Grand Prix drivers have never been as fit as they are now. But do they have to be? It's a question of focus

I'm told that I did more overtaking than anyone else during the French GP, so I must admit to feeling amused when I hear people say that it's just not possible in F l these days. But I won't pretend it's easy.  At Magny Cours you have a very quick and "aerodynamic" corner before the long straight down to the hairpin, and it's an obvious overtaking place. But it's difficult to pass people because you can't keep close enough to them round that preceding right-hander. Where the guys were in the middle of the track in that corner, I'd try to hug the inside to stay out of their draft, and in the clean air I could get closer to them and get a better exit.

If a car has, say, a two-second-a-lap advantage over you, and for the sake of argument the track has 10 corners, that may amount to only a two-tenth-of-a-second advantage over your car, per corner. That's not much. Even Michael Schumacher admitted recently that passing Minardis can be tough. Being able to pass people still requires the factors it has always required: later braking, better grip, more power... or permutations of all three. But the margins have become so refined by the sheer technical development of the cars that the opportunities have accordingly been reduced. Everybody seems to brake in the same place these days, the way brake systems have developed, so that makes it very, very hard. You don't have the longer braking distances there were, say, in the '70s. You use the brakes like a switch, on and off.

At Magny Cours I had a car that was good under braking, and that gave me the opportunity, even though I wasn't always close, to pass people into the hairpin. I could get the job done under the brakes. Michael does that a lot, because he sets up a car so that it's most stable under braking.

It's not just in F1 that overtaking is tough. It was in F3 back in 1987, but there were more drivers there who were easy to pass. It's the same now in IndyCars. Alex Zanardi goes through gaps that many Indycar drivers won't try. F1 hones a driver's skill, and demands that he race at an absolute pitch. There's no room for cruisers, the way there might be in other formulae where the competitive stimulus is not as great. Other sports are similar - look at tennis. Years ago, there were only a couple of guys who took their fitness seriously. Now they all do, and it's much harder. It's all so much more competitive now, whether it be tennis players and coaches, or race teams and drivers, and that's the way modem sport has gone. It's all much more refined and much more difficult.

The other factor is aerodynamics. They are so efficient that you get far less of a tow from the slipstream, because good aerodynamics always produce less slipstream. The flipside of that, though, is the turbulence that affects following cars. This tends to lift the front of your car, and the understeer forces you to drop back. In some corners you can compensate for that, but in the corner leading onto the main straight in Barcelona, for example, there is only one line. So you suffer accordingly if you get too close to the guy in front. And that, of course, jeopardises your chances of passing down the straight.

The tendency when you're stuck behind somebody is to become frustrated, which you must avoid at all costs - and it's why you see so many incidents between drivers, or a driver initiating a manoeuvre and then suddenly pulling back because they aren't confident enough to try it. But the line between being a hero and an idiot is very fine. That's what makes it so tough.

These GP Columns appeared exclusively in F1 Racing magazine every month.
The columns are reproduced by kind permission of the Editor, Matt Bishop.
With thanks to F1 Racing ©. All rights reserved.
This page prepared 26th July 1998.