Dan Fallows: Do Formula 1 engineers favour one driver over another?

Ask any racing driver in any series who they would count as their biggest rival, and they will all say the same thing: my team-mate.

Even in series like Formula 2, where everyone is driving ostensibly the same car, some teams seem to be able to set the cars up better or provide the drivers with a generally better car than some others. In F1, every team’s car is different, so the only true comparison of driver ability is between team-mates.

This is especially important when a team is not doing so well. If both drivers are uncompetitive, then it is logical to blame the car.

When one driver is doing notably better than the other, it is normal to point the finger at the driver. But a complaint we hear time and again in this scenario is that the car has been developed to suit one driver more than the other. Clearly, that could just be seen as a convenient excuse, but is there any truth in it? And if so, why would that be the case?

Immediate impact

It’s fair to say that at Jaguar Racing, back in 2003, at the start of my F1 career, we were not a competitive team. Seventh in the championship was as good as we could manage, and some major changes in personnel in 2002 meant that the team lacked the stability that is so important for success.

When a young Mark Webber joined the team for 2003, partnered initially with Antonio Pizzonia, we could see immediately that he was quick. Suddenly the car looked to have some potential and Mark's feedback was incredibly helpful to diagnose and fix some of the underlying issues with the car. I remember clearly when he was second on the grid for the second race of 2004 in Malaysia - something we hadn't dreamed was possible just a few months before.

Sadly, Mark's team-mates over the next two years (Justin Wilson and Christian Klien) did not manage to achieve the same level of performance, although each showed flashes of brilliance. Significantly for the engineering team, they could not deliver the same quality of feedback from the races and tests that Mark could.

On occasion, we were left with conflicting information from both sides of the garage. In circumstances like that, how does a team react?

Unreliable witnesses

I’ll say at this point that F1 is a ruthless competition.

Drivers and their teams have in the past gone to extreme lengths to gain an advantage in any way they can. Sometimes those lengths can seem less than sporting, but we must not forget that the stakes are very high. Having said that, I have never come across an engineering team that deliberately sets out to advantage one driver over another.

This is mainly for the simple reason that the team cares more about the constructors’ championship, and, therefore, having both cars scoring maximum points is the priority. That is not to say it has not happened at all, just that I have never encountered it myself.

Even if a team wanted to design a car to suit one driver over another, it is not an easy task. There is enough for the designers to do to add outright performance as well as make the car more stable and predictable, without having to try to bake in preferred characteristics that will not suit one driver. It’s better to concentrate on establishing what is the most likely bottleneck to improvements, and maximising effort on that. 

Furthermore, it is not always obvious why one driver is struggling more than the other. A driver who is being beaten consistently by their team-mate will be feeling increasing pressure, and many will start to actually drive worse. Where they could once rely on their talent and experience, they now start to look at what the faster one is doing - perhaps comparing speed traces to see where the gains are coming from - and start driving unnaturally for them to try to close the gap.

In that case, they begin to be unreliable witnesses for telling us engineers about the car. Sometimes they need to calm down, go back to their own style of driving and set the car up around that before we can really believe their feedback.

This is where the danger of unconscious bias comes in for the team.

If you know you have a driver struggling compared to their team-mate, it is natural to give less credence to what they say. 

Picking sides

The choice of where to direct the most effort will likely be driven by the requirements of the dominant driver, particularly in an era of F1 governed by the cost cap, where resources are limited.

Again, this is often not deliberate or even outwardly discussed; it is just a natural tendency to try to narrow down the many requirements into a more manageable list. Whatever the motivation, it means that what suits the faster driver is more likely to be pursued and prioritised.

In these cases, the preference usually comes down to which axle is the limiting factor at some key part of the lap. For example, one driver may be adamant that the front end is lacking, causing terminal understeer and the stability of the rear of the car at that stage is actually hurting them. The other may say that the front of the car is manageable, but that the rear stability is lacking and causing them to brake much earlier to stay in control. If your faster driver is the front-end one, logic alone might push you to focus on that weakness.

Added to this is another effect that teams need to be wary of. 

Entering ‘dangerous territory’

Consider Jaguar Racing back in 2003, having just been through a very public round of redundancies and management changes: A team feeling demotivated and in desperate need of some good news.

When Webber joined and started to put in competitive laptimes, we realised that the car may not be as bad as we thought. In fact, when one of your drivers is doing well, it has the advantage of proving to the world that the car can be competitive.

Any driver in that situation will tell you that they are outdriving the capability of the car, which is, of course, nonsense. In fact, it shows you are doing something right, which, back in 2003, was very motivating for the whole team.

Of course, Mark was later to meet his match with Sebastian Vettel. Their relationship was famously at times explosive, but they pushed each other forward and pushed us as well. There was no sense that we would want to favour one over the other, even if Seb was Red Bull’s golden child in his early F1 days.

In many ways, the driver pairing we had at Red Bull from 2016 to 2018 - in Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo - was the best for the engineering team.

They were fiercely competitive and evenly matched so that there was no sense of bias, whether unintended or not. Daniel may have felt at times that the team was favouring the young challenger, but I can absolutely say from our side that we did not. Rather, we enjoyed a time where both drivers were highly talented and gave great feedback about the car. 

Yes, sometimes the information was conflicting, but we were usually able to tease out what would make the ultimate performance better.

A final, but perhaps most contentious, source of bias can be from the race engineering teams at the track. Whilst a lot of the character of the car is set by its design and many of the set-up decisions are made before a race, there is still a lot that can be changed at the circuit.

With limited testing, teams make the most of Friday practice sessions to try new set-up directions such as balancing aerodynamic characteristics with roll stiffness to tune how the car uses its tyres. If one side of the garage hits a sweet spot or makes an obvious gain, that will usually come to light in the debrief meeting and the other car can adopt it if they think it will also help them.

I have heard of teams where this doesn't always happen, however. Race engineers are every bit as competitive as the rest of the team and giving their car a material advantage over the other one can be useful in proving their superiority.

This is really dangerous territory for the rest of the engineering team; however, if secrets are being kept at the track, no one ultimately benefits. Drivers can easily be involved in this as well, sometimes deliberately downplaying the effect of some key change in order to avoid, or at least delay, their team-mate getting wind of it.

In the extreme, this kind of gamesmanship can become quite overt and start to eat away at the trust inside a team.

There have been public examples where drivers have managed to drive a wedge between the two sides of the garage. Whilst this might seem like it gives them an advantage, it is no good for the design team and will ultimately result in a slower car.

A ‘natural consequence’ of F1

So, do teams favour one driver over another?

I think the answer must be that on occasion, yes, they do - but, for the most part, it is unintentional and just a natural consequence of a highly competitive environment.

Certainly, I do not believe that teams set out to advantage one over the other, nor do I believe the team bias is in any way as prevalent as many drivers would have you believe.

From my own experience, we as engineers just want to make the best car we can and make sure that both drivers score as many points as they can.

After all, it is only really when your cars come first and second in a race that you can unequivocally say you have the best car.