But of course, the innovations that, uh, Formula One has produced, um, you know, the sort of, uh, you know, braking and, and, um, s- and steering systems and of course even the, the hybrids have had a lot to do with Formula One development, haven't they?

Well, yeah.

The, the hybrid engine's been a particularly interesting case in point in that when they came in in 2014, you had this colossal increase in efficiency, um, and that should've been a great signal for the road car industry.

But instead, all that was drowned out, all that positivity was drowned out by the complaints about how quiet they were, 'cause of course-

Now, going further back, you go back to 1950, um, obviously, looking, as I said, talking about the way the, which the cars and design and the way they look and, and how they're driven have changed dramatically, haven't they?

Well, yeah, 1950 and '51, the Drivers' Championships both won, uh, by developments of, uh, of, of the same car, which had actually begun life, um, at the behest of Enzo Ferrari in, before World War II, uh, when he was the competitions manager at Alfa Romeo, and they were getting completely kicked around the park in Grand Prix racing by the, the German cars that were basically bankrolled by the-

[laughs]

It's problematic for him.

Um, he, uh, he, he, he really, really never got on af- probably after Multi '21 was, was, was the big tipping point when, um, Vettel wasn't punished for ignoring team orders and passing him in Malaysia of all places, uh, in what, 2013 I think, a long time ago now.

Um, and that just put, sort of put the seed of his doubt, of doubt in his mind that, you know, he's, he's never gonna be allowed to win a world championship that team because the other driver's the favored son.

And I think Mark last year was bringing a lot of that energy into the battle, and it's very easy to, for people from the outside looking in to say that a team is sabotaging one driver or favoring one driver over another.

Now, they might unconsciously favor one driver over another, but no Formula 1 team ever actively sabotages, uh, one driver, 'cause there, there are millions of millions of dollars at stake in prize money in the way you finish in the Constructors Championship.

It really is suicide, uh, sabotaging one driver.

Um, Codder, just explain it quickly and just what is going on here.

We shouldn't do that.

So you have to rely on colleagues, uh, overseas to go back through the on boards for you.

Usually you get more, but not necessarily all of the on boards.

It's, it's corrupted for Hamilton around that, that time, um, probably because of the urban cityscape, so you can't really tell what was being said.

We saw Verstappen have radio problems throughout the rest of the race.

So we, we don't actually have any record of Hamilton being told to come in, but Frederic Vasseur afterwards said both cars were told to come in.

Now, with four seconds between them, um, a double stat, even if they'd make a mi- made a mistake on Leclerc's car, it would likely not have damaged Hamilton's race.

Visibility

... to be seen, was there?

No.

And it was, it, it was kind of there just in the layout that sort of looked promising, but on the ground, too many fiddly cambers, too narrow.

Um, so there's too, too narrow at the entry, far too narrow at the exit.

There was a real funnel effect.

You can see there, um, that next corner after the exit of the La Monumental, it just narrows into a funnel, and that whole section, uh, into the third sector, far, far, far too narrow.

There was never, ever, ever going to be any overtaking there, and you saw when the, the curved approach to turn five and six, as, as the track bends to the right around there, you saw when Alonso tried to send it up the inside or the outside-

Yeah.

So when it comes to the, the half-second gap we saw in qualifying, okay, we didn't get to see George in the race, [laughs] um, how much of it do you think is driving style, and how much of it is the kind of slightly... it's almost like a sort of black art of, of the, of the management and deployment system, as the engines and the systems are learning as they go around the lap?

Well, this is the thing, that oth- other teams also, uh, will bring in McLaren on this one, because McLaren team principal Andrea Stella pointed to sort of the, the pace difference between Norris and Piastri and saying, "That's something else." They can't quite account for this sort of speed difference that they're seeing, and it is- Kind of in that whole noise of how the machine learning algorithms are watching how the drivers apply the throttle and deploy the power all the way through the lap, because the engineers talk about this thing, the optimal lap, which is this, this perfect, um, combination of the electrical power where you're making the most use of your deployment capacity, but also harvesting, and that's what the machine learning algorithms are looking for.

But if you just push a little too much on the throttle at a particular point, um, then you're using power, you're confus- essentially confusing the algorithm, and if, say, you lose a little bit of speed by fractionally overcooking it into one corner, you, you then recoup some of that speed by put- giving it a bit more throttle.

You're using more of the power that's in the battery, and so that is then not available to you later on in the lap.

So that...

And, and, and what you find with a, with a lap like Spa where there's very few, um, possibilities to recharge conventionally through lift and coast or braking, they're having to do the clipping, um, you, your, your disadvantage then compounds through the lap and it converts into a straight line speed loss because, um, as, as the power depletes in the battery, the, it, it, it has to ramp down because the FIA doesn't want cars to just, uh, uh, basically come off a cliff with the power and, and slow down suddenly.

So you're, you basically hit a lower peak, and then it tails off, and if the driver who's done a slightly, we'll say, a better job, like they haven't pushed quite so hard through that particular corner, which is massively counterintuitive-

they wanted to make sure the tire could get to the end, but it felt like maybe they were a little bit conservative with it.

... rather than me run, run through 2000, then I can combat yours or not.

Uh, Ralf Schumacher, not the answer to any question apart from, who is Michael Schumacher's less talented brother? Um, just underwhelming at every turn.

Um, a, a wasted talent.

Um, and also convincingly I'd, I'd say got, got it handed to him by a teammate who was quite capricious in application of talent.

And what I would say is, why is Robert Kubica not on this list? A far more exciting driver and, uh, also someone who could've...

He, he, Kubica was actually a championship material had he not had his accident, whereas I don't think Ralf was ever championship material.

in the two- in this era, he's- it's like a computer game sometimes.

But I think just to pick up on Karun's point about tenacity, that is something that really marks him apart from other people.

well we're not judging them by what they do outside the car

yeah I suppose so that first year you know just Getting in, putting it on pole for the first race, marvellous.

Running his team-mate close to the championship, great.

Then next year, his team leader has the best car on the grid and contrives to make extraordinarily heavy weather of the whole thing.

It just is a comedy of errors throughout the series.

And then it all goes down to the wire and admittedly drove well in that finale, but...

I was impressed with him in 1996 and just became increasingly unimpressed thereafter.

And

so you think if he can get up there as well but it is interesting that it feels like Hamilton's maybe taking the technical lead you can almost see a time in the future where Hamilton's got the team and the car sorted this is how to win a championship and then the clerk's actually the guy that might benefit from that in the future but we're perhaps getting a little bit ahead of ourselves

I think you know it's worth digging into that dynamic between the two because the uh the accident Charles had was at turn four which is one of the corners where the Ferrari was particularly strong and it comes back to the question of braking and obviously Charles has gone over to the carboni industry materials and discs etc this weekend because he's kind of following Lewis's example what Lewis always did really well what he was a master at is not just braking late heavily but also having that feel for when to modulate the pressure on the brake pedal and actually come off it And maybe there's an element of Leclerc not quite having that same strength within, you know, he's a great driver, but maybe that's where he slightly falls short of Hamilton.

And in that corner, Leclerc was actually, he carried too much speed, off the brake a little bit too late, went onto the dirty line, and that just carried him straight off.

He got a twitch, corrected it, but he was pointing the wrong way.

I'd like to say we've all done it, but we've seen YouTube footage of it.

People in road cars doing it.

So he caught it, but he was pointing in the wrong direction and went straight on.

You

which

actually it's quite bizarre for someone to be on pole position despite not having set a purple sector of memory serves.

It was max fastest lap.

first and third sectors.

Lewis Hamilton fastest in the second sector, which will have caused Charles Leclerc to chafe since he'd just posted his Ferrari into the barrier to back.

But, you know, he's in good company.

Rudolf Caracciola also smoked the masonry there in, what, 1933? So it's got form.

And in Leclerc's case, it was about the brakes, wasn't it? And he's now talking about going to Lewis Hamilton's set-up.