Originally Posted by
clubagreenie
And that came come down to the driver just as much as the engineering. Some drivers I've worked with have;
1. No mechanical idea at all about how a car works, so;
2. There's no feeling on what the car is going through and driving around issues that are arising.
3. From this, there are drivers who can pilot a car around a circuit fast (take vettel) but don't have the "ass" to feel what the car is doing underneath them. I believe this stems from coming from driving cars that are overpowered for the cars handling abilities vs having a car with low power and having to drive it to the absolute limit of power and pushing its handling abilities at an absolute point instead of having to back off on power application and having the car setup to handle at that point.
4. The drivers that "did it hard" coming through the ranks. That had to fund themselves, engineer themselves or with little help and working with crews know what makes up a car, what each system does and how it affects other areas and how to provide feedback to the crews to enable them to better set up the car.
Many of todays drivers are from the "buying a drive" bringing their personal or sponsor $$$ with them and the lower trams that need the money will sck them up. I can relate it (as cheesy as it may be) to the movie Days of Thunder, where TC talks of the fact that he doesn't have the vocabulary to feedback what the cars doing. He just has the ability to drive the door handles off it but at much expense to the cars longevity.
Go back in history, there have always been periods where there is a matchup of a dominant driver in either;
1. An equally superior car.
2. A car that is inferior to the immediate competition but the superior car has the inferior driver.
During the 80's, you had Mansell, Prost, Senna, Rosburg et al. There was always a mix of winners, cars were not completely reliable (remember the regular explosions of turbos) and everything was mechanical so you had to be sympathetic or it just wouldn't last. As I said earlier, a driver from those days would be able to slip into todays cars and be competitive (probably with the exception of Rosberg who was a mountain by comparison to todays drivers) but very few of todays drivers would be competitive in those cars with the eras drivers. For the same reason you stick a rally driver into a F1 and they are competitive but an F1 driver is slower in a rally car.