There is a belief that today’s Formula 1 drivers must have at least two important qualities to be successful at the highest level: the ability to drive the fastest cars in the world as quickly as possible and the ability to help their engineers time to set them up.
However, for many years and increasingly, the top-flight single-seaters in motorsport have been equipped with many sensors that allow teams to receive a large amount of data for further analysis, without the help of driver feedback. .
So does a driver today need more than just the ability to be as fast as possible on the track? Adrian Newey , head of design at Red Bull, answered this question using one of his drivers, Max Verstappen, as an example.
“Max is the best example of what a new generation driver is,” Newey said. “In the past, when all these sensors and this technology that now helps us collect data did not exist, the engineers could only rely on the words of the pilots. That is, the ability of each of them to transmit information to the engineer played a key role in performance.
“Now that we have so many numbers you might think driver feedback is no longer necessary. But really that’s not the case.”
“The data from the sensors only informs what is happening with the car. But it is always very difficult to understand why something is happening. And that is the question that the drivers can answer. No data can replace the other, but complement each other.”
“Max will never say something like ‘we need to make the front springs stiffer’ or anything like that. But he can tell very accurately what’s going on in the car in general when he’s driving on the track. And for an engineer, this is very important information,” he concluded.
Currently, Verstappen shares a garage with Sergio Pérez, a much more experienced driver than him, however, his years within Red Bull and his position in the team after having been proclaimed world champion for the first time, cause his comments to be the most relevant to the energy drinks team.
