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Fuji was on the maps of formula 1 racing track this season. Its an amazing circuit, enabling teams to play with different strategies, allowing lot of overtaking opportunities and most importantly it is a beautiful place. Last time when I visited Japan, I could see the Fuji mountain from my office and the view was breathtaking. Anyhow, the race this Sunday was pretty eventful, as expected rains made the event very exciting. And more importantly it gave an insight to the teams on how to optimize their strategies and reduce other factors that play a part. Grossly Fuji track can be categorized into two sectors (Though there are more)
1) Straight Long sector : This is straight long sector and if a car has high speed then overtaking is easy. But for high speed a car need to have low down force.
2) Curvilinear Sector : This is how I define this sector. This sector has lot of curves and needs a high grip for a higher speed. A higher grip demands high down force. Thus, teams are left with two gross strategies , that is either to have low down force or a high down force. But since Fuji is known for rains, there is another factor that comes into the play.
On a typical rainy day, the cars on the long straight sector will have higher speeds and therefore will make a cloud of mist behind them, reducing the visibility of the driver behind them. This phenomena deters the driver from overtaking since he cannot see anything infront of him and he has not choice but to maintain certain distance from the driver infront, else he runs into a risk of collision. On the other hand, on curves specially steep curves, cars will have slower speeds and therefore will not generate watery mist. Making the visibility better and thus overtaking easier, provided the car has a high down force. To explains is in more detail I am posting a picture .... hope it explains. Ferrari's did adopt the strategy of high down force, they were able to compete for podium inspite of making some couple of additional stops as compared to other teams.
I am a fan of formual1, not just because its car racing and one team looses and other wins, but more of because it involves so much of planning, execution, strategy, skills, innovation and definitely risk taking ability on part of everyone. It starts with testing where the team tries to understand the car, the track, the weather, the competition, the tires etc. Anyways, Bahrain race was amazing, Ferrari's and McLarens, both had a very good package, during the first two legs Ferrari's seemed to dominate and during the last leg McLarens. Though there is no explanation why different team dominated during different legs, here is what I think
a) First two legs both the teams had soft tyres
Now for this race after Malaysia heating problem, Ferrari's used rear brake cooling inlets. So with soft tyres they as everyone could, can speed well but while decelerating where G force goes as high as 5G, Ferrari's had an advantage. Ferrari's would have been able to decelerate faster which produces more heat, in a heated environment (Bahrain) but innovative cooling system helped to compensate that. McLarens would have struggled during decelerations.
b) Last Leg.
Last leg was with hard tyres, that means deceleration is limited by tyres, no more excessive heating by hard decelerations and Ferrari's loosing its advantage. The result do substantiate this theory, with McLarens gaining 3 seconds everylap, relative to Ferrari's.
The question that I am not able to understand is, why McLarens did not include any additional cooling knowing that Bahrain is a hot track ? Also why Ferrari's seemed not so competitive without the cooling advantage ?
