Diesel wrote:The cars are all very similar in height in this area, it's the seat that sets the position, the car isn't designed around a driver in that exact nature.
Rubbish. The cars are built with so little space to spare that a driver's size and natural driving position inevitably affects seating and helmet position and cockpit comfort. In Button and Rosberg's cases their head and helmet height and seat position in the cockpit should have been discussed and sorted out weeks ago at the first fitting. It's shocking that it doesn't seem to have been and they have turned up to a test with these problems. There's no reason for it. You can't just mold a seat to a driver's backside and say that it fits.
As someone else has mentioned there is so little space to spare in Newey's Red Bulls that he even designed his cars with a particular helmet manufacturer in mind.
Aabsolute trash. The car is designed with a neutral balance in mind and they will suite it to each driver using the setup.
I'm afraid this 'neutral balance' crap needs to be put to bed, and it's quite clearly something that's bandied around by many engineers who have never driven a car in their life and who think drivers are interchangeable cogs. The driver ultimately decides what the car actually does when it's on track.
A driver's style and what a car will allow him to do has a huge influence on how fast the car goes in reality, not on paper, despite there not being much to see either visually or even via telemetry. Slight differences in driving style make a huge difference - many drivers favour a steady in slow and out fast approach to cornering, some drivers prefer to turn in roughly, get the nose in and correct the car constantly and some drivers just take different lines through corners that might only be a matter of inches here and there. That's before you get to throttle and brake balance. It all adds up.
On the other side of the coin sometimes you have cars that are designed heavily around generating aerodynamic grip from the start and moving around very little through corners, and some cars are biased more towards utilising mechanical grip and will allow a driver much more control and movement as to how he goes through a corner. The 2007/2008 McLaren and Ferrari were diametrically opposed in that manner.
Yes, you can play about with setups all you like but if you're trying to get a setup where you are trying to dial out and minimise the natural tendencies and philosophy with which the car is built then you are on to a loser straight away, especially with how complex and finely tuned today's modern cars are. Saying that driving style doesn't matter goes against everything we've seen over the past few seasons.
