Overtaking - 2013 debate

[Richard]

We can play with refuelling, DRS, tyres and downwash, but even then we'll have cars of very similar specs, with drivers of very similar standard, following very similar strategies. It's no surprise that they'll end up with very similar pace, hence very little overtaking.

Don't take my word for it, there's science behind it:

Variation in batting averages must decrease as improving play eliminates the rough edges that great players could exploit, and average performance moves toward the limits of human possibility.

http://changethis.com/manifesto/100.03. ... uation.pdf

In athletics they talk about extreme value analysis. This says that performance follows an S curve, the so called "greats" take advantage of being ahead of the curve. As the professionalism increases, then it's harder to be ahead of the pack, ie the flat plateau at the top of the S.


http://www.economist.com/node/21559903

F1 is on that flat plateau, doomed to ever greater homogeneity until there is some disruptive change. To be honest that change is unlikely to be in F1, but a completely different sport that surpasses F1. A bit like the transition from horse to car, or cassette tape to mp3. We're just waiting for the goldilocks conditions to arrive.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs[/youtube]
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_christia ... story.html

.... or for those of a short attention span http://www.voicebase.com/voice_file/pub ... conditions

[bhall]

[raymondu999]

I so wish I could up vote you right about now richard.

[fiohaa]

Personally, I think the problem is that there is less and less uncertainty as the sport's professionalism and technology matures. There are no missed gear changes, no overheating engines, no failed gearboxes, cars don't slide off track. In the golden days we had 30-40% attrition, which to my mind indicates that there were an awful lot of variables to grapple with. there was bound to be more overtaking if there were so many variables and high odds of getting it wrong.

Unfortunately what we are seeing is natural consequence of evolution, the clock can't be turned back. As it happens, there was an interesting article in the Guardian this week about this http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... -your-luck

you keep quoting this article, ........except you fail to understand what evolution is.
Evolution doesn't have a purpose. It does not mean something progressing to the point of perfection.

Organisms that are in any system are the organisms that survived. They were naturally selected by the environment - the ones that didn't fit in with their environment, died.
Go and read up on what evolution means.

secondly, f1 didn't become more reliable through any kind of natural process.........decisions were taken to A. limit cost. B. increase life of the engine. That forced manufacturers to build engines with higher tolerance levels and with power/torque not being the primary objective anymore. not to mention the engine design freeze.............

Yes, manufacturing techniques and quality controls will have played a part, but if everyone only had to make their engines last 1 race - i guarantee things would be the same as before, and you'd see a lot more engine blowouts again as manufacturers pushed things to the limit.

so again, this isn't some natural process.....this is due to people making decisions.

Thirdly - in most sports I can think of, as the money has pumped in and the professionalism has increased, it has improved the sport - the standards are higher all round, and to achieve in football or tennis or boxing or atheletics, you have to train much much harder due to the higher number of professionals about competing. Compare that to maybe 50 or 60 years ago when there wasn't so much money in sport, and you'd have hobbyists and semi amateurs competing against each other.
(you could argue that money has corrupted all these sports but thats a seperate issue......also motorsport IS money)


The article you have linked to simply talks about why a particular baseball record hasn't been broken...........in terms of the 'evolution of baseball' im sure its just as enjoyable as it ever was. The core fundamentals for baseball will not have changed for a century.

However, the core fundamentals of F1 have completely changed now, because the primary thing a racing driver has to do is to Go fast. Thats his primary skill, what the professionals of motorsport would have learnt to do from an early age.

And now? Hamilton: 'Im going as slow as I can'.

This hasn't come about through some natural progression of motorsport, it is by decisions taken by people who run the sport.

You also seem to be mixing up overtaking, which is one of the core elements of motor racing, with progression of competition. You also assume that motorsport will reach some kind of plateau, accept a quick glance at other categories and you'll see that the racing is as healthy as ever.
You also don't factor money into the equation, and the different in wealth the big teams have in comparison to the small teams
You also don't factor in the massive gaps in the field today...........which blows your theory right out the water.

Im babbling now but i cant be bothered to right coherent paragraphs, its not worth the time, so this is just a brain dump of thought, some food for you to feast on.

[strad]

in terms of the 'evolution of baseball' im sure its just as enjoyable as it ever was. The core fundamentals for baseball will not have changed for a century.

WRONG!
......................................................................................................................................................
Richard, I know we have argued from time to time, but in this you are right..
Y'all want passing? get rid of carbon on carbon brakes.

[komninosm]

NO to refueling!!!!

http://i.imgur.com/tUrZb.png

Correlation isn't causation.
No refueling does not help "real" overtaking. It only helps fake overtaking (along with bad tires) because drivers don't fight for position so much any more. Real overtaking is when both are driving as fast as they can, not coasting around in fuel-saving mode (and tire-saving mode).
No Refueling makes it a marathon run instead of a sprint race. If I wanted a marathon I'd watch Paris-Dakar, not F1.
(Yes I know human marathons last 2-3 hours like F1 races, but that's not the point, we're talking about cars not bipeds.)

[komninosm]

... some food for you to feast on.

You saved me half an hour mate of thinking and typing something similar.
Thanks and have a nice day.

I don't want a more random F1. I want a more fair F1. I want them to push the car, not save tires or fuel. I can do that with my old street car driving to work.

[bhall]

[...]

Im babbling now but i cant be bothered to right coherent paragraphs, its not worth the time, so this is just a brain dump of thought, some food for you to feast on.

...what you've just said ... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

[maxxer]

It annoys me for awhile so i just ventilate this :

Over the years F1 has gone to cutting expenses.
Testing is limited , engine and gearbox use is limited.
From next year it will be even a challenge not to use as much fuel as you can as some years ago this was never an issue.
Then can someone please explain to me that why they are using tyres which wear our much quicker then the tyres we had few years ago.
If they want pitstops then bring back refuelling and maybe force teams to use 3 different front wings also during the race.
For me as a car owner I cannot comprehend why F1 doesnt develop the best tyre possible to race on. (which would also benefit the other racing sports FIA is paying for from F1 money)
I read this story on Formula1.com that the tyres are produced in turkey and then trucked over to the uk to scan the barcode and then they are trucked back to the circuit, after the race the tyres are trucked back to the uk to be burned or recycled.
That doesn't really sound very pro environment and cost cutting to me , which is what they are trying to promote. Even if the cost of 10 trucks driving up n down europe with tyres is a fraction of the whole it is still just wasting money.

[Stradivarius]

I don't think it makes sense to say that today's F1 isn't fair. As long as the tyres are the same for everyone, it is fair no matter how difficult it is to make the tyres last. Whether or not f1 is interesting to watch is another matter, but I don't think that the tyre saving ruined the fight among the best yesterday. In Malaysia I think many people found it disappointing when the first 4 drivers were instructed to stop racing, and I can understand concerns about this becomming a permanent problem. But I don't think this will be a problem when the teams have learned more about how to use the tyres. Some teams may run into trouble now and then and may be forced to stop racing in order to make sure the tyres last. But this may happen if the tyres last longer as well because the benchmark will be moved. In Barcelona it was challenging to make the tyres last for 15 laps, but if the tyres lasted 10 laps longer, the teams would have tried to make it with 2-3 stops instead of 3-4 stops and there would still be someone on the limit.

Regarding the evolution of the sport, I would like to point out that evolution is about natural selection where success is all about adapting to the environment. A species can come close to an optimum for a certain environment, but once the environment changes, the optimum will change and the species will have to readapt. In formula 1 the environment changes every time there is a change of the rules, and now adays, if there is a change to the tyres. What used to work before the rules changed doesn't necessarily work so well anymore. In some aspects this is very comparable to the text book evolution example of the peppered moth after the industrial revolution. http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/i ... e/127.html

As long as the rules keep changing, there will be variations between the performance of different f1 teams. A sudden rule change may favour a team that is currently struggling a lot. The white peppered moths had an advantage over the black peppered moths before the trees turned black, but then it all changed. Just like Mercedes had an advantage over Renault before 2012 when the tyres were reasonably durable, but then it all changed and Lotus (the old Renault team) took advantage. Next year there will be substantial changes again with new engines, and that will effectively bring the teams further away from the top of the S-curve that richard_leeds mentioned.

I have one final remark about the evolution and that is the simple fact that f1 is very different from most other sports, even within motor racing. The technology used in f1 is not used in many other series and the strategies they follow are not applicable in many other places. This is why we still see fairly obvious blunders from the teams and the drivers. If you have a competition where you select the 20 best competitors from a total of 1 million, you would not expect any big differences and you would expect all of them to be very close to an optimum. But in formula 1 we see the top competitors failing to attach the wheel during a pit stop, we see drivers failing to follow a simple rule like staying with the safety car, we see strategic blunders like when Alonso lost the title in 2010 because Ferrari looked away from the fact that Vettel was leading the race when Webber came in for his pitstop. Alonso is considered one of the top drivers and a couple of years ago he jump started and received a penalty. After 2008 I stopped believing that the level in formula 1 is very high. In 2008 the driver who made the most and the biggest mistakes won the drivers championship and the team who made the most and the biggest mistakes won the constructors championship. When you can become champion dispite running into the back of another driver waiting for the green light in the pit lane, or despite sending your driver away from a pit stop with the fuel hose still attached, you are not very close to the top of the "S-curve".

[Richard]

I'd say engineering design is evolution. The design teams have many possible solutions but only the fittest survive to make it to track testing, of those only the select few make it to the race. The rest are thrown in the bin (aka die). Sometimes there's a disruptive mutation that works and is rapidly adopted (eg F duct) while other disruptive mutations appear and then die (front exit exhaust).

Both nature and F1 evolve to meet goals (ie the failure to meet those goals leads to extinction) such as procreating & getting food, or signing sponsors & winning races.

Both nature and F1 have feedback loops. Evolution of a species will change its eco-system (ie impact on food supply or perhaps alter the predation) while in F1 the evolution of engineering design results in changes of food source (ie sponsors) and alters the predation (ie FIA Regs).

Anyway that wasn't the main thrust of my point. The main point is that technology tends to follow an S curve as it matures (I call that "evolutionary", but don't let the semantics of that word distract us). On the steep middle bit, a team that is slightly ahead on the x axis has a big performance advantage on the y axis. When we reach the top plateau, then a team that is ahead on the curve only has a slight performance advantage. It's like the principle of diminishing returns.

No matter how much we tinker with the rules, the maturity of the technology (especially the rate of development enabled by computational simulation) means teams will rapidly converge to the optimum, ie they'll quickly gather at that top plateau. So if we unleash the engine rules the teams would converge within a few seasons and we'd be exactly where we are now. We saw that with KERS, and we'll see it with the new turbo engines.

So how does this relate to overtaking? In F1, overtaking requires one car to have a performance advantage over another. It needs to be a significant advantage to overcome the advantage enjoyed by the driver in front having clear road and clear air. However, if cars are on that top level plateau then the gap between them is smaller, so the chances are greatly reduced of there being a big enough difference in performance to allow overtaking.

I'd go so far as to say that if we take away the strategic tools (KERS, tyres, DRS) and relied on pure speed of the cars, then we'd see zero overtaking between the top 3 or 4 teams.

[fiohaa]

[...]

Im babbling now but i cant be bothered to right coherent paragraphs, its not worth the time, so this is just a brain dump of thought, some food for you to feast on.

...what you've just said ... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

alright, well instead of just saying 'i think you're wrong', its better to quote parts of my post and say why you think its wrong.
just saying 'its insanely idiotic' and not saying why simply leaves you open and strengthens my argument. youre going to have to do better then that.

[fiohaa]

No matter how much we tinker with the rules, the maturity of the technology (especially the rate of development enabled by computational simulation) means teams will rapidly converge to the optimum, ie they'll quickly gather at that top plateau. So if we unleash the engine rules the teams would converge within a few seasons and we'd be exactly where we are now. We saw that with KERS, and we'll see it with the new turbo engines.

So how does this relate to overtaking? In F1, overtaking requires one car to have a performance advantage over another. It needs to be a significant advantage to overcome the advantage enjoyed by the driver in front having clear road and clear air. However, if cars are on that top level plateau then the gap between them is smaller, so the chances are greatly reduced of there being a big enough difference in performance to allow overtaking.

'clean road with clean air'
again........the design of the cars has not been dictated or formed through some natural process.
which was the main point of my piece - they were formed through decisions by men.
there is no reason why overtaking cannot be improved through simply slashing a ton of downforce or making it so that the aero wake isn't so bad.

your theory doesnt make any sense because if you apply it to other categories where they have the SAME cars, you still see plenty of racing. So it doesn't hold!

[turbof1]

I neither would say the development of the cars have followed a natural proces. The constant addition of rules pushed teams towards a certain direction of evolution. Within the scope they are allowed to, the evolution is natural; the scope itself is pushed outside the s-curve.
In that way, the fia actually is the cause of why overtaking has becomea problem. Rules limited development so much, that the parts that are allowed to develop, are way ahead of the original s curve.

The fia should remove rules, but carefully. One small area at a time.

[Stradivarius]

So how does this relate to overtaking? In F1, overtaking requires one car to have a performance advantage over another. It needs to be a significant advantage to overcome the advantage enjoyed by the driver in front having clear road and clear air. However, if cars are on that top level plateau then the gap between them is smaller, so the chances are greatly reduced of there being a big enough difference in performance to allow overtaking.

I'd go so far as to say that if we take away the strategic tools (KERS, tyres, DRS) and relied on pure speed of the cars, then we'd see zero overtaking between the top 3 or 4 teams.

I agree with the use of the word evolution. The teams evolve, trying to adapt to the governing constraints. But there is one element which still will allow overtaking. Even if the cars have similar performance over a full race distance, there may still be different ways to optimize the car, just like the evolution in nature finds different ways achieve the same target. Evolution actually encourages the competitors to find different strategies so they can take advantage of what the opponents leave behind. In the forrest, the plants are competing to get the sunlight they need. Some trees grow very tall and gets sunlight that way. Some trees have sprigs/needles and stay green all winter, so they don't depend on getting that much in the summer when the broadleaved trees dominate. Other plants may sprout very early in the spring, before most of the trees have their leaves. Some may even sprout before the snow has smelted in order to avoid competition, but then it becomes a competition in sprouting first. Others again wait for the autumn, after many of the competitors have done theirs.

Red Bull and Lotus are performing very similar this year, Vettel and Raikkonen have 89 and 85 points after 5 races. But the caracteristics of their cars are very different and Lotus have performed well on circuits where Red Bull have struggled and vice versa. Additionally, they perform differently during the races and in qualifying. Lotus may not be as quick, so they don't take pole position. But they are kind on the tyres and go quicker in the races and can also do with fewer pitstops. Ferrari seems to be somewhere in between Lotus and Red Bull, while Mercedes are more extreme than Red Bull and have taken pole position twice without being anywhere near a race win. So we actually have a situation were some pretty slow race cars (Mercedes) start in front of the rest, while the quickest race cars (Ferrari and Lotus) start a bit behind. In addition, the performance varies differently through the races. Lotus are relatively quick towards the end of their stints, but often not so quick at the beginning, relatively. Some times they may even be relatively quick at the beginning because the others have to go sacrifice speed in order to make the tyres last, which Lotus don't have to do to the same extent. Maybe it is not correct to include Mercedes, since they obviously are not at the level of the best. But in the next race (Monaco) they might actually be able to win. This is also relevant to evolution. If you can specialize for one specific track and win there, you are successfully picking up what the oponents leave behind and a victory in Monaco is a great accomplishment.

In one way, evolution forces competitors towards the same apporach, in the extent that their starting point is the same. You can't have any big gaps in particular areas. But when the starting points are different, it may actually work the other way around. The most successful competitors are the ones who try to pick up what the others leave behind, not the ones who try to fight for the same thing and end up having to share with a lot of other competitors. If you want to beet Usain Bolt on 100 meters, you won't do it by copying exactly what Usain Bolt is doing. That will always leave you one step behind him. You need to find something that Usain Bolt doesn't have. In many ways, it's the same in formula 1. If Lotus had tried to beat Red Bull at what are their strengths (without having access to Adrian Newey's expertice) they might not have been able to beat them as they have done several times lately. Instead, they found something else, which turns out to be a weakness at Red Bull.