Sauber has just installed, at a cost of £2.25 million, a computer simply to assist wind tunnel testing. It has one terabyte of memory and 11 terabytes of hard disk space. This his high street stuff compared with what Ferrari has, and Ferrari has had years of experience of using computers.
The story I have heard, and I believe the source to be sound, is that since about 2000 Ferrari's mapping of each circuit has been so sophisticated that its electronics know precisely where the car is on the track. Take this one stage further and the electronics can be tuned to alter the differential, locking it where appropriate, and even change the setting many times in a single corner. Using the same information, the brake bias can also be changed, again for an individual corner, or even a section of it. Likewise the optimum throttle settings between corners, for it might be more advantageous not to hit maximum power, but to be able to brake a fraction later. A good driver can estimate by about a tenth of a second, but on board computer systems react in time so small it is impossible to comprehend.
The programs must be immensely complicated, they have to take in account such factors as weight of fuel and tyre wear until 2005 and the 'one tyre' rule, when did any driver change tyre pressures during a pit stop? I don't think that even Mario Andretti could have made that calculation.
In the 1980s, McLaren developed different sidepod apertures to be fitted according to the ambient temperature so as to keep the engine running at its optimum temperature. That was a huge step forward, they looked at a thermometer and fitted a slightly larger aperture if race day was hotter than qualifying.
If you are going to squeeze every last ounce of performance, and you have massive computing power at your disposal back at base, plus up to 100 kgs of spare weight. Then your on car systems should be able take account of ambient temperature, track temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and so on. Cars wait on the grid and all those measurements could be taken then, and probably are. In fact, it would perfectly legal to take all those measurements at many points round a circuit and feed them by a laptop on the grid.
If someone in F1 thinks there is 1/100th second advantage in being able to take account of the fact that the cross wind at a certain corner is stronger, then that time will be sought. It may be only a case of moving a small amount of ballast from one side of a car to the other.
My source reckons that Ferrari's period of superiority was mainly due to its advances in electronics and that it was actually disguising problems with Bridgestone tyres. By the beginning of the present season, McLaren and Renault had caught up and that would explain Ross Brawn's cryptic remark about Ferrari's problems in 2005 were partly car and partly tyres,
There might also be a connection between the software theory and the trial next year of two former Ferrari employees. After all, you do not need industrial espionage to learn the secrets of a new wishbone, any of the photographers in the pitlane will sell you a set of pictures. A way into Ferrari's software, that would be worth having.
It leads to a seemingly unrelated incident, the fact that Adrian Newey is to leave McLaren, apparently because Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh no longer believe in the 'Superstar Designer'. The experienced, brilliant, engineer, who has leadership and management skills, yes, 'Superstar Designer', no. It has been years since any Technical Director in Formula One has understood every aspect of his car in detail.
The 'Superstar Designer' now needs Supercomputers and teams of bright graduates to use them. I visited BAR a couple of years ago and the design department had about 100 engineers, small fry compared to McLaren and Ferrari. The McLaren MP4 was designed largely by John Barnard, though Alan Jenkins joined him during the project. That was the 1980/1 McLaren design team and Barnard, I think, became the first to be called a 'Superstar Designer'.
Mike Lawrence
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