Catalunya & the Riddle of Steel

What is carbon fibre next to the hand that steers it? What is turbo direct injection without the fire in the heart that drives a man to get on the throttle earlier, brake a little later, keep pushing his luck?

Formula 1 is a modern-day manifestation of the Riddle of Steel. That is, Which is fast? The Car, or the Driver? It's a question more relevant than ever as the old brigade of F1 fans get ever more elderly and ever more vocal in their whining that - *cue adenoids* - "In the old days a great driver could get a bad car to the podium. Nowadays the car matters more than the driver!"

For those who need to brush up on their geek references, it's a question that entered the culture through Schwarzenegger vehicle Conan the Barbarian. Conan has been taught that steel is strong, but the warlord Thulsa Doom (only in the 80's could you unironically name a character Doom) shoots down that interpretation with a grand little speech:

So that's the riddle: flesh or steel? Throttle control or downforce? On foot, Lewis Hamilton would be beaten by Usain Bolt; but put Lewis in his Mercedes W05 and Bolt will be left far, far behind. Yet, put me in that W05, and all you'll get is some scattered gravel and a smear on the Armco. Put nobody in it and it won't move at all. Clearly the problem gets more complex the closer you look.

Essentially, it's a modernist approach to a postmodern question. The answer, as with everything today it seems, is "both working together." It's the dynamic interplay between car and driver - to get needlessly pretentious, it's Clauswitz's schwerpunkt. As Niki Lauda said in Rush, "You don't suppose the fact that the car's so good has something to do with me?"

And despite what the old fogies will tell you, it's been like that since the beginning, even Fangio's day:

It was true that he always had the best car, and that was because he was the best damn driver! The cheapest method of becoming a successful Grand Prix team was to sign up Fangio. – Stirling Moss

That's also why Michael Schumacher was worth $50 million a year: putting Schumacher in the car made it half a second a lap faster. Finding half a second in the windtunnel or engine shop would have cost an awful lot more than $50 million...

And it's a question that has a special relationship with the Spanish Grand Prix, for two reasons. One, it's the first race after the "fly-aways", the first race of the European season. And two, it's run at the Circuit de Catalunya, which used to be called the test driver's second home (back when they still had test drivers). This was partly thanks to the mild Spanish winter, and partly because of the corner layout. Check it out:

Notice all those long, sweeping bends? Notice how they're all, like, a bit different? Notice how they all come together in a long, long front straight? There's nowhere to hide at Catalunya. To get a fast lap time you need everything - grip, power, handling - and you need it all working together. That's why it was the place to test a new car, because if something wasn't working, you knew straight away. Today, together with the scheduling, that means the Spanish GP sees the biggest round of car upgrades all season.

And that has serious consequences for the championship. Mercedes have had it all their way so far, but Red Bull did amazingly well considering their preseason woes. With that rate of progress, will they be able to catch up? Will Vettel, spending long hours in the simulator  with Ricciardo's data, have found a way to keep the tail of his RB10 under control? Will Red Bull's engineers have found a setup that gives him a stable rear end? Or will they have moved towards each other organically, meeting somewhere in the middle?

Alternatively, will Mercedes have polished the razor and found a few tenths to keep their drivers in front, or will their new updates be a backward step that drops them behind their rivals? Or will some hitherto unnoticed driver arrive in the first corner and  find the latest updates make the back end of his mediocre car come around just right, so he can drive it flat out all day and never make a mistake? If that happens it won't matter that Mercedes and Red Bull have more downforce, on race day our lucky driver will be faster.

It's happened before... (via bandeiraverde.com.br)

There's no way of knowing. That sweet spot where driver meets car is a moving target, and even if you get it perfect this week, by next week your rivals have moved on. Or your drivers could trip over each other at the first corner and all your painstaking upgrades will be wiped out in a heartbeat. At that moment, you might as well have put me in the car for all the difference it will have made. Just one of the things that makes Formula 1 so dynamic and interesting.

But my prediction? Races at Catalunya tend to be won from pole, and pole this year seems to belong to Lewis Hamilton. So unless Red Bull have come up with something major at the factory, this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix will be Hamilton's to lose. The result will be interesting rather than entertaining... but then I said that about Bahrain too.

See? That's the irony of F1: all the hard work to take the guesswork out of it just makes sure you can never tell what will happen next. That's the Riddle of Steel.