Thought the Valencia race was rubbish? Don’t blame the track, blame the rules
The cars did get close during the Valencia race - but only on the formation lap
Valencia’s first F1 race was not a classic. Looking at the rate the race poll it seems most people thought it was as boring as the Bahrain, Spanish and French Grands Prix.
But let’s not jump to conclusions about the track. Circuit designer Hermann Tilke is not to blame for the paucity of action in yesterday’s race. F1 car design and the sporting regulations are responsible.
The GP2 races showed that single seater cars with less downforce and slick tyres were capable of racing wheel-to-wheel on the circuit. The sprint race featured some excellent, genuine battles for position.
F1 has been stuck with the same problem for years: the cars have become so dependent on their wings to generate downforce and grip they become hyper-sensitive to disturbed air from cars in front of them, and cannot get close enough to each other through corners.
The refuelling rules make matters worse, by encouraging the field to spread apart. As anyone who qualifies 11th or worse can use whatever fuel load they choose, all these cars tend to run with high fuel loads in the hope that a safety car deployment will play into their hands – as it did for Piquet Jnr at Hockenheim.
The top ten drivers qualify with their race fuel loads and board and – what do you know? – the cars with less fuel end up nearer the front. So when the race starts the lighter cars drive away from the heavier ones.
We end up with the field spreading apart because of the refuelling rules, and when cars do get close enough to each other they usually can’t pass each other because they are too aerodynamically sensitive.
This is why we fans approach every F1 weekend hoping for rain. It disrupts the grip levels, allows the cars to get close to each other, and can make refuelling strategies less important.
Next year the aerodynamics regulations are going to change, with wings being cut in size and slick tyres brought back. This looks like being a step in the right direction. (Driver-adjustable wings, as we’ve discussed, does not. And Vee’s got misgivings about what KERS will do to the competitivity of some teams).
However refuelling and race-fuel qualifying are set to say, which is a real shame, because they do nothing to make the racing more exciting and usually make it worse.
For years F1 has been looking to revised track design to encourage better racing. Has it really worked? I’d say not – the Bahrain Grand Prix this year was rubbish.
Blame the tracks for bad races? No. Blame the rules.
Paige said on 25th August 2008, 19:04
This is the only Herman Tilke design I’ve ever liked. All of his other designs and “updates” of tracks are rubbish. He’s taken a great historic track in Hockenheim and ripped the bullocks right from under it.
Herman Tilke should be banished from motorsport permanently. Period. The only reason he is still is because he’s BFFs with Bernie.
Brar said on 25th August 2008, 20:13
Sorry Page.To tell you the truth I thing that Hockenheim was the only “amputation” that achieved a good result.
The races there are good. Old Hockh was the easiest circuit. And there was not to much sense in those to long straights and chicanes. The older one with no chicanes, oK! that was really nice and classic, but the time perhaps made it obsolete,
MarathonMan801 said on 25th August 2008, 21:19
“The GP2 races showed that single seater cars with less downforce and slick tyres were capable of racing wheel-to-wheel on the circuit. The sprint race featured some excellent, genuine battles for position.”
Well yes okay, Keith. But the main race was less than enthralling, wasn’t it? On the same track with the same conditions
Salty said on 26th August 2008, 1:25
I think we all agree that the current spec F1 cars make overtaking a lot more difficult than for a GP2 car, or indeed just about any other class of vehicle. Personally don’t think that removal of winglets and re-addition of slicks next year is going to magically fix the problem.
Firstly the winglets are not the main cause of the disturbed air flow produced behind an F1 car. The diffuser is the main source of the dirty air. But the diffuser is what allows the F1 cars to suck down onto the track at speed. They already took away ground effects quite rightly, imagine the speed of cornering in a modern F1 car if that was still there. But removing the diffuser would make them look like Formula Ford.
Secondly the re-introduction of slicks is a mixed blessing. Most overtaking in F1 is executed in the braking zone, not by slip streaming at high speed. The slicks are going to reduce the braking distance of the cars, so reducing the window for drivers to out brake each other.
As for KERS, well the big budget boys are going to make it work. The smaller ones won’t. One team will really nail it and romp home all season. Will this tell us who is the best driver though? Nah! Will we hate it? Yep!
So what has changed? Well, F1 cars are a lot better at accelerating and braking these days, tyres are a lot stickier, and yes, the airflow behind them is turbulent. As the cars have got faster, the circuits haven’t grown to accomodate them. If you have a nice long straight followed by slow corner, you can generally expect to have a chance of some overtaking, but it has to be a straight long enough for a modern F1 car to get close inspite of the turbulence, so no 30° bends half way down them like Herman just put in the middle of Valencia’s start/finish straight, or the following car will lose grip and fall off the pace.
Circuits that are blessed with long straights (a very slightly long sweeping curve will still work) with a following tight corner will work then. Much as I loved the uniqueness of the old Hockenheim, the first third of the new circuit is great because of the hairpin at the end of the long parabolika. Spa works; Les Combes at the end of Kemmel (which actually works as an even longer straight than it is due to the uphill gradient). Monza works; the long run from parabolica to variante rettifilio. You get the general idea.
If you want more overtaking, no tyre changes. A much harder compound would be required for the 200 miles required of them. This would also in turn reduce the marbling of the track off the racing line for a longer proportion of the race – I agree that in this instance slicks would be a better option, as the grooved tyres have more edges to degrade over their lifespan.
Steel brakes. Used in other single seater series where plenty of overtaking still happens. Increases the braking zone, thus the window of opportunity for underbraking.
Just my thoughts, but Tilke really should be looking at what works in a circuit for modern F1 cars – he did a good job with Malaysia and Hockenheim. Valencia is a great location and works fine for other series, but he was meant to be designing it for F1, or perhaps I misunderstood that.
Ricardo said on 26th August 2008, 1:47
I think that F1 cars overtaking is so difficult in most of the circuits but nothing compared with Valencia street one.
It was chossen because of comercial reasons, but many of F1 fanatics just want to see car races!!
the limit said on 26th August 2008, 3:30
The race at Valencia was disappointing as far as entertainment value was concerned, but I love the way the circuit has been built, and I can’t wait to see the 2009 spec cars race there.
As you so pointed out Keith, Formula One still suffers due to its outdated rules, which the fans have wanted to see changed for years and years.
I know its crazy, but I would love it if the drivers had to qualify on full fuel tanks, everybody with the exact amount of gasoline, and for it to be strictly enforced. Then we would sort the men from the boys.
As you pointed out, the lighter cars always end up out front, but if they all had to start on the same fuel load, then all that would change.
Could you imagine the spectacle of the entire field pitting at once, and the chaos it would cause, the spectacle.
Watching one car outfront, with the second car seven seconds behind, and the third fifteen seconds behind that, does not get the old blood flowing.
Infact, it can be down right boring!
michael counsell said on 26th August 2008, 8:07
I don’t think that the opinions on this blog is a vald reson to write off driver adjustable wings. The general person who leves comments simply does not know enough to form a worthwhile opionion about a topic like this.
The Bahrain grand prix wasn’t even that bad as there was actual overtaking for positions near the front of the race ie both Ferraris passing Kubica and Heidfeld passing Kovaleinen…
The reasons Valencia was boring were that:
1. It was too easy few drivers were making mistakes and were qualifying where they should do. Plus mistakes could not be capitalised on in a race. It was also so easy that no one crashed to bring out the “expected” safety car.
2. The slow corners and shortish straights strung out the field.
3. Due to there being no real medium to fast corners or complexes fuel load made very little difference so no fast car was ending up directly behind a slow car. Even pit strategy could rarely make the difference between a positions.
On a plus side who was impressed at Nakajima’s pass on Barrichello?
michael counsell said on 26th August 2008, 8:16
Another thing is that often in the GP2 race the car in front was often up to a second slower than the car chasing due to tyre degradation and how the setup/driver reacts to tyre degradation. This never really happened in the F1 race as the tyres held up remarkably well for the 1 stoppers let alone the the two stoppers.
Journeyer said on 26th August 2008, 8:34
Michael, the thing about driver-adjustable wings is… if the guy behind does it, chances are the guy in front will do it too. It just adds an unneccessary complication. At least that’s how I see it.
But you do make a good point about tyre degredation. I’m guessing Bridgestone has learned from their mistakes in earlier races.
Chalky said on 26th August 2008, 9:45
I watched about 30mins of the race. Every now and then I popped in to see what was happening.
I spun through the recording later on and was seriously disappointed with the lack of action that I expected from a “street circuit”. Lewis even said it didn’t feel like a street circuit but more like he was “driving around a carpark”. Now that says something. It’s a typical new safe F1 circuit. There’s no danger as the cars grip too well with the aero. It’s all too easy for the drivers.
The most memorable parts of the whole weekend was a drunk man trying to get on the circuit in practice and maybe 2 things happened in the race that I can recall that were slightly interesting. Massa & Sutil in the pits and Kimi’s engine went pop. Wow I feel thrilled.
To improve the racing:
Just get rid the front wings or seriously reduce the width of them. All the cars will struggle for front end grip and would have to rely on the tyres.
So, let Bridgestone bring in softer tyres to compensate.
I also would like race fuel qualifying banned too.
Race refuelling really isn’t a requirement either, but I’ll accept it if the above methods are implemented first. One step at a time to see if we can get some on track action back.
Well done Massa though. He seems to like these new smooth dry tracks.
ogami musashi said on 26th August 2008, 10:58
@Keith
You Ask for not jumping on conclusions too early, why don’t you do the same?
Who said it was aerodynamics fault??
All week end long drivers repeated this: “Overtaking will be difficult as there’s no grip off line”.
For the exact same reason they said “You can lose a lot of time with small mistakes because there’s so little grip off line”.
You blame aeros without knowing the actual flow field properties at that particular track.
Cars ran with moderate wings trim meaning the turbulence was more moderate than a track like monaco.
Tyres are to blame as much as aero, you’d be surprised to see how tyre’s grip curve changes with exterior variation are like the aerodynamics one.
There can be a lot of explanations for the lack of overtaking.
An obvious one, and that will make the transition to where i strongly disagree with you, is that F1 cars are aggressive cars. You have a lot of grip, so you need to be aggressive to be the fastest.
GT cars that ran in valencia are another form of racing, the limit of grip is attained much more easily so there’s much more a question of control at the limit.
That is, mistakes from drivers are frequent and then they allow for overtaking.
My point is that racing is not unique, You don’t drive a rally car like a Sprint cup car, and an F1 car is not to be driven like the firsts.
You ask for less downforce which, if taken to the extreme, results in less grip, but what precisely lacked there was grip..
@Salty:
“Firstly the winglets are not the main cause of the disturbed air flow produced behind an F1 car. The diffuser is the main source of the dirty air.”
The diffuser AND the rear wing is the main source of turbulence.
The diffuser itself poses no problems. This is when there’s a coupling with the rear wing that the wake structure become were problematic…But to tell the truth the wheels themselves are a problem when coupled with rear wing’s wake.
As for the winglets, yes they are a problem, most of them create vortex direct to the rear wing, when those vortex leave the rear wing the add to the non linear wake structure.
Reason is simple, they have very high lift coefficient to create vortices which means high strength vortex.
They in addition when in a wake lose their efficiency very fast resulting in even more disturbance.
”
But the diffuser is what allows the F1 cars to suck down onto the track at speed. They already took away ground effects quite rightly, imagine the speed of cornering in a modern F1 car if that was still there. But removing the diffuser would make them look like Formula Ford.”
Diffuser is important but only a small part. It moves the center of pressure back so you need front wing to balance it, and the actual diffusers would not even work 50% of their capacity without the rear wing coupling.
“Secondly the re-introduction of slicks is a mixed blessing. Most overtaking in F1 is executed in the braking zone, not by slip streaming at high speed. The slicks are going to reduce the braking distance of the cars, so reducing the window for drivers to out brake each other.”
I don’t think most overtaking is done on braking in F1.
F1 enjoys, on normal track conditions, the privilege of a lot of in corner overtaking because the grip is huge allowing for many firction circle position (I.E: combination of longitudinal and lateral accelerations).
I’m not quite sure the braking distance will be reduced as terminal top speed will be higher.
”
As for KERS, well the big budget boys are going to make it work. The smaller ones won’t. One team will really nail it and romp home all season. Will this tell us who is the best driver though? Nah! Will we hate it? Yep!”
Kind of bit premature as many teams will buy it from magneti marelli.
”
So what has changed? Well, F1 cars are a lot better at accelerating and braking these days, tyres are a lot stickier, and yes, the airflow behind them is turbulent.”
The tyres are NOT stickier. The actual tyres are not only low grip compared to any other performance series (like GP2,formula nippon, A1 etc..)but they also exhibit quite strange behaviors (especially the graining one) and have a super narrow slip angle operating range meaning that any overshoot of slip angle result in an almost total loss of grip.
All the grip from F1 cars comes from the downforce, that’s why the cars are tricky at low speed while being aggressive in high speed.
”
As the cars have got faster, the circuits haven’t grown to accomodate them. If you have a nice long straight followed by slow corner, you can generally expect to have a chance of some overtaking, but it has to be a straight long enough for a modern F1 car to get close inspite of the turbulence, so no 30° bends half way down them like Herman just put in the middle of Valencia’s start/finish straight, or the following car will lose grip and fall off the pace.”
I think this is not a logical argument. Car’s are faster now. They’re not on another planet either, as 1990 F1 cars were about 2 seconds from now.
but the problem in your argument is that since cars corner faster the delta with top speed (but what is top speed??there’s no top speed in F1) is lower, thus the slipstream needed is actually lower than in another series.
So i don’t see a problem here.
A real problem concerning THAT situation of overtaking (i hope never to see a F1 with only slipstream and braking overtaking only) is the rev limiter imho.
”
If you want more overtaking, no tyre changes. A much harder compound would be required for the 200 miles required of them. This would also in turn reduce the marbling of the track off the racing line for a longer proportion of the race”
No, marbling has nothing to see with hardness of compound. You can grain a road tyre with ease.
You don’t see it because road cars are driven far below their limit and everybody is taking different driving lines so marbles go away.
In addition making harder tyres just make the situation even worse, you just put the cars even more into a low grip situation, works fine for some series aimed at that, not for F1 aimed at having aggressive driving styles.
I think the problem is that you want a certain type of racing while preserving contradictory parameters.
You want to have a modern F1 with speed, while taking elements of 60′s F1 which was typically a low grip formula.
”
Steel brakes. Used in other single seater series where plenty of overtaking still happens. Increases the braking zone, thus the window of opportunity for underbraking.”
They don’t, braking distance is vastly a question of tyre grip. As simple as that.
And all major series with overtaking go to carbon brakes.
Formula Nippon, GP2, A1GP, Le Mans Series..Carbon brakes are not a problem.
Next year less downforce (=drag) and higher terminal speeds will garuanty braking zone to be okay.
Robert McKay said on 26th August 2008, 11:37
Ogami – there might well be no grip offline.
But that doesn’t explain why cars can’t run within 1.5 to 2 seconds of each other. That’s aerodynamics.
Clearly it IS a problem, or the FIA would not be rewriting the aero regs for next year, and would not have wasted all that time money and effort designing the defunct CDG wing.
But going back to the grip offline – surely it should be possible to make a racetrack where the tarmac offline is considerably more grippy than the tarmac on the racing line, and thus giving some help to the driver trying to overtake?
Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine) said on 26th August 2008, 11:41
Ogami, I’m not ‘jumping to conclusions’ about aerodynamics. The FIA’s own Advisory Experts Group produced a report in 1999 that said overtaking would be improved if the FIA downforce levels were cut by 50% and increasing mechanical grip and drag by 10%. It’s taken ten years for Mosley to take their advice seriously.
And, as Steven points out, people who know a sight more about the technology of it than I (Gary Anderson) have said the ’09 measures don’t go far enough to curb the effects of turbulence.
ogami musashi said on 26th August 2008, 12:56
@Robert:
”
Ogami – there might well be no grip offline.
But that doesn’t explain why cars can’t run within 1.5 to 2 seconds of each other. That’s aerodynamics.”
No i don’t think that’s aerodynamics. If it was the case, then in straight lines and/or spare grip conditions (when you have far more grip than needed to take the whole width of the track) the cars would have closed to each other, but it was not the case.
I think it is more down to the simple fact that there’s no point in running into the gear box of somebody as you don’t have any opportunity to overtake.
Second, F1 cars brake fast, it is really not a good idea to follow just behind the gear box if you’re not sure about the pace of the guy leading.
”
Clearly it IS a problem, or the FIA would not be rewriting the aero regs for next year, and would not have wasted all that time money and effort designing the defunct CDG wing.”
Don’t confuse things. There’s a problem with aerodynamics, but that doesn’t mean the problem here were aerodynamics.
”
But going back to the grip offline – surely it should be possible to make a racetrack where the tarmac offline is considerably more grippy than the tarmac on the racing line, and thus giving some help to the driver trying to overtake?”
Yes it is possible, but you don’t need that normally, it is simply that in valencia there was a lot of dust on the surface.
This is also down to the tyre’s operating range which do not tolerate a lot running onto slippery surfaces.
Under normal track circumstances, F1 cars have far less problems taking different lines, and to point in favour of the infamous “free width run off” areas, they do allow for more aggressive overtaking maneuvers, which here obviously you don’t have since there’re walls.
@Keith:
“Ogami, I’m not ‘jumping to conclusions’ about aerodynamics. The FIA’s own Advisory Experts Group produced a report in 1999 that said overtaking would be improved if the FIA downforce levels were cut by 50% and increasing mechanical grip and drag by 10%. It’s taken ten years for Mosley to take their advice seriously.”
The first point is that this study being valid or not, you still jumping onto conclusions that the lack of overtaking, at valencia, during the weekend of 24-26 august 200 was down to aerodynamics.
The second point is that this study means nothing. The same expert group just pointed the opposite in 2000′s saying high downforce low mechanical grip cars would ensure overtaking by making the cars difficult to handle..
This same expert group issued the CDG wing without even having tested it just to find out the wing wouldn’t work.
FIA is not a unified body, there’re many experts in there that have completely different opinions.
”
And, as Steven points out, people who know a sight more about the technology of it than I (Gary Anderson) have said the ‘09 measures don’t go far enough to curb the effects of turbulence.”
You could point me ross brawn saying a thing, i could point you to paddy lowe saying the other way.
If there was a consensus, that is, if the problem was so simple that a unique way the solution, then believe me wings would have been banned since a long long time.
The 09 regs are a first step, the reason being it is that physics (and especially race dynamics) are far from the high school level.
Just to point you to my main point, you have no clue at all about what caused the problem.
Aerodynamics may have their part but you don’t know this.
That’s what i wanted to say.
Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine) said on 26th August 2008, 13:08
Ogami – So you think there was something different about the Valencia race than, say, Bahrain or Magny-Cours? What was that?