MAN IN THE KNOW
Karun airs his views about everything in the world of motor racing
Karun Chandhok gives a forecast for the 2017 F1 season
THE RULE CHANGES FOR 2017 are unique wherein for the first time in F1 history, the objective of a rule change has been to make the cars significantly faster and I do hope that it works. We want to see the best cars and drivers in the world fighting on the ragged edge for two hours, not lapping six or seven seconds a lap off their qualifying pace.
There’s no question that in the Pirelli era, the drivers have had to spend the races driving below the limit and managing their tyres much more than the previous Bridgestone era which has been the cause of some frustration for the drivers and their engineers.
I think the cars will look better with the bigger tyres and the proportion of the front and rear wings will be better, so aesthetically the cars will look nicer. Whether they look more spectacular or not is going to come down to how fast they are through the corners I believe.
The initial aim was to make the cars 5 seconds per lap faster but by the time we got to Abu Dhabi last year, there were mutterings of that number being closer to 2.5 – 3 seconds depending on the circuit. The drag element of having bigger tyres is huge and once again the weight limit has increased, up to 728 kilograms now (just for comparison, the minimum weight number in 2009 was only 605 kilos!).
Can Bottas take the fight to Lewis?
Valtteri has been given the opportunity of a lifetime to jump into the dominant car of the recent past. The new regulations could mix up the pecking order but Mercedes are too good a team now to not be a World title contender.
Going up against Lewis Hamilton is not going to be an easy challenge and could be the making or breaking of Valtteri. Either he will take the fight to Lewis and therefore establish himself as one of the elite or he will be relegated to the role of the number two.
Toto Wolff, Niki Lauda and the team are coming off the back of a season full of internal battles so they will be looking for a low stress relationship between their two drivers. Lewis outside the car created more headaches than they would have liked in 2016 but they’ll tolerate it all because in the car, an on-form Lewis Hamilton is unbeatable.
Can Red Bull fight Mercedes?
For the sake of the show in Formula 1, we would all hope so! I do believe that this is a battle that we can’t judge too early in the year, as we’re going to see a very high rate of development throughout the season.
Red Bull have shown in the last few years that aerodynamically they’re as strong as ever but let’s be clear, the Mercedes hasn’t exactly been a lemon in the corners! At a high downforce track like Budapest last year, where people expected the Red Bull drivers to perhaps challenge Mercedes, they ended up nearly half a minute behind at the end of the race – and Adrian Newey said to me at the time that he thought the Mercedes drivers were backing the pack up early on.
The aero rule changes are huge for 2017 but I think it would be wrong to rule out the fact that the token system for the power units has now gone. This means that the development race between the engine builders is well and truly on too and in order to topple Mercedes, it’s not going to be enough for Red Bull to build a better chassis. Having Torro Rosso also using the same power unit now will help Renault as there should be more scope for sharing information but will it be enough to push the senior team back to the top? Only time will tell.
What of the rest?
Both Ferrari and Mclaren are coming into 2017 on the back of turbulent times in the recent past.
F1 needs Ferrari to be fighting for wins and the pressure to succeed on the team from the tifosi around the world is still higher than anyone else. The merry-go-round at the top with the Domenicali – Mattiachi – Montezemolo – Marchionne – Arrivabene circle along with the Pat Fry – James Allison – Mattia Binotto shuffle has undoubtly created a degree of instability over the past few years and it will be interesting to see how the Scuderia performs in 2017.
In its first season of the post-Ron Dennis era, 2017 is arguably a more important year for Mclaren than their long term Italian rivals. There’s no question that the Honda power unit package has failed to live up to the pre-2015 expectations but by all accounts, they’re starting 2017 with a completely new design architecture. Watching if Honda hit the ground running and not suffer the reliability woes of their 2015 campaign is going to be one of the big stories of the Barcelona tests I think.
The midfield battle between Force India, Williams, Torro Rosso and McLaren was very entertaining to watch with Haas occasionally able to throw their hats into the ring.
Force India did a very good job last season and pound for pound, were probably the best “value for money” team of 2016. The battle for fourth place really started to swing in their direction as the season went on, as Williams couldn’t get their updates to work as effectively as the Silverstone based squad. Williams now look set to have the brilliant Paddy Lowe re-join them from Mercedes which will give them some guidance but F1 teams are no longer a one man team.
Renault had publicly declared that they would need until 2018 to start to reap the rewards of their late re-takeover of the Enstone squad but even so, I’ll bet the sight of the yellow cars on the back row of the grid on occasions last year didn’t please anybody in the boardrooms in Paris.
More physical cars again?
I think the drivers are all excited about the prospect of being challenged to their physical limits again. Personally, I always found a perverse sense of pleasure when you got out of a car after a physically tough race like Malaysia or Budapest and felt like you had put your body and mind through a solid work out. Drivers are sportsmen at the end of the day and we got into the sport expecting to feel physical pain.
It’s amazing the differences in the physical effort needed with a relatively small increase in G-loads when you’re in the zone of three to four ‘G’ of lateral force. The physios and drivers will have a rough idea of how much faster the cornering speeds will be from their simulator programs and that will mentally get them in the zone of training harder and preparing for it more. ⌧