This week's Grapevine brings you information fresh from the paddock on: Fuel Strategies Pushing the Safety Envelope

Fuel Strategies

Traditionally, Brazil is relatively neutral on pit strategy. One stop is normally avoided: the heavy fuel load promotes tyre wear and makes it relatively easy for others to pass on the main straight. Three stops is theoretically fastest, shaving off up to 30 seconds over a race distance, but carries the risk of being stalled behind slower runners. Most teams opt for the safer two-stop strategy, which takes around ten seconds longer, but doesn't carry much pressure to make passes in order to make it work.

This year, the rain put a real spanner in the strategy works, making the best way forward depend on guessing how much time the safety car would spend on the track, whether it would dry out, and whether the race would go the distance, or be stopped at the two-hour mark. This led two teams to gamble on a "no-stop" race, refuelling at the start of the race, gambling on spending sufficient time behind the safety car to run the whole distance.

Gambling on a full tank and running full lean was a strategy that worked for Heinz-Harald Frentzen before, when he won in France with Jordan in 1999. At Sauber, whilst the Ferrari engine might not be quite as impressive as this year's model for power, when leaned off, the fuel consumption is pretty good, so the team decided it was worth gambling. After the opening safety car period, the team guessed that the race would last the full two hours, and as soon as they believed they needed fuel to make the two-hour mark, Frentzen was called in for refuelling. However, with the circuit drying up, speeds and consumption increased. It looked like the strategy was going to backfire, requiring a splash-and-dash four laps from the end, until Webber's accident brought out the safety car: had Alonso's accident not stopped the race, that safety car period should have made enough difference to last the race distance. However, on wearing tyres, he should have been an easy target for the freshly refuelled and rebooted McLarens.

Jordan took a bigger chance, stopping Giancarlo Fisichella at the end of the opening safety car period to have his car filled to the brim. Having looked after his tyres in a heavy car and on the drying track, running lean and short shifting to conserve fuel, his race was shaping up nicely, and looked competitive against McLaren, though opinion is divided over whether he could have maintained that form to the end of the race. Whilst the team remain tight-lipped over their prospects, McLaren are convinced that Fisichella needed to stop in the next five laps, so he could not have won the event unless the safety car brought on by Webber's accident took the race to the two-hour mark, or full distance.

In the event, one team who definitely got their strategy wrong is Ferrari, who seem to have dropped the ball. Rubens Barrichello was running a basic two-stop strategy, and due to make his second stop when he experienced a 'total shutdown' - later clarified as a fuel feed problem. And it's not the first time that has been given as the reason when the problem with the fuel feed is having no fuel left in the tank.

Pushing the Safety Envelope

If there was ever an illustration that the changes made for safety reasons in Formula One work, then it has to be said, Mark Webber shredding his Jaguar on the main straight at Brazil, and Alonso running into trouble in the wreckage, with both escaping serious injury, fits the bill. Nonetheless, events from the same race have brought up some concerns.

When two cars went off at the same time, on the same corner, it was pretty clear that there was a problem brewing. The cause of the incidents - a veritable river running across the otherwise drying track - was clearly not going to change, so it would be a safe assumption that there would be more visitors to the same piece of barrier. Which begs the question why, when Michael Schumacher arrived two laps later, he was faced with the prospect of running into a Caterpillar rather than the tyre wall, in which case he could all too easily be ruing another shortened season, rather than just a poor start. When a car comes off the track, typically, it remains a hazard until it is removed from the place it ended up. If the incident was at speed, then the tyre wall inevitably needs attention, too, and there will be debris to consider.

Which raises the safety concern: how to ensure stranded cars are removed from the gravel trap before someone else runs into them, without risking collision with a large, very solid piece of machinery in the way. There are two obvious routes to achieving this - either not having equipment inside the barriers, or better still, ensuring more cars don't come off the track in the same place.

In theory, once an accident takes place, waved yellow flags are supposed to ensure that drivers take extra care coming through the sector, normally at a much-reduced speed. Being the best drivers in the world, that is thought to be sufficient to ensure they stay out of trouble. However, if conditions can even catch out the reigning World Champion, then it is clear that there are some circumstances where yellow flags are just plain inadequate: the fallback here is deploying the safety car.

Unfortunately, as Fernando Alonso demonstrated, in the time between deploying the safety car, and all the drivers catching up to it, there is plenty of opportunity for further incident. This leaves the FIA with plenty to think about on two fronts: starting immediately with the drivers themselves.

The FIA believe the drivers are due a reminder on the respect due to waved yellow flags. After a word at the drivers briefing ahead of Imola, anyone involved in an incident under waved yellows is going to have some trouble explaining themselves to the race stewards, and face sanctions if they haven't an excellent reason for it.

On the other hand, safety procedures at the circuits themselves can use some attention. Placement of flags posts can be part of the problem, with drivers missing the flags shown. Marshals training is to be stepped up in anticipation of improving visibility.

Looking towards future circuit contracts, the requirements for car recovery are going to be enhanced. Accident blackspots are to be accorded new respect; at these locations, cars that end up in the barriers will be recoverable by being craned off the circuit by equipment behind the barriers. For dealing with cars further out in gravel traps of these blackspots, there are some new ideas being examined, including using mounted winches to haul car towards the crane behind the barrier.

On a different track, the FIA are not impressed by teams' claims that much of the mayhem of the weekend could have been avoided, had they been able to take full wet tyres as well as the intermediates. Indeed, from their perspective, the choice would have reduced safety, not improved it.

The use of full wet tyres at Brazil would have been problematic at best. From fairly early, the circuit was showing a strong dry line, and the problem with turn three was caused by drivers acclimatising to a rapidly drying circuit running through a basically wet corner. Running wet tyres would have allowed drivers to take the wet section faster - but the drying track would have overheated the tyres, making the difference between wet and dry sections more pronounced, and increasing the risk of an incident. Increasing both the odds of an accident, and the speed at which it would happen, is not safe. Needless to say, if all the teams agree to change the tyre rules, it will happen, but the FIA are certainly not driving that issue.