Quote:
Originally Posted by peebee2
Bearman impressed absolutely but speak to pretty much any new F1 driver from the last 20 years and they will tell you that an F1 is the easiest car to drive they’ve experienced in their whole careers.
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If low downforce and no power steering makes a car hard to drive then Bearman has already been driving that in Formula 2? So why wouldn't Bearman be prepared?
I don't think the notion that Formula 2 and Indycars (about the same speed as F2) are harder to drive is necessarily correct, obviously the steering takes more physical effort but the cornering at 3.5G is also far more leisurely and less stimulating than at 5G.
The nature of Formula 1 is that cars are very under control, until such point they go over the limit where (with very wide tyres and very high downforce) they snap and end up backwards in the wall in almost unrecoverable way.
But you can see in wet races that the current F1 cars are more than capable of sliding around (and the drivers capable of sliding the cars around) in lower grip conditions.
Cars like the
2003 Minardi or
2004 Jordan were less sorted and had pretty terrible handling, yet some mediocre pay drivers still managed to keep them on the track for the most part -- so what does "hard to drive" prove anyway?
[Not saying Pantano is necessarily mediocre, he was highly rated at one point!]
The cars at the front like the Ferrari and Williams-BMW being driven by the better drivers, were much better handling cars (not the best show case for the skills of the better drivers?) -- that's why those cars were at the front!!
Incidentally, that Minardi was one of the last Formula One cars without power steering. Eventually it got to the point where they "added" more downforce to it (with Toro Rosso's relabelled 2005 Jaguar) such that it did "need" power steering.