Following Monza I put out a video on why all the drivers were running wide at Parabolica
and the FIA were being so strict about it. But another thing to really show its ugly
head due to the unique characteristics of Monza was the absolute cluster-ruckus that
was everybody trying to get a tow at once and missing out on getting a final hot lap
in. But before we get onto that I’m going to
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Right - Monza then. As previously stated, the Italian track is the only high-speed power
circuit on the F1 calendar. It’s multiple long straights mean 84% of
the lap is run at full throttle so almost everything on the car is biased towards speed
in setup/ You want the car to reach high top speeds
and reach them quickly. This is crucial to getting a fast lap in qualifying. Or any time,
really, but qualifying is the session of nailing that one fast lap.
That’s why in Monza - and to a degree in Spa the previous weekend up the very long
full throttle section from La Source to Les Combes - we saw cars teaming up to utilise
what’s been called ‘The Tow’. Now we kind of instinctively know what the
tow is - team mates (usually) will run one behind the other on the qualifying outlap
so that the leading car can give the trailing car a marginal boost.
The effect is genuinely pretty marginal but - as we know - in Formula 1, and especially
qualifying, the small margins can make all the difference.
To get a tow from the car in front, the car behind needs to get into the leading car’s
slipstream - that is, the low pressure volume of air being created behind them.
See, in a more universal sense: the track stays still, the air is hanging in a fairly
stationary way and a Formula 1 car rushes through it. I mean, we know that, obviously
- we see it all the time. Well, we don’t see the air but we see all the other stuff.
I’m getting away from myself here. But, obviously this is a silly reference frame
to use if you want to study the interaction between the air and the car because you’re
most interested in what happens to the car. So instead, let’s just assume the car stays
still and the track and rushes past it. This is exactly the same model, we have just changed
our frame of reference - that is ‘the thing we chose as a stationary point’ from the
track to the car. And this is what car designers do themselves.
A wind tunnel is just a car held stationary while huge fans suck air over the car and
a rolling road treadmill simulates the track moving underneath.
But let’s ignore the car for a moment and really think about the moving air, which we
can think of as wind. And at hundreds of kilometres an hour, we really can think of this as hurricane
strength wind. So imagine you - a human (I assume) - trying
to walk through this hurricane. While holding a shield. You can almost feel that right?
It’s really hard to push forward against the wind.
But, if instead you were walking behind this first person you’d find it a heck of a lot
easier. That’s because the huge winds are being
displaced by the person in front creating a large pocket of low pressure, low density
air behind them that’s much, much easier to pass through.
So you use less energy walking behind the leading person and you can even move much
faster in this pocket, this slipstream, should you want to.
In this case the person behind would be getting a ‘tow’ because - for the same energy
- it seems like they’re being pulled forward faster than if they were in the brunt of the
howling winds. Back to the cars then.
So naturally with these big straights in Monza it’s important to maximise your top speed
potential to shave a tenth or two off your fast lap.
Your fast lap begins with a lap out from the pits to set you up. Your speed all the way
down the pit straight in particular is important as you want to nail it right through your
outlap to set you up as fast as possible for when you switch to your fast lap as you cross
the line. On your own, you’re obviously pushing against
the air like the guy with the shield. Obviously, F1 cars are designed to be a lot more elegant
and slippery against the wind that old Shield Boy but they still drag against the air.
And those big wings, even when flattened out in super Monza spec, still drag against the
air kind of like shields themselves. A lot. They pull against the acceleration of the
car a lot. So obviously if you didn’t have all this
air to push through all the way down the pit straight you’d be able to do it a lot faster,
hit top speed a lot faster, get to the first corner in a quicker time.
Which is why you want to be the second person - behind the Shield Guy. If you stay behind
them all the way down the back straight, Rettilineo, using less energy than you would have needed.
Then, follow them through Parabolica onto the pit straight.
You can then use this low pressure, low density slipstream to accelerate even faster and then
slingshot out past them to maximise your speed down the straight and start your lap off right.
If you’re very lucky it could give you maybe a 10 km/h boost by the end of the pit straight
and one tenth of a second cut out of your lap time. So, small margins. But important
in the world of qualifying. And of course, this is also why you’ll tuck
in behind the car in front when looking to overtake them during the race. You get more
acceleration available and can sling shot past. Exactly the same thing, except it’s
not a consensual manoeuvre between team mates. But back to qualifying and why almost everyone
failed to set a lap time in the last run through Q3 at Monza.
So the natural pattern of Q3 is most people will go out and set a lap in the first half
of the session to make sure they’ve got something on the table in case anything dramatic
happens later. Obviously this will be a genuine attempt at a lap but most drivers expect to
go for their best possible lap in the second half of the session.
Quite often, track evolution means that the track improves throughout qualifying so you
tend to want to be the last person out on track at the end of Q3 for the best possible
chance of a supreme lap. Again, these are small margins we’re talking about but strategists
are paranoid pernickity people. In Monza, there is the added effect of this
tow we’ve discussed. Teams will have prearranged with their drivers who gets to tow whom ahead
of time (normally on the basis of swapping with each run or between race weekends).
But also, with everyone else on track you really don’t wanna be the chump who goes
out first and leads the train of cars round on the outlap. You’ll be the only sucker
pushing through the hurricane while everyone else benefits from the tow behind.
As a quick aside, there’s a bit of an overplayed myth about the ‘double slipstream’. If
you’re the third car in a train of close running cars you do get a slight extra benefit
but nothing as ridiculously overpowered as ‘double slipstream’ suggests. The majority
of the slipstream effect comes from the first car and the second car in line merely helps
continue that hole in the air down the train. Another fun aside that we don’t really see
in F1 because they don’t run in trains or peletons like oval racers or cyclist do - if
the car behind runs right nose to tail with the car ahead they can both benefit.
This is because a lot of the drag on the leading car comes from the large vacuum of air directly
behind it as it displaces the air away. If the following car moves close into this spaces,
it breaks the vacuum by creating a continuous slipstream down the train and sending the
vacuum to the back. Both cars now share the vacuum space of one car and will both be able
to move faster. And this effect increases as more cars join
the train. Pretty fun. Though the leading car will always be doing the most work, it
still gets to benefit somewhat from very close slipstreaming.
Oooh, another aside - during a race you might sometimes see a driver weave to ‘break the
tow’, which is basically just their attempt to create a bit of a moving goalpost of shielded
air behind them to stop the car behind benefitting. This was especially funny during the Formula
2 sprint race when the leader, Aitken, tried to break the tow of the entire train behind
by weaving across the track resulting in a slithery snake of cars right down the pit
straight. Anyway back to the hell of qualifying. Earlier
in the session, Mercedes had already played silly buggers by pretending to lead the train
out of the pits only to pull to the side and let everyone through. You might argue that
this moment was the real ‘gloves off moment’ where everyone else thought ‘oh fine, I
guess we can do whatever we want to make sure we’re not stuck at the front of the pack.’
And so in the dying moments of qualifying, everyone left the pits to go on their final
fast runs. Bear in mind, team send their drivers out
with very small margins to get to the line on time. Charles Leclerc, for example, was
sent out with a ten second margin to play with between him being able to get to the
start/finish line and the chequered flag ending the session.
Hulkenberg, who led the train out decided to just skip the first corner entirely and
go down the escape road chicanes so he could slot back into the middle of the train.
Stroll, second in line, wasn’t having any of it and backed right up to make sure the
Hulk would still be leading. Sainz behind wasn’t prepared to take the lead either
and thus began the most farcical attempt by all drivers to not be at the front of the
train. So much so that they even blocked other drivers who may or may not have wanted to
get on with it. As we saw, the end result was that the pack
was so slowed that only two cars made it to the line in time and every other car failed
to start their quick lap. They looked like amateurs. Teams that spend millions of dollars
and run international mission control style operations were undone by drivers pratting
about on the outlap. It’s quite funny really. The question remains: does anything need to
be done about this? There were a couple of reprimands handed out for driving unnecessarily
slowly but it was hard to separate the complicit drivers from the affected ones.
Part of me says, ‘just let the drivers get on with it and if they are too silly to do
qualifying properly then it’s their own fault if they lose out’. But another part
knows it’s embarrassing and drivers need to be given an official word not to faff about
on the outlap. They were already given a minimum time to
meet on the outlap to try and kerb this ‘waiting for the tow’ behaviour but obviously it
didn’t work. How do you legislate this? ‘Don’t faff about on the outlap’ isn’t
exactly a hard and fast rule. It seems absurd we need to think about the need to write rules
to tell drivers to stop messing around and play the game properly but here we are.
It’s the so called pinnacle of motorsport but with such high stakes, so the likelihood
of toying with the letter of the law increases. Bunch of gangsters, they are.