Formula 1: The GOAT

”This is worse than what Gasly and Tsunoda said,” Fatih said as he sat looking down, holding his head in his hands.

It took him only an hour before he finally understood exactly what the two drivers were trying to describe, but also what the engineers would have gathered and would now be discovering by sifting through the data from the car.

The problems weren’t big enough to make the car bad, but finding their cause was going to take the team a significant amount of time due to the variety of possible sources. It was a perfect combination of different things going just slightly wrong, making it difficult to find the root of the problem and come up with a solution.

”Knowing the problem is half the solution, so let me hear if the thousands of dollars your mother spent on teachers has paid off,” Apollo said as he appeared with a massive scroll and a feather quill, as if he were from medieval times, ready to take notes of all the problems Fatih would mention.

”The front-rear aero mismatch; we knew about it and tried to mitigate it, but the residual balance requires ongoing development. Although we have moved to a rear end that allows for a slimmer profile and clearer airflow to the rear diffuser, we have also inherited its rear instability.

We knew about that and worked with Red Bull to mitigate it, and although the catastrophic snap has been mostly designed out, as Tsunoda and Gasly said, mid-corner exit instability remains, though I can drive around that. Suspension geometry mismatch; minor compliances under peak load are still there.

Floor-diffuser interaction is yet to be optimized, and we are still below the wind tunnel predictions and will need further development. Thermal margins are tighter than expected and will require modifying some of the cooling system for better integration.

We are still trying to correlate the wind tunnel, which in turn taints all the data the team has, since we can’t say with confidence whether it is an actual problem or just a correlation mismatch. These are the major ones; the minor ones are still invisible, covered by these,” Fatih said in rapid-fire, listing the problems he had discovered both in the simulation and from the briefing session during Day 1 of testing, as Apollo wrote everything down.

He had managed to narrow everything down thanks to Invictus, Sponge Brain, and Sponge Body being at Limit Break, with the simulation allowing for specific conditions to be maintained lap after lap, removing all possible issues from data corruption from constantly changing conditions.

”When are you planning to tell the team this?”

”I’m thinking about it,” Fatih said as he looked at the car next to him.

In a perfect world, he could just tell them all of this, and the team would take it and use it to improve the car. But unfortunately, the world is not perfect, and the human mind is different from one person to another, so he could not know how the engineers would take his feedback.

They might look at him as if he were trying to overstep his position, or think he was a genius and they were dumb, or that he was just in his own head and completely ignore his suggestions. But all of these would just destroy the relationship between him and the engineers and kill any possible future collaboration.

It would be even more difficult to point to anything as evidence because he couldn’t say that he had driven the car and discovered it himself, but he also couldn’t wait until he officially got in the car to bring them up. By then, many of the issues might have been solved, and while that was good, the situation would be even better if they knew about all of them now. Instead of troubleshooting the car, they could spend that time improving it.

”Do you already have the solution?” Apollo asked.

”Not yet,” Fatih said, shaking his head.

”Isn’t it easier to point out a possible problem when you have a possible solution they could try? After all, if you point to a problem and they don’t take you seriously, you can just tell them the solution. They might try it just to shut you up or to show you that you are biting off more than you can chew. If it works, it will reinforce your position, and if it doesn’t, then they will just stop listening to you,” he said, taking his role as mentor seriously and suggesting a way Fatih could approach the problem.

”That is a good idea,” Fatih said, giving Apollo a thumbs-up for an idea that solved some of the biggest problems he was facing.

He was currently very thankful that he had someone he could freely talk to about system-related matters. He kept wondering how he would have fared if he didn’t have a release valve; he might have had to reveal it to his mother since holding everything in is not possible.

”Well then, let’s use the remaining time solving just one problem,” Fatih said as he jumped into the car, fully planning on focusing only on the suspension geometry mismatch. The suspension is the only medium that controls how the car’s aero package interacts overall, due to it being the only way the car’s contact with the track is facilitated. Having a stable, fully working one would reduce much of the noise in the data.

A few seconds later, he was already out in his already-purchased Bahrain Circuit. He needed a solution that would be implemented immediately on the same track where the verification testing would be done, so the team could see the results as fast as possible.

As the one who had caused the team to face all of these problems, he knew he also needed to help as much as possible in solving them. After all, despite all these problems, the car at its current level had already matched the 2020 car. So, as long as they solved these issues, he was confident that it would be faster than last year’s, and that in itself was good enough news for him to work hard to help solve them.