Every generation of racing driver has its supreme talent. Seldom is the difference between this individual and their peers more manifest than when conditions are wet or changeable, goes the established wisdom.
While it’s difficult to argue against most of the names on Autosport’s spreadsheet of victories in grands prix significantly affected by rain, the reality is somewhat more nuanced than that.
Even some of those once-or-twice-in-a-generation aces have had days where they haven’t stood the proverbial head and shoulders over everybody else. Take last Sunday in Australia, where Max Verstappen was one of several top-drawer talents to slide off the track; never has the man who seemed on another level in Brazil last year looked so happy to finish second in a race.
Fundamentally it’s a question of physics: how much tyre rubber is making contact with the road, and what purchase it has on the surface at any given moment.
Thanks to modern data science and Formula 1’s single-tyre-supplier format, in completely dry running the variables are usually linear. Drivers will have established through practice what the grip levels are in a particular corner on a certain tyre, and how that changes through tyre degradation and declining fuel loads. Otherwise unexpected hazards – such as oil or gravel – will be flagged up to them by the pitwall.
Wet running introduces more variables because it’s almost impossible for the track to exist in a consistent state of ‘wetness’: at any given point it’s either getting wetter or drier. To an extent, there are potential rewards available for drivers with more confidence or who are willing to entertain more risk.
In the wet, the absolute level of grip is less definite, and therefore harder to discover, than it is in the dry – and the grip available in a certain place will vary lap after lap. Higher wing levels can assist a driver here but in changeable conditions the cost (principally the drag penalty in a straight line) may exceed the benefit when the track is dry or drying.
Nevertheless a limit exists: that point beyond which speed exceeds the tyres’ capacity to exert mechanical grip, and/or their ability to disperse water. The current-generation Pirelli wet tyres can disperse 85 litres of water per second – over that limit they float over the surface of the water rather than contacting the track, and the driver might as well be aboard a boat.
Until 1966, aquaplaning was less of an issue in F1 because the cars ran on narrower wheels and tyres, which were less prone to riding on the surface of standing water rather than cutting through it. Fatter tyres post-’66 arguably added to the challenge of racing in the wet rather than subtracting from it.
This, you would imagine, is where the ‘feel’ of the greatest drivers offers answers to a problem even modern data science cannot solve on the fly.
Except it doesn’t, because Pirelli’s full wet tyres are a vanishingly rare sight even on wet weekends. If it’s raining enough to require this compound’s water-clearing abilities – double that of the intermediates – all that water they’re displacing into the air creates a safety hazard. It’s impossible to see through that amount of spray, so the inevitable outcome is a safety car deployment or a red flag.
In drying conditions the full wet tyres deteriorate so rapidly that nobody wants to use them.
In temps perdu, before laptops and telemetry, a race would start more or less come what may. At the Nurburgring in 1968, competitors didn’t fancy the constant rain, along with fog that cut visibility to around 180 metres, all through the weekend – so the organisers obligingly laid on another practice session on the Sunday morning and ran the race anyway, even though nothing had changed.
Jackie Stewart was only persuaded to take part in that extra practice session because team boss Ken Tyrrell pointed out to him that it was better to see where the water was sitting beforehand than to encounter it for the first time in race conditions. From the third row of the grid, he snatched the lead as soon as he could, to get out of the wall of spray created by the cars ahead – and won by over four minutes, largely because he wanted the whole farce over as soon as possible. “Total madness” was how JYS described it.
Contemporary F1 is now thankfully more risk-averse but it still wrestles with the challenges of wet-weather running. In the rogues’ gallery of farcical grands prix, Spa 2021 – a race comprising three contractually obliged laps behind the safety car and a three-hour wait between laps one and two – is right up there with the Indianapolis farrago of 2005.
Two years later the fickle Ardennes microclimate brought more ordure F1’s way as the sprint race got under way behind the safety car, with the entire field running on Pirelli’s wet tyres as mandated by the rules in such circumstances. The only drivers who didn’t pit for intermediates as soon as the safety car parked up were those who couldn’t afford to double-stack behind their team-mates in the pitbox.
Pirelli has mooted a ‘super intermediate’ tyre, closer in spec to the wet but less prone to rapid self-destruction, which would avoid scenes such as this – but nothing has come of it, partly because of the difficulties in testing in like-for-like conditions. Most of its tests have had to take place on artificially wetted surfaces.
The FIA’s proposed ‘spray guards’ were a good idea in principle but testing last year revealed these made little difference – because much of the spray was generated not by the wheels and tyres but by the underfloor aerodynamics the present generation of cars relies upon.
Just as ‘full wet’ running is out of the question, changeable conditions such as those in Melbourne last weekend continue to prove vexatious owing to the limitations of the intermediate compound. As soon as a dry line starts to develop, the tyres deteriorate unless the drivers take them for a quick dip in the remaining water away from the racing line. Even then, this is delaying the inevitable.
The result is, by and large, a procession, because to go off the drying line for too long incurs too much risk.
Calculating the moment to swap to slicks – or back again – involves luck as well as judgement; when Lando Norris, George Russell and Alex Albon headed for the pits for inters at the end of lap 44 at Albert Park they seemed slightly early, given the relatively dry state of sectors one and two. Circumstances then fell in their favour as rain set in over the rest of the track. Gambles can often look like genius in hindsight.
When conditions change in this fashion – dry(ish) to wet – the default option is the intermediate tyre because the wet is too sensitive and fragile. Better to tiptoe around on the intermediates and wait for Bernd Maylander to rejoin the fray.
And what of the ‘myth’ of the mega-talent who can transcend both their machinery and the laws of physics? One could argue that modern F1 drivers stand in the proverbial shadow of Ayrton Senna’s performance in the 1993 European Grand Prix at Donington Park, where he surged from fifth to first on the opening lap, and then finished a full lap ahead of his old nemesis Alain Prost.
To some readers it will be tantamount to blasphemy to write this, but Donington 1993 was a showcase of driving talent augmented by a full suite of clever traction-control electronics in a well-balanced car. Senna made the best of the tools at his disposal on a day Prost looked bizarrely clueless.
Portugal 1985, where 26 cars started and only nine were classified as running at the finish, provided a more compelling argument for talent being the decisive factor in a runaway wet-weather victory over drivers in similar equipment: the top eight were all on Goodyear rubber and Senna finished a lap ahead of team-mate Elio de Angelis. We come back to the point of rewards being available for drivers with more confidence or more appetite for risk.
Still, even champions can put a wheel in the wrong place, especially on street circuits where painted white lines abound. The wet 1984 Monaco Grand Prix was one of those famous what-might-have-beens, as clerk of the course Jacky Ickx (no slouch in the wet during his time) red-flagged the race early while Senna was chasing down Prost. Earlier on, Nigel Mansell had spun out of the lead, having dipped a wheel on one of the white lines bordering the road up out of Ste Devote.
Lotus team manager Peter Warr was moved by this to declare “Nigel Mansell will never win a grand prix so long as I have a hole in my arse”. He was wrong about that. And did Mansell want for confidence, bravery or propensity for risks? For sure not.
In the wet, there are no absolutes. Those days like Michael Schumacher’s in Barcelona in 1996, Juan Manuel Fangio’s at the Nurburgring in 1957, and Lewis Hamilton’s at Silverstone in 2008, stand out because they are exceptional, even among the best of the best.
