Tuesday, 30 August 2011 14:52
This time I'll reveal to you how to make a start with an F1 car. There are many variables and it gets pretty technical. There are more people involved in the starts than just the driver.
We find the biting point of the clutch already before the warm-up lap, when the car is still on the dummy grid. Some spectators may have noticed the cars budging a bit and crunching while sitting there. That's when we're calculating the grip between the tyres and the asphalt and searching for the biting point of the clutch.
During the warm-up lap the tyres usually cool off a bit, because the blankets are taken off, so a moment before the start, usually in the last curve of the warm-up lap where everyone is driving pretty slow, we do a final check of the clutch. That's when the clutch is sniffing for the latest grip circumstances as the tyres are a bit cooler and we're very close to the conditions of the start of the race.
After the last curve, before I stop at my starting position, an engineer in the pit wall follows a few sensors from the telemetry data. He can then fine-tune the clutch's profile and how it will bite. He estimates whether to have the clutch bite a bit earlier or to slip the clutch some more. Then just before the start I turn a switch on my steering wheel a couple of clicks to some direction. After that the success of the start depends on the driver's reactions and how correct the engineer's estimations have been: does the clutch slip too much or does it bite too heavily, resulting in spinning wheels.
Usually during the season there comes 15 average starts, a couple of good ones and two or three bad ones. Both of our cars have now been better at starts than last year. I had some very good starts in the beginning of the year. After the races we analyze from video everyone else's starts and we've always been in the top five or top seven in starts.
Credit: Heikki Kovalainen (www.heikkikovalainen.com)
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