I hadn’t had a games console for going on 20 years, but I bought it because I’d entered the Le Mans 24-Hour Race (more of which later) and I was due to go there and test. The idea is that you test for one weekend before racing the following weekend, and the fact that there are three guys in the team means you get hardly any circuit time – between eight and ten laps only – so I thought it’d be a good idea to take a Le Mans crash course via the wonders of video game technology.
So anyway. I expected to just switch on the computer, or console, or whatever they call it, and play like we used to do in the old days, when games came on a cartridge not a disc or a download, and you whiled away entire summer holidays playing Super Mario Kart, drinking tins of Fanta and burping the theme tune to Jaws.
But this thing took bloody ages to load, or upload, or download, or update, or whatever the hell it was doing. And then when I did eventually get to play it became apparent that I had to play it for 250 hours just to reach the Le Mans section of the game.
So the PlayStation was packed away, and instead I phoned up my mate down the road. This bloke has built a simulator in his living room. I mean it – you wouldn’t believe the amount of effort that’s gone into it. No word of a lie, you walk into his normal-sized living room, with its sofa, two chairs and a desk, and it all looks normal except for the fact that on the other side of the room is this sit-in simulator, with a shell that lifts up, and inside that a seat – a proper racing-car seat that you strap yourself into – and a 2D surround screen. You’ve also got a pedal box for your feet, all of which is properly sprung and dampened, a proper steering wheel that will give you feedback.
I think it’s still all played through a PlayStation, so it is in effect a glorified game console, but it’s a completely different beast from what I’d packed away at home. The quality and feel of it was just unreal – or should that be the other way around? It was totally real.
‘Could I borrow it?’ I asked him.
‘Borrow it?’ he said.
‘I don’t mean take it away. I just mean have a go in it.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you can get the kids off it.’
They were on it non-stop, apparently, but not playing a racing game. They had this other thing where they just drove around the English countryside. Not racing, just driving. They played it all day, by all accounts.
So anyway, we turfed them off, I got in, and I did at least get to experience Le Mans. I learnt the circuit layout. I figured out the banked corners and overall got a good feel for the track. It was, all in all, a decent way to get a taste of the circuit.
When I’d finished, I got out, and my mate asked me how it had gone.
‘Great,’ I said.
He was beaming with pride, and with good reason: his was a great simulator. Now it’s coming, the confession bit, because he said, ‘I bet it’s just as good as the ones you were used to at McLaren, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yeah, mate,’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? It’s right up there.’
Which was a lie.
Fair’s fair, though, it was better than the first simulator I ever used at Benetton, which was static. It was basically a racing car tub, like an F1 car without the suspension. You got in it the same way. The seat was the same. Steering wheel the same. You had a screen in front of you. But nothing moved, so you didn’t really get a feel for anything. There were no vibrations, nothing like that. It was just static.
I guess it was good to get used to the circuit, but aside from that, it didn’t really help me in any way: there was no feedback so you couldn’t work on set-up. Plus the room they put it in smelled of socks.
All in all, it was pretty useless, so I ended up giving that and all other simulators a wide berth wherever possible.
Arriving at McLaren in 2010 my heart sank when they were like, ‘Right, you have to drive the simulator.’
Maybe they’d got wind of my severe simulator aversion because they’d even put it in my contract that I had to drive the simulator before and after every race (as far as I know I was a pioneer in that regard, because everybody now has that clause in their contract).
‘We’ll work you gently into it,’ they said, ‘because everybody gets sick in the simulator.’
I was still thinking of the bathtub thing with the arcade-game screen. ‘Really?’ I said, ‘what sort of simulator have you got then?’
‘Oh, it’s pretty good,’ they said, ‘we’ve spent about thirty million on it.’
Okay.
So I go into this really dark room. It smells a bit musty, there’s no air in there, and there’s a carbon-fibre tub of the car you get into which is on widthways rails, so it goes side to side. Full-on massive surround screen. Toto, I’m thinking, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.
Besides that is a whole bunch of other screens for the various engineers: the simulator engineer, the tyre engineer, the engine engineer, the engineer engineer, who all sit behind the driver.
And they were right: everybody feels sick. Remember when you were a kid and you used to get in your dad’s car and want to throw up? It’s like that. Motion sickness, it is. The driver’s sick. All those poor engineers sitting behind the screens feel sick, too.
Still. Unappetising as it was, it did the job – the job being to successfully mimic all aspects of driving a Formula One car, even the G-force, which comes through a crash helmet you wear. This thing is connected to the machine in order to simulate G-force which it does so well that you think, If that goes wrong, it’s going to rip my head off.
Also, it has a system in it that makes it vibrate, so every gearshift you do, you get a jolt in the right manner. If you lock a tyre under-braking, you can feel it lock; with oversteer, you can feel the car slide, which is frankly amazing, because it’s very difficult to ‘feel’ a rear end that isn’t actually there. How can you feel wheels and tyres that don’t exist? And yet somehow you can.
They also have the real brakes, so even though there’s no wheel and thus no brake disc, there’s a calliper so it feels identical to the race car. It was so close to the real thing that when you crashed you’d close your eyes and take your hands off the steering wheel.
Even so, at first I was bit sniffy. ‘The brakes don’t feel right.’
Next time I went in there they had the brakes sorted.
They’d make a change to the suspension and you’d feel it. Later, when you climbed in the real thing, it would be exactly the same as the simulator and you’d be left wondering what kind of witchcraft they used to do that.
So it was a great simulator. I think most of them still aren’t as good as McLaren’s. It had everything.
And yet… it didn’t. Some days I’d get in it and be completely jubilant. ‘It feels really good; it’s identical to what the car feels like,’ and I’d be brimming with confidence that we could find a set-up that would work for the next race.
Sure enough, we’d have a great day in the simulator, use the set-up for the next race, Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt, and then the next time I went in there, it would feel utter shite, nothing like reality, and we could never work out why.
The team would be like, ‘Well, there’s nothing different, mate. It’s the same. It’s just you getting in it thinking it’s different.’
I’d go, ‘No, it’s different.’
Every driver was the same. We’d spend three hours trying to correlate with reality – all to no avail.
Then, of course, you had the fact that circuits were different. Or there would be changes to the tyre compound, and we’d have to correlate the simulator to the new tyres, which again you’d think was weird because it hasn’t got any tyres on it, but it does in the simulator.
It was one of the things that if the simulator was working then it was amazing, an invaluable tool. But when it wasn’t working? It just sucked time and money, frayed tempers, wore everyone out, stopped being any kind of tool at all and became a hindrance instead.
And it
was funny, because I’d turn up at a race, and I’d speak to Nico Rosberg. ‘How much simulator have you done?’ He’d go, ‘Never used one,’ and then go out and win the race. Although to be fair he did have the quickest car.
There were certain drivers who despite being contracted to go in the simulator were jammy gits, managed to wheedle out and only went in it about twice a year – naming no names Fernando Alonso.
But frankly you couldn’t blame them. Who in their right mind would want to spend unnecessary time in this small, airless room, redolent with the promise of imminent vomit? My thoughts went out to the guy whose sole job it was to look after the simulator. He’d been my data engineer and then became the simulator engineer. I don’t know if that’s a searing indictment of how bad it was to be my data engineer or not. I dread to think.
Just the regular drivers and test drivers were allowed to use the simulator. Then you had other teams, such as Force India, who would pay to use it. Only then it all went hush-hush, because all our data would have to be kept separate from their data. Their engineers would ask our engineers, ‘How does this bit work?’ and our engineers would shrug and go, ‘Yeah, dunno…’
And now, with ‘eSports’ all the rage, competition simulator driving has really taken off. They don’t use the F1 set-up but they have rigs that are probably just as advanced as my mate has in his living room, and they take part in all sorts of competitions on games like iRacing, Project Cars 2, Gran Turismo, rFactor 2 and DiRT 2.0. They even have teams run by actual Formula One personnel.
Guess who runs a team? Fernando Alonso. I know, right?
4. WINGS
So you’ve got your front wing and your rear wing. The job of the front wing is to help front downforce, as well as direct the down-force to the rest of the car and to the rear wing, the idea being that the two works as a package.
And my God they’ve changed over the years. When you look at the year 2000 cars, they’re beautiful because they’re so simple. But they’re also square; they’re boxes. Over the years they become more curvaceous and compact. You’ve got the engine in the back, all the radiators and everything and the designers are housing it in this little beautiful bubble, trying to make it as compact as possible, so that the airflow is better underneath and round the bodywork to the rear wing.
The front of the car is obviously most important because that’s what directs all the airflow round to the rest of the car. If the front doesn’t work, the rest of the car doesn’t work. If you look at a picture of a wing from 2009, it’s so simple. Just three flaps. A very simple front wing, and a bog-standard rear wing to match.
And the reason for that is not because the field of aerodynamics was in the dark ages in 2009 but because it was the first year of a new regulation. See, the thing is that the FIA are constantly introducing new rules, which limits what aerodynamicists are able to do, because otherwise downforce levels get crazy, overtaking becomes even more difficult, and the spectacle of the sport suffers (whole other arguments for another time here that we’ll neatly sidestep).
Now, in 2008, the cars were proper extreme. It was like the collective aerodynamicists of Formula One were all under the influence of the same bizarre hallucinogen. We had winglets everywhere. Wings upon wings. We had flicks and scoops and horns.
The following year, then, was like a Year Zero for wings. Regulations curbing their overuse meant that simple was once again in fashion. So what happened? The designers found a way to circumvent, bypass or otherwise sidestep the rules. Not breaking them. Oh no. Just bending them. Finding a way to gain an advantage while still obeying them. That, after all, is their job.
And so gradually you got this situation where the mad wings crept back, until the 2017 regulations allowed the teams to get even more imaginative, and the designers started dropping acid again (I’m talking to you, Mercedes T-Wing, which is in fact a pretty cool-looking wing).
Look at a wing in Formula One in 2019 and it’s just crazy busy. You look at it and you think, if one of those things break, the rest of the car looks like it would be undriveable, because it’s so integral to the car.
Again, the Mercedes wing is incredibly detailed. Just by looking at it, you can see the idea of it is for the airflow to go around the front tyre and then be sucked in behind the front tyre to the rest of the aero part, so it’s giving you front downforce, it’s helping all the way down the middle of the car, it’s helping the rear wing, it’s helping the full airflow. What’s called a Y250 vortex comes off the side of the front wing and connects everything.
That’s about as technical as it gets for me. I am not an aerodynamics expert, but I love the design of what they come up with. I love the fact that they’re not making the car beautiful to make it beautiful, they’re making it beautiful because that’s how it looks when you design a car aerodynamically. I’ve got a McLaren P1 road car and it’s stunning to look at, but it’s not designed to be beautiful, it’s just beautiful because that’s how it looks when the aerodynamics are working at their best.
5. LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE POOR, OVERLOOKED WIND TUNNEL
When Ross Brawn bought out Honda and Brawn Racing was born in 2009, I found myself rescued from a potentially sticky career situation and sitting in a car, the BGP 001, that looked very, very tasty indeed.
We were a newcomer team, and despite the fact that in Ross we had an engineer who’d already won multiple Championships with Benetton and Ferrari, and despite the fact that every single person in that team had been racing for years, whether as an engineer, aerodynamicist, or a mechanic, nobody really expected us to be competitive.
But that’s because they didn’t know what we knew, which was that Ross had been working on something that would capitalise on a 2009 regulation change, having spotted a loophole in the rules. He’d put a ‘double diffuser’ on the car. A diffuser is a bit of underbody aimed at aiding the passage of air from underneath and out the back, converting it from the low, downforce-creating pressure beneath the car to the natural pressure of the outside air, and reducing drag at the back. And this one did that job, only twice as well.
Like I say, our rivals didn’t know about that. So when I then went on to win six of the first seven races of the 2009 season, I think it’s fair to say that we caught the competition napping and they spent much of the season playing catch-up.
History tells us that Brawn ended up winning the Driver’s and the Constructor’s Championships that season, of course, so all’s well that ends well. But the fact is that given our huge head start, it was a little bit touch and go at the end there. We didn’t fully capitalise on the massive gap we’d opened up on the other teams.
Why? Two words: wind tunnel.
Other teams spend something like £14m or £15m in the wind tunnel per year. At Brawn – new and comparatively underfunded – we were spending something like £500,000.
And time in the wind tunnel is so important. We may have started with a great car but development throughout any year is key and we weren’t doing that. Other teams did. It’s a huge strength at Red Bull, and sure enough they made up an enormous amount of lap time that season because they’d spent so much in the wind tunnel.
McLaren. Again, they were a second and a half slower than us at the first race but made up ground over the season, going on to beat us twice and almost winning the last race but for a brake failure.
Brawn? We changed the front wing once. Other than that, the design we started with was the one we finished with. Lucky it was such a good package.
A simulator doesn’t teach you much about the car. It’s mostly for the driver to get his eye in and help do set-up changes. Mainly it’s just a case of confirming what the data is already telling you. So you’re not actually learning anything. Whereas, a wind tunnel is everything, it really is, for the simple reason that aerodynamics is the most important thing in an F1 car. They will help the mechanical grip, the cooling of the engine, determine the visibility for the driver. Everything is determined by aerodynamics
, because it’s all about downforce. And that comes from the wind tunnel.
6. THE VEXED QUESTION OF SET-UP
Not really a bit of ‘kit’ as such, but so closely related that it might as well go here anyway. In terms of set-up, we’d do some of it in the simulator. Also, we’d carry it over from the previous race, or the team understands which circuits are similar and which are completely different.
Again, they run simulations – and I’m not talking about the simulator that we drive, but computer-based simulations – of what it should feel like with certain set-ups. It’s all very useful and we’d arrive at the circuit with a pretty good set-up most of the time. Put it this way, it would be very unusual for us to turn up and think, Hang on, we’re totally out of bed here and we need to change significant things.
Sometimes you’d have to change big things. Like maybe the suspension geometry – the various aspects that make up the suspension, like camber, toe and ‘caster angle’ – wasn’t working, which would take up to two hours. You make the changes and you think it’s okay. Oh, but it’s still a bit pants and you have to go back to the drawing board. Or the aerodynamics just aren’t working – we’re not getting the downforce that we expected. Why is that? And then they have to run through all the checks and sensors to find out what’s wrong.
A lot of this will be going on behind the scenes while we drivers are still munching on healthy snacks in our motorhomes. Then we get in the car, tell them how it feels, and the next phase starts: how can we make this car better for the race weekend?
I’ll take the car out. Oh, there’s too much understeer at high speed, traction’s terrible, so we’d add a front wing, change the ride height, whatever was needed.
It was mad, the amount of time we spend with the engineers developing the car over the weekend. But then for some races, it’s like, Hang on, this feels great, and you adjust the front wing one or two degrees and that’s it for the weekend. Sometimes cars work on certain circuits and not on others and that was the fun thing in the 2018 F1 season: some races Mercedes were amazing, and other races Ferrari were amazing and then you had Red Bull that were quick in other places. But this year, 2019, it’s all Mercedes. They’re quick everywhere, which is demoralising for everyone else because they don’t have a weakness. Or, if they do, they’re not showing it.
How to Be an F1 Driver Page 12