Is everyone jealous of Ferrari's secret ingredient?

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

0:30can't ignore that Aston Martin are way slower than expected, though they've got the best designer in the history of Formula One. I would not want to be in the same room as Fernando Alonso right now. And we did say he spends more time in the panic than he does the kitchen. Gordon Ramsay has joined the chat and sent us a question he'd like us to answer. It's Will. It's Naomi. It's David. It's Jolie. Now let's get you up to speed.

1:00Up to speed.

1:05Well, we are all back together again for another episode. Jolie, you weren't with us for our last episode, but it's good to have the band back together. She's too much in demand. Too in demand. Well, I was away with one of our teams we're going to be talking about a lot today. Lovely. Well, this is going to be episode four. Looks like the Max episode is getting a lot of love, over half a million views. If you guys haven't checked it out, then please head over to YouTube, check it out, or wherever you get your podcasts. What did you guys think of it? How it's gone down? Well, I think I said at the time, I just love how open he is.

1:38He feels safe with us because we've known him a long time. We're not going to throw any curveballs in there. We admire his success, but we need to know, what does he think of these new regs? What is his hopes and desires? How long is he going to be around? And I think he was pretty forthright in his answers. Yeah, and that's really reflected in the comments. They always say, don't read the comments. We always read the comments. And my favorite ones were the ones that said, I hate this podcast. I hate this interview because it's made me fall in love with someone that I thought I hated. And it's lovely because that's exactly what you guys did.

2:10You drew that side out of him that, you know, those of us who've known him for a while, we know it's there. But you managed to display that for all to see. And yeah, that's why I think it's so good. It was such a great interview. And I think that's exactly what we want to do here, right? I mean, people can form opinions about what these drivers, team principals, mechanics, whoever it is that you look upon in F1, you can draw an opinion of them. But when you actually meet these people, they're all just humans and they're all actually really lovely. So it's nice to be able to bring that side of Max out.

2:39And as you say, hopefully have converted some people into new Max fans. Actually, just picking up on that, you're absolutely right. They're all just humans. Why do we put people on pedestals? You see, you don't understand this, DC, because you're one of those people that we put on a pedestal. You guys keep kicking me before I come in the studio. It's because 99.999999 % of people on earth will never have and will never be able to compute how you do what you do. And it's why we love the sport. It's why we put you guys on pedestals, because you are able to do this thing that we love and we could never do.

3:13Wow, this is very wholesome to start the day. The kumbaya. We've got a heap to discuss, because final pre-season testing is done and dusted, and now we are heading into Australia. So who's hot and who's not? I'm going to start with Ferrari because they are the testing Formula One world champions, which we know means absolutely nothing at all. But let's start outright pace. They topped the test. As we were saying on our podcast episode, the regulations have changed this year. Now every time the drivers hit a straight, they're able to open the rear wing and the front wing reduce the drag, reduce the downforce, increase top line speed.

3:54Every team, that rear wing opens. Ferraris doesn't just open. It flips 180 degrees and goes upside down. Now, what does that do? The basics of aerodynamics in Formula One are the opposite of wings on aeroplanes. Wings on aeroplanes are designed to provide lift and launch them up into the sky. Wings on Formula One cars are upside down and designed to push the cars down onto the track and increase grip. So this wing flip in 180 essentially turns it into an airplane wing and induces lift. And that tiny little wing at the bottom just helps to keep those tires down on the ground so the rear tires aren't lifted up into the air.

4:29It's incredibly smart. It means the Ferrari is lightning in a straight line. And as we saw from their practice starts, the Ferrari off the line. I don't know if you guys saw the last video of this because it's madness. I mean, who didn't see it? You've got all the other cars lined up. Row one, row two, row three. Lewis is back on like row 10. I think he started from 9th. I think he started from Qatar. There were gaps between each row. He wasn't even in Bahrain anymore. And by the time they got to turn one, Lewis was P1. The way it looks at the moment, Ferrari could qualify on the back row of the grid and be leading the Grand Prix by turn one.

5:03Like that's how good that car looks. Yeah, but the saving grace though for anyone who's thinking, well, that's going to make a mockery of qualifying. Melbourne, short run to the first corner, narrow racetrack and quite a tight short apex corner, which we've seen incidents in the past. So I don't think we'll see the dominance of a start in Melbourne. But it reminds me of, through the history of time, 15 years in Formula One, when you come with an innovation that gives you a real advantage over the others, it feels good. That little secret portion of power. And there was a time at McLaren where we had what was called the third brake.

5:38Of course, there's a brake in each corner, but we had the normal brake pedal, and then we had a third pedal, which we could, with a little solenoid switch on the steering wheel, put it to brake the left rear or the right rear. So it actually worked like a tank track. So a tank turns by slowing down one side of the car. So we learned to sort of balance a car at high speed by throttling and braking together, but it would only brake the inside rear wheel and it would help then mean that you didn't have to have as much steering angle, which meant you didn't lose as much downforce, which meant you were quicker through the corner.

6:14Did you ever forget which pedal was which though? When you're learning how to use it, you only did that once because it resulted in a high speed spin. But we managed to run that for more than half a season before eventually a photographer, Darren Heath, managed to get a photograph inside the cockpit. Good old Darren. And then he exposed it. No one could understand how they were doing what they were doing. And we were talking about testing when cars break down. All the photographers try and get underneath to see it. But yeah, as DC says, his mica broke down at the side of the track, and Darren Heath was close by, and he just put his arm inside the cockpit with his camera, click, click, click.

6:47That's a shutter, by the way. I think it was before digital photography, so he had to go and get the negatives processed and then saw what he had, and it was like, we've got them. We know what they're doing. Can I just rewind a little bit into these innovations? Was it any good? It sounds great. Was it any good? Yeah, it was two, three turns a lap. Okay, well, everybody is talking about this Ferrari rear wing, right? It's gone viral. Everyone's thinking, why didn't we do this? But have the numbers proven that it's worth as much as how cold it looks? The question's got to be that although the regulation says that the wing has to be able to open and close to the straight line mode in under 0.4 of a second, there is a moment where as it inverts, it's clearly going to be momentarily like an airbreak.

7:34that has to have a negative effect even if that's happening in 0.1 of a second so we don't know as we speak whether they're going to run that in Melbourne or whether they'll run it at all this season People love to make big storylines everyone's desperate for the season to come back so we're all grasping at straws about every little detail are we really putting Ferrari? are we predicting Ferrari? Well, just to answer your question first of all, if you look at where we started with these cars back in the Barcelona test that was not covered to where we are after the second test in Bahrain, the cars already look drastically different.

8:09So I think there's an element of whilst teams are sandbagging, a lot of them are at the front. Nobody wants to be the fastest dog. Sandbagging is essentially when teams up their fuel loads, lower their engine modes. They basically don't want to show their full hand because they don't want the competition to know that they've got X amount left in the bag. They want them to think we're on target. We've got nothing more to look for. I've never understood that though, because you've always got to know what is the potential of your package. So I get it, but at a certain point, you cannot find out for the first time how quick the car is in qualifying.

8:43And there's so much chat that Mercedes haven't turned the engine up fully yet, that McLaren weren't even running a race-spec engine in their car yet, because they didn't have it from Mercedes. I think one thing that's fascinating with Ferrari is they have shown their hand, and they've shown these upgrades, which if they run them in Australia or any races in the future, they will be very difficult, nigh on impossible to replicate by other teams. And that's key to this. If it's a silver bullet, it's going to be so hard to copy. It could be a complete distraction technique. They've had this as a little side project.

9:17Now other teams go and spend time looking at whether it works in CFD, which is the computational fluid dynamics, putting design team onto looking at it, which means they're then not utilising that resource to develop the old car. Just to answer your question there, Jolie, obviously there's a lot of could this be the quickest team? Have we seen everything from each team? I personally think from what we have seen, what we've got access to, that Mercedes is still holding a lot back. So there's a lot of talk about Ferrari and they were the quickest in terms of their final lap time. But Mercedes had a lot of potential, although they had a little bit of reliability issues, which I think is a bit of a concern.

9:53But look, I think between the two of them, we're looking at the two fastest teams. And obviously that's fast start is going to be a big aid to Ferrari. So, yeah, that's I think there's going to be no surprise between the two of those. But I think what's been a big shock is the woes of testing. Will, do you want to pick up on who's lost testing for sure? Who's lost testing? Well, DC picked it up at the start, Aston Martin. Horrible preseason test. I mean, this was supposed to be the car, right? The Adrian Newey car, no expense spared. Honda coming back to the sports, you know, sort of full time.

10:31And it's the Honda engine that is the massive woe. And if we look back to the last time there was a big engine regulation change, Honda were with McLaren. They got it completely wrong. And it appears that they are massively, massively, not just off the pace, but with an engine that is unreliable. And on the last day of testing, they only got six laps in. Yeah, but not even timed laps. And when you say off the pace, can we just clarify that we're talking four seconds? off the pace. I mean, I was recently with the Aston team. I was with them pre-testing. The mood was great. And then I was with a few of them post-testing and the mood in camp definitely wasn't great.

11:10And we've spoken a lot about Lewis potentially retiring, Max potentially leaving F1, Alonso. There's been a lot of talk about this being his last year, especially someone with all his success. He'd want to go out on a bang. It's very difficult when you've got a downer power engine to actually know how good the car is because a very good car, they've all got the same tyres. So the best car clearly takes those tyres to a higher limit. There's more energy going into those tyres but if you've got the downforce then there's less sliding and you take the potential. So there's no guarantee that let's say Honda fixed the problem like that and they suddenly have the same power.

11:47Maybe that'll bring the Aston Martin car into a window where it doesn't work. So I don't think it's as simple as saying Adrian and his team have done a great job and Honda Boo Hoo. You know, the two have to work together. What is really surprising, and you mentioned, Will, there, that Honda's come back to Formula One, which might confuse some of our new listeners because Honda were still supplying engines to Red Bull last year. But the point of that was they decided to pull out of Formula One and it was scheduled that their last year would be last year. And like six months later, Lauren Stroll presumably managed to persuade them to redesign a new engine for the new regulations, but they'd switched the programme off and then they had to gear it all back up again.

12:29Meantime, they've lost engineers and designers to other manufacturers. And it clearly shows brainpower is not something that you can just do with headcount. You've got to have people with experience. And of course, talking of a lack of experience, we've got the new team, Cadillac, which everyone, we're assuming that we're going to be last of the grid, but they've got the Ferrari engine. Now looking at the grid, Are we thinking Aston could possibly fall behind them? I think they could. And honestly, I think Cadillac have done themselves proud. Yeah, I'm going to agree. Turning up and doing every day of the shakedown and both pre-season tests.

13:04Look, they've had little issues here and there, but they've run well. They've run consistently, loads of laps on the board. And their marketing, sorry. Let's not take away from that as well, because I think for a lot of fans that might not have necessarily been watching testing, They took over Times Square for their launch. Super Bowl, baby. That in itself, the marketing, yeah, they're working overtime. It's massive. And, you know, you can't underestimate the job that it takes to put a car on the grid from scratch. It's incredible. And, yes, they have loads of experienced people on that team. But they've all come from different teams.

13:40They've all got to gel and mesh and ultimately create a culture from nothing. I think they've done great so far. Will they be slowest in Melbourne? Possibly. But not if Aston Martin are still looking as terrible as they are. But with that Ferrari engine, again, they could qualify last and make up 5-10 positions off the line. Did you get any feel on the driver comparisons? Because I think I mentioned in a previous discussion between us all that it feels that Valtteri should have the upper hand in that team because he's still current. He stayed with Mercedes. He was doing the simulator work. He did some test events.

14:15And it feels that Checo, a Grand Prix winner, a guy that at a certain point in his life was the most consistent tyre preservation driver out there. But he kind of went off the boil at the end of his Red Bull career. So I think the spotlight's on him as an individual. So if we got a feel for, was he matching Valtteri because they're doing split days with one car, we just won't know until we get to Melbourne. It's tough to really figure that one out. And I think, you know, one thing that we spoke about on one of the previous episodes is the fact that Valtteri and Checo are going to have to work together.

14:45You know, it can't be man-a-man. But they have to beat each other. as well. They definitely do. I don't think they do. Not this year. Really? I don't think they have to beat each other. Their role this year is not to one-up each other. Their job this year is to make that team look competitive. It's an American team. Just great. It's about consolidating and moving forward and learning and creating the foundations of what this team will be into the future. I think they will be given the mandate this season of look, you guys are safe. You're safe no matter what happens. Is Colton Hurt going to win the Formula 2 title and get a seat next year?

15:23Very, very, very unlikely. So just bed yourselves in and take it easy. Wouldn't you say that expectations play such a big role into what we've seen in testing? I mean, we're talking about two teams who are at the back of the grid based off of what we've seen in testing. And we're giving them completely different reviews. Obviously, Aston Martin are a team that have a lot of experience, do not have any lack whatsoever of funding, two experienced drivers that are fresh on the grid. They've been here for a while and they are nowhere. And we're all saying they've lost testing, whereas you've got Cadillac, who our expectations were really low.

16:00And yes, they're still at the back of the field. But I think, as you say, they've done themselves very proud. People keep asking them whether, you know, they feel like a real F1 team. Are they going to add value to Formula One? And I think they've proven that, you know, they're not playing games. I mean, the starting blocks for them are in a really good position compared to, I think, what a lot of people expected. Yeah, I think just coming back to what Julie was saying, their launch, the way they did that. I was speaking to some Apple executives as ahead of their big launch of their streaming servers.

16:27And they were like, yeah, that's the kind of way Apple would look to do something. They were really impressed. And to have a company like that acknowledge that an automotive Formula One team have done something cool to bring brand awareness to the public is, I think, quite remarkable. I think you've got also to look at Cadillac are a rookie team. Aston Martin have been around for a long time, as you say. So if you were to compare them, say, with drivers, Lewis didn't get a podium last year. Liam Lawson didn't get a podium last year. Both started off the season with a bit of difficulty, overcame their hurdles, you know, pretty similar seasons.

17:03Liam, as a rookie, was seen to ultimately, by the end of it, have had a successful season and pulled it all together. Lewis' season was seen as a total disaster. Why the difference? one's got the experience the other hasn't expectations well in Drive to Survive that is coming out shortly and we'll be talking about we see a specific driver a specific rookie do very very well Kimi Antonelli which warmed my heart because he is I don't know how much you guys have worked with him but he's such a nice guy off of the track a little fun story he's a trail he's just a nice kid I was going to say he's a nice kid I did an event with him and he said to me I don't leave the event until I take a photo with every single person that has queued that I have access to.

17:43And his team was saying, he's so lovely, but as a Mercedes driver, he doesn't realise how exhausting that is. He'll grow over that. That's what I was going to say.

17:56On Mercedes, their loophole. And Will, I'm going to lean on you to explain a little bit more about that. Oh, please don't. But is it a storm in a teacup? Or have we got a big advantage? It's not a storm in a teacup at all. Naomi, I don't know if I want to pass this one over to you. But essentially, it's all about compression ratios. Ultimately, it's about how much bang you get for your buck out of the engine. And Mercedes have found a way to get more bang for their buck out of the fuel being pushed through the engine while the engine is at temperature and running than when the tests are done on the engine, which is when they're cold.

18:30Now, the other teams were not happy about this because they'd all designed it within the intention of the regulation, whereas Mercedes saw a loophole and decided to maximize the availabilities within that loophole, such as Formula One. What is a loophole? I mean, we make it sound like such a negative thing, and it's not. No. It's innovation. It's genius. We said the gray area in a set of regulations is where creativity comes out, where we see the likes of an Adrian Newey or whoever's found this loophole at Mercedes comes up with these creative things that everybody loves to hate because they didn't think about it themselves.

19:04But they are hating. Ferrari's upside down wing. But they're getting rid of this. This Mercedes loophole. Well, are they? Are they? And this is the thing. So there will be a vote between the teams, the F1 Commission, on whether or not to change the way in which the tests are done on the engine in order to do a test when the engine is warm rather than when it's at ambient temperature. So in other words, when the engine will be getting its biggest bang for its buck. but intriguingly since all the teams that didn't have this technology decided to raise a fuss about it and raise their concerns it now seems like they may be backtracking and wouldn't even vote to change the test should should they be given that opportunity because they see an opportunity there potentially to do something.

19:52DC put us in the cockpit how much of an advantage do you think this will be potentially they're talking about if there is a change it's only going to be around the summer breaks. That's like half a season worth of advantage. Yeah. Well, look, there's been many examples of where teams have found a loophole, found an advantage for half a season. I'm thinking Braun, Jenson, Button. They came out with a double diffuser, which gave them an advantage aerodynamically. That was then copied by the other teams by mid-season. And from mid-season on, they never won another Grand Prix. But they'd done enough accumulation of points in the beginning of the year to secure the championship.

20:22So anything that's giving you more horsepower, horsepower and downforce are the two most important things in Formula One because the horsepower will push you through there and the downforce will help you in the corners. So it is a real advantage to Mercedes, to McLaren, who have the Mercedes engine, and to Williams, who have the Mercedes engine. And Alpine. And Alpine, of course, yeah, completely excluded them. Amazingly, the Alpine team owned by the Renault group have closed down their engine manufacturing sites. Renault's running Mercedes power, Cadillac's running Ferrari power. It's a whole crazy world.

20:56But it's always been the case, the affiliation. You know, Mercedes have used some of the powertrains from Renault and some of the road cars, and Aston Martin used AMG Mercedes engines and their road cars. I think the economy is a skill for these smaller manufacturers means that we see a lot of these collaborations. Well, I just want to say that when people at home heard that there is a potential change in the regulations to address this loophole, people in the comments sections were up in arms. They said, no way. If they're cheating, it needs to be changed now. Why are you going to give them a head start?

21:31Well, exactly. They're not cheating. If anything, the others should have thought of this themselves. But because there's been so much sort of controversy about this online, I really want to hear from our listeners at home. What do you think? Do you think that Mercedes have totally figured it out? Or do you think that the FIA should get their stuff together and change this at the beginning of the season if it is an issue? Actually, just on that, you mentioned the FIA, the Federation International Automobile. They are the governing body of Formula One. And I've read recently, they're going, well, we're only about 20 people writing the rules and Formula One teams have hundreds of people, which is why we didn't figure out the loophole and then close it down that the Mercedes engineers and designers have done.

22:09You probably don't want to say that out loud. Well, you know, here's the thing, though. If the regulation makers did a better job, quite frankly, of understanding the operational window of a Formula One car, An operational window for Formula One car isn't sitting in a garage at ambient temperature. It is out on track. The engine temperature at 110 degrees, everything red hot, brakes at over 1 ,000 degrees. That's where they should be designing the rules and regulations. Interestingly, we talked about Ferrari and their starts. Other teams having difficulties with their starts, it seems. Ferrari raised the issue of race starts and how difficult they would be to the FIA.