It was no surprise to hear Ferrari has changed Sebastian Vettel’s chassis for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix given his Silverstone struggles.
Sometimes when things are not going to plan something needs to be done – forget the fact of whether it is the right or wrong thing or whatever the real reason for it was, it’s sometimes best to just get on with it.
You can have a problem with the chassis that has a real impact on performance, perhaps a crack that leads to some flexibility or some damage around the suspension pickup points that means the suspension isn’t as stiff as it should be. Very little movement in a suspension pickup can cause various problems that means it is more difficult to move loads around the car with setup changes. Perhaps that was the case with Vettel’s chassis.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean the chassis really was the cause of the troubles. The quote from head of chassis engineering Simone Resta made it quite clear that it didn’t have a huge impact on performance, and I suspect this means it’s been changed for what you might call psychological reasons.
He said: “Sebastian will have a new chassis, because after the Silverstone post-race analysis, we spotted a small fault caused by a heavy impact over a kerb. It would not have had much of an effect on performance, but it was the logical decision to take.”
That’s a strange way of putting it if you were trying to pick the driver up. You could just leave the ‘it would not have had much of an effect on performance’ out of the sentence and keep it to yourself.
It’s a win-win situation for Ferrari doing this. Either there is a real problem that held back performance, which it has now eliminated, or as is often the case the driver thinks there is a problem.
Anyone can see that things between Vettel and Ferrari haven’t been right this season, which seems to be down to the fact he wasn’t offered a new contract and the way this was done. No four-times world champion can be expected to be happy when a team decides that the young guy in the other car is the one to get behind.
Drivers in that kind of situation can sometimes get into a difficult mindset where there will always be something wrong that explains their struggles. Maybe they think a kerb strike cracked the chassis, so you change that – and any number of things – to try to free up the driver’s mind.
I’ve been in this situation many times as a technical director. Mentally the driver believes there’s something wrong and you have to wipe the slate clean to help them get back to a good place and able to get a good result.
Dampers have always been high on the list of problems that can cause confusion. More than once we took a set off the car and put them straight back on again without touching them and fixed the problem! It’s amazing what rattling a few spanners around the back of the car can ‘fix’.
Sebastian is one of those drivers who needs his head straight and focused and wants to feel needed, so perhaps the team felt obliged to make the change to set his mind at rest.
That doesn’t mean that there are never problems with a chassis and there have been times where there has been a legitimate reason for the change. But for the team, normally you would change the chassis because there is a problem with it. That would be identified on a torsion or bending stiffness rig back in Maranello, but this is a very different season and with no time between races you just have to get on and do it just in case you do have a problem.
When we ran Alex Zanardi at the end of 1991, he had various offs in Adelaide that damaged his chassis, the spare-car chassis plus our emergency spare chassis. I think we changed chassis twice, each time having to inject the damaged areas with more and more resin to try to bond it back together.
In the end, he raced a chassis that had had a major lower front wishbone pick up point repair after an off at a Silverstone test earlier in the year. It was probably 3kg heavier from bits of extra aluminium bulkhead and glue!
Unless you can identify a specific problem, like a reduction in stiffness or a suspension or engine pickup problem, then I would never hold out much hope for a miracle cure.
Vettel struggled a lot at Silverstone, but we’ve seen that before as it’s a circuit that doesn’t play to his strengths and he was 0.367s off Charles last weekend, which isn’t a huge gap around a large circuit. I’d expect him to go better at Barcelona even without this change.
