Why is it so difficult for drivers to switch F1 teams?
Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz say they need more time to adapt to their new cars
We’ve heard a lot from Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz in recent weeks about how hard it is to switch teams and adapt to a new car with different systems.
That’s especially true in the case of a power unit swap. Hamilton and Sainz have been on either end of a Ferrari/Mercedes exchange, and both have commented on how much they have had to learn.
It’s easy to be a bit sceptical, but people perhaps forget how complex current F1 cars really are, and how many tools they have that can be exploited by the drivers. It’s all about those marginal gains.
Even Nico Hulkenberg – who stuck with Ferrari power in going from Haas to Sauber and thus didn’t have to learn new PU systems – has had plenty of things to get used to, as the Swiss team’s performance director Stefano Sordo explains.
“I think one of the things that the driver obviously relates to, beside the behaviour of the car, is for example, the power steering and the steering ratio,” said Sordo when I asked him about the subject.
“Those are items that, especially Nico is quite sensitive to it, and he's still trying to find the best compromise there. And very much you adapt power steering, the level of assistance, the ratio between steering wheel and wheels. It's very much driver preference.
“So that's one of the things that commentable, that he felt a decent difference. And while there is no difference in lap time, so if you run a simulation, there is obviously no difference lap time, the difference comes when the driver has to extract everything from the package.
“The same for throttle pedal, the stroke of the throttle pedal, the brake pedal it's all these little things.”
Sordo says that it’s a work-in-progress: “We are adapting. We obviously changed the level of assistance based on his feedback from the Abu Dhabi test last year.
“We did few a modification to the throttle pedal, throttle pedal springs and this type of things. But we are still very much work in progress, because obviously he goes to another circuit and he keeps building feeling about the car.”
Esteban Ocon is another driver who has switched camps this year, and his Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu makes an interesting comment that perhaps adds an extra dimension to what Hamilton and Sainz are experiencing.
“He's still learning, but he's learning fast,” Komatsu said of Ocon. “These young drivers – Esteban, even though he's experienced, he's still 27. So those generations, they are fine.
“We've been dealing with people like Nico and Kevin [Magnussen]. We noticed this year, Ollie 19, Esteban 27, both of them are much more proactive in using tools. It's nice to see, actually.”