- 11 Jul 08, 22:18#54837
Ayrton Senna: WDC 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991
McLaren: WCC 1974, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2007
McLaren: WDC 1974, 1976, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2008
From ITV.com:
After Lewis Hamilton’s majestic British Grand Prix win, Sir Jackie Stewart and others have hailed him as Formula 1’s new rain master.
Throughout Formula 1 history a few drivers have shown a special affinity for driving in the rain. Some – Jacky Ickx or Jean Alesi for example – seemed to reach a level they couldn’t quite manage in the dry; while others, like Stewart, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, were the best of their generation in any conditions but especially awesome in the wet.
In his latest feature for itv.com/f1, Mark Hughes analyses what it is about Hamilton that makes him a great wet-weather driver, giving a fascinating insight into his driving technique.
Lewis Hamilton has now won three of the past four wet grands prix: Silverstone and Monaco this year added to Japan 2007.
In fact the only wet grand prix he’s contested and not won since that Fuji race was the infamous Chinese GP, and even then he showed a startling superiority before his intermediate tyres wore out.
Of the four guys in the two quickest cars at the head of the field, he’s clearly the best wet-weather driver.
It’s a mixture of a wonderfully fine-honed feel for the messages the car is giving him and a driving style that allows him the flexibility to adapt to whatever the car’s dominant handling trait is.
This latter point is a huge boon in wet-weather racing, where the variation in the car’s behaviour is much greater than in the dry because of the more variable grip levels.
Hamilton likes to be able to use the rear of the car to help him turn in. He’s totally relaxed with an oversteering, sliding car and is superb at maintaining momentum going into the corner even with the rear out of line.
His feel allows him to manipulate the car in such a way that the oversteer never becomes excessive.
Instead it just scrubs the excess speed away, usually even before the apex is reached, and he arrives there with the direction change completed, disruptive steering lock kept to a minimum.
It’s tricky as hell to make work in wet conditions – far easier to just lean against the front of an understeering car (where the front tyres, rather than the rears, are running wide), using the scrub of sliding front tyres to dictate the pace.
But if you can pull it off, if your inner ear balance and feel is good enough, you can use an oversteering car to come down to the grip level before you get to the apex.
You can do this with an understeering car too; in fact it’s much easier to do so. But you lose time because the very thing you’re trying to accomplish – direction change – is by definition delayed by the initial understeer, the car’s reluctance to turn.
Oversteer helps the direction change and so long as you can then prevent that rear slide gaining too much momentum, you keep the time you gained during the turn-in.
We’re talking very small degrees here; take just a little too much speed in and the oversteer that’s aided your direction change will develop into a full-blown spin in the blink of an eye.
But if your feel is good enough, what to others feels like a thin ribbon of margin will feel like a big, wide expanse of possibilities and options.
This feel will allow you to gauge grip from braking into what you’re going to have in the corner, so you can get the entry speed somewhere in the ballpark without having to be too conservative.
Then too much oversteer after turning in? A slight lift of the throttle. Not quite enough? A bit more loud pedal or alternatively let the slide build a little longer before correcting it. Or a mixture of both responses.
All instinctively done, not even thinking about it, just living it because your feel is buying you creative time. And the longer you live in that zone, the better and more at ease you become there.
We are also talking slow- and medium-speed corners only. In the faster turns there is so much downforce working on the rear wing and underbody that the rear end is next-to-impossible to unstick; the downforce squares with the speed and is more powerful at the rear, and so at cornering speeds of more than 120mph, if you’ve managed to get the car turned in, there’s no way the rear is going to surrender.
But this brings us to another advantage of being at ease with oversteer. It means you can get away with running less rear wing than drivers who need to avoid oversteer in the wet.
So as the track dries out, those drivers will be penalised relative to Hamilton as the rear wing angle costs them more lap time in lost straightline speed than it is buying them in corner speed.
With the variable conditions, as the track alternately begins to dry then become wetter again, Lewis’s style again gives him flexibility over a wider range of conditions; he is able to do a lap time in the wet that doesn’t need so much of a feature (increased rear wing angle) that will cost him time as the track dries.
There’s an important distinction to be made here between ‘closed loop’ and ‘open loop’ driving.
In the former case, a driver will correct a slide in reaction to it happening. With open loop, he will be using his feel anticipate, to make the correct inputs almost ahead of what the car is doing.
All drivers will use a mixture of both, but the proportion will vary. Lewis almost certainly performs with a high proportion of open loop, allowing him to gauge more precisely possible entry speeds.
With the more consistent grip of a dry track this won’t matter so much, but its advantage will certainly be felt when the grip is more variable on a rainy afternoon.
If every race this year were to be wet, Hamilton’s chances of a world title would be much enhanced.
That won’t happen of course, but he must be optimistic about his chances at Spa, Fuji and, possibly, Interlagos.
After Lewis Hamilton’s majestic British Grand Prix win, Sir Jackie Stewart and others have hailed him as Formula 1’s new rain master.
Throughout Formula 1 history a few drivers have shown a special affinity for driving in the rain. Some – Jacky Ickx or Jean Alesi for example – seemed to reach a level they couldn’t quite manage in the dry; while others, like Stewart, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, were the best of their generation in any conditions but especially awesome in the wet.
In his latest feature for itv.com/f1, Mark Hughes analyses what it is about Hamilton that makes him a great wet-weather driver, giving a fascinating insight into his driving technique.
Lewis Hamilton has now won three of the past four wet grands prix: Silverstone and Monaco this year added to Japan 2007.
In fact the only wet grand prix he’s contested and not won since that Fuji race was the infamous Chinese GP, and even then he showed a startling superiority before his intermediate tyres wore out.
Of the four guys in the two quickest cars at the head of the field, he’s clearly the best wet-weather driver.
It’s a mixture of a wonderfully fine-honed feel for the messages the car is giving him and a driving style that allows him the flexibility to adapt to whatever the car’s dominant handling trait is.
This latter point is a huge boon in wet-weather racing, where the variation in the car’s behaviour is much greater than in the dry because of the more variable grip levels.
Hamilton likes to be able to use the rear of the car to help him turn in. He’s totally relaxed with an oversteering, sliding car and is superb at maintaining momentum going into the corner even with the rear out of line.
His feel allows him to manipulate the car in such a way that the oversteer never becomes excessive.
Instead it just scrubs the excess speed away, usually even before the apex is reached, and he arrives there with the direction change completed, disruptive steering lock kept to a minimum.
It’s tricky as hell to make work in wet conditions – far easier to just lean against the front of an understeering car (where the front tyres, rather than the rears, are running wide), using the scrub of sliding front tyres to dictate the pace.
But if you can pull it off, if your inner ear balance and feel is good enough, you can use an oversteering car to come down to the grip level before you get to the apex.
You can do this with an understeering car too; in fact it’s much easier to do so. But you lose time because the very thing you’re trying to accomplish – direction change – is by definition delayed by the initial understeer, the car’s reluctance to turn.
Oversteer helps the direction change and so long as you can then prevent that rear slide gaining too much momentum, you keep the time you gained during the turn-in.
We’re talking very small degrees here; take just a little too much speed in and the oversteer that’s aided your direction change will develop into a full-blown spin in the blink of an eye.
But if your feel is good enough, what to others feels like a thin ribbon of margin will feel like a big, wide expanse of possibilities and options.
This feel will allow you to gauge grip from braking into what you’re going to have in the corner, so you can get the entry speed somewhere in the ballpark without having to be too conservative.
Then too much oversteer after turning in? A slight lift of the throttle. Not quite enough? A bit more loud pedal or alternatively let the slide build a little longer before correcting it. Or a mixture of both responses.
All instinctively done, not even thinking about it, just living it because your feel is buying you creative time. And the longer you live in that zone, the better and more at ease you become there.
We are also talking slow- and medium-speed corners only. In the faster turns there is so much downforce working on the rear wing and underbody that the rear end is next-to-impossible to unstick; the downforce squares with the speed and is more powerful at the rear, and so at cornering speeds of more than 120mph, if you’ve managed to get the car turned in, there’s no way the rear is going to surrender.
But this brings us to another advantage of being at ease with oversteer. It means you can get away with running less rear wing than drivers who need to avoid oversteer in the wet.
So as the track dries out, those drivers will be penalised relative to Hamilton as the rear wing angle costs them more lap time in lost straightline speed than it is buying them in corner speed.
With the variable conditions, as the track alternately begins to dry then become wetter again, Lewis’s style again gives him flexibility over a wider range of conditions; he is able to do a lap time in the wet that doesn’t need so much of a feature (increased rear wing angle) that will cost him time as the track dries.
There’s an important distinction to be made here between ‘closed loop’ and ‘open loop’ driving.
In the former case, a driver will correct a slide in reaction to it happening. With open loop, he will be using his feel anticipate, to make the correct inputs almost ahead of what the car is doing.
All drivers will use a mixture of both, but the proportion will vary. Lewis almost certainly performs with a high proportion of open loop, allowing him to gauge more precisely possible entry speeds.
With the more consistent grip of a dry track this won’t matter so much, but its advantage will certainly be felt when the grip is more variable on a rainy afternoon.
If every race this year were to be wet, Hamilton’s chances of a world title would be much enhanced.
That won’t happen of course, but he must be optimistic about his chances at Spa, Fuji and, possibly, Interlagos.
Ayrton Senna: WDC 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991
McLaren: WCC 1974, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2007
McLaren: WDC 1974, 1976, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2008
