touch, and because they touch the guys behind are nervous of crashing, lift off, and that slows everyone down, and again because you’re further back you can take the other side and make up positions.
Having said all that, there really is no substitute for being up the front, because if you’ve qualified, say, tenth, there’s a much bigger chance you’re going to crash. Fourteenth is the worst. When you’re right at the back you can hang back and see what’s going on. But when you’re 14th, you don’t want to lose places to the cars behind, so you’ve got to push and you try and overtake which means there’s a big chance of crashing or damaging the car.
Both of these are bad. Crashing is bad, obviously. But damaging the car is even worse. If somebody drives into the back of you and damages your floor or your diffuser, it’s a lot of down-force gone, but you can still carry on, and it’s the worst indignity – up there with taking out your teammate and being overtaken on the outside. You’re just driving Miss Daisy for an hour and a half, wishing that you’d crashed and were in the wall, because at least that would be better than what you’re doing now, being lapped and cursing your terrible start.
2. GEARS
; In a racing car, you’re changing down as you come into the corner, which is what you should be doing in any car, except most people don’t think to change down. They get to the corner, go to accelerate, realise there’s no power and then change down gears.
In an F1 car, your braking and shifting go together, with one being a reaction to the other. You’re coming into a third-gear corner in eighth, which in an F1 car is top gear, so it’s brake then shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. There’s a safety mechanism fitted so that you can’t shift down by too much and over-rev the engine. It’ll only let you shift down when it knows that the revs won’t go above 12,500rpm.
You know which gear you need to be in for each corner. At Monaco, for example, there are three first-gear corners. Having said that, it’s not like you have them memorised. I mean, you know from previous experience, and you’re told, and you have all the data in front of you before you go out. But you get out there and it all happens by feel anyway.
Plus, it’s often the case that gears can change from practice to qualifying. Say you have a corner, and you’ve been practising in third gear on old tyres, you might give it a go in fourth in qualifying because you’ve got new tyres, you’ve got less fuel, there’s more grip on the circuit. It’s a risk because you might screw it up by going in fourth, but you might be another tenth quicker. Again, that comes with feel and instinct.
Journos would always ask me after a race what gear I was in for such-and-such a corner, and I’d be like, ‘Hmm, I think it was third, or it might have been fourth,’ because as a driver it doesn’t really matter, it’s about listening to the car. Like if you feel the revs are too low, you downshift. If you feel that it’s not going to pull when you get to the exit, or if it’s pushing too much, and you need more engine braking, then it means that you’re in too high a gear.
How to Be an F1 Driver Page 7