Are current F1 cars too easy to drive?

Jon

I tend to disagree a little with you on this point mainly because most of the buttons that are on the wheel there days pretty much always exsited. They used to be on the dash but have been moved to the wheel for packaging's sake. If you eliminated LC, TC, and paddle shift you would likely have less buttons untill the engineers figured out what else he could burden you with during the race. MS's statement that you could put the car more on the limit with the driver aids is correct, but to me, it is purer to see them do it themselves with no outside help at all. Driving an F1 car should be difficult. Just my two cents.

Lou

 

Next years V8's should be a lot easier to drive than today's V10's.

 

Yes they will be 8/10s easier to drive.
If the rules ever get to 4 cylinders they will once again be so easy to drive there is a fear that a drivers wages may not be enough to support a growing family.
If a 1 or 2 cylinder rule ever emerges, drivers will have to pay to drive.

 

I completely agree that any car driven at the real limit is difficult to drive. By definition it must be.

If you've done any competitive driving though you can recognize how much more talent and ability it takes to get just a little more out of a given car. As you get closer and closer to the limit of control it takes more and more ability to get a smaller and smaller gain in time. There comes a point where a driver is astronomically better and yet he's only a couple tenths faster than his competition.

I don't have to have 99% of a top driver's ability in order to run times 99% as fast. That last 1% is much, much more difficult to extract and takes much, much more ability.

 

Technically, they'd be 2/10ths easier to drive, or 8/10ths as hard. Either way, they ought to be phoning it in next year

 

no car is easy to race on the limit, having traction control, power steering and automatic transmission just improves the cars performance. Now to improve racing.....lose the carbon brakes....lengthens the braking distances......lose the big wings......widen the cars to improve mechanical grip.

 

Have you ever watched someone like Schumacher do a lap, making adjustments virtually every corner? Most of us can't drive on the street, use our cell phones, and manually adjust the radio without chancing an accident.

Driving an F1 car for a two hour sprint is not at all easy, it requires an incredible amount of concentration and energy.

 

Tiff Needle drove a Williams F1 car (looked to be the FW25 from 2003) this past week on Fifth Gear against the new M5. At the end of the segment one of the guys asked him if it was hectic in the cockpit and if he was constantly doing stuff. Tiff said it was the opposite and that "the cars are now so well sorted, that they're actually quite easy to operate." Take that fwiw.

 

Being easy to drive and being easy to drive on the limit are two VERY different things. Yall also need to take into account the physical wear on the driver while he's in the car... 4.5gs wasn't even thought of 40 years ago, but now it's common in F1 around certain corners.

 

I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

 

Common around certain corners?

Err, no.

Under braking (longitudinal) - forces of over 5 G's are recorded when braking for slow chicanes from well over 300km/h.

Around corners (lateral) - the most you're gonna see is between 3.5 and 4.0 G's, and there are only a dozen or so corners in the season where those forces are reached (e.g. Maggots and Bridge at Silverstone, Mergulho at Interlagos, Degner Curve and 130R at Suzuka, New Holland 1 and 2 at Catalunya, Audi-S at Nurburgring, Acque Minerali 1 at Imola, Estoril and Nurburgring at Magny-Cours).

 

In F1 magazine there was a feature about the new Bahrain track (this was a while ago) and it said around one of the turns the drivers could pull 4.5gs around it...

either way, 3+gs is still a LOT of force to be put under for a 2 hour race!

 

But if he had to compete it against another F1 car, he might find himself working a bit harder. Plus I doubt he was engaged in all of the race-management requirements the drivers have to deal with, making constant adjustments and communications. If all you have to do is sit back and knock it around the track, I'm sure today's cars ARE much easier to drive than the older ones.

 

5Th gear: BMW M5 vs Williams

Video: http://rapidshare.de/files/6530812/M5vsF1.wmv.html

 

The main thing that I see that is less required by the drivers of modern F1 cars is throttle control. Traction Control (TC) lets the driver keep the pedal on the ground and the computer sorts out how much real throttle to put in so the tires won't spin. This can also be seen in cornering after braking where drivers simply floor the pedal and the computer prevents oversteer through more TC work.

That is probably the main thing why I say that drivers today have an easier car to work with. They don't have to worry about spinning tires on the starting grid for starts and don't have to worry about oversteering (unless of course the TC/computeres don't work right!).

Thanks for posting up that video F1racer. For a correction of my previous post after watching the video again, the car Tiff is driving is last year's FW26b without the wings on either side of the chassis above the front suspension.

Edit:

Pic from video, notice the holes above the front suspension where the wings would attach through: http://img478.imageshack.us/img478/9722/f11si.jpg

Pic from 2004 of Montoya in the FW26b. Wings attached above the front suspsension: http://img478.imageshack.us/img478/7473/formula1k1du.jpg

 

Tiff also said that getting the final second out of the car is very,very tough and that only the elite drivers could do that. So very similar to what has been said here.