The recent Canadian Grand Prix was just the latest in which drivers were given all sorts of information and coaching from their teams as to the best way to drive the car, the manage the tyres, and where their opponents are faster or slower etc.
There is a rule within the regulations that a driver must drive the car “alone and unaided” but this seems to matter not.
It surely is getting daft now. On the way to the grid the drivers are told the number of burnouts they need to perform to get the rear tyres to the optimum temperature. During the race they are told where to ease off, where they can push, to make best use of the tyres. To the extent they may be told to be gentle through a given corner as it is putting too much load onto a specific tyre. Where to lift and coast to preserve engine temperatures, to manage the under-fuelled cars (to save weight) and all sorts of other things.
Why? The teams have huge amounts of data coming from the sensors on the cars and therefore they can provide all this information, but the question still has to be asked – why? In a world of endless cost-cutting, in which the series is trending to the mean by virtue of the cost cap, why is the FIA allowing each team to have a hundred people or more in the UK, as well as huge amounts of cloud compute expense to run race models and tyres simulations to give drivers such precise, corner by corner, gear change by gear change information? How, fundamentally does that help finances and racing?
Ban the car-to-pit telemetry. Make the data transfer have to happen through physical media not over the air. Let the teams analyse the data from practice, from the previous Grand Prix. But not during a race.
Drivers can have data on their dashboard. They can have as much as they like. But not tyre temperatures. They can see the tyres out the front of the car or in their mirrors. They can feel how they are behaving. They don’t need a computer telling them stats.
The teams will probably claim “Safety” if the FIA tries to take this from them. OK, fine. Get a trigger point for each metric – i.e. oil pressure, tyre temperature and so on, and set the ECU to alert when that threshold is breached. Make the light on the top of the car go red, the steering wheel light up red, and the driver must park the car or be black flagged and face a penalty – if it’s a safety issue.
But it is not a safety issue. It’s a performance issue. From an engineering perspective the biggest variable in the car is driver performance and all this data, and thus all this coaching, is to try to flatten out a normal human being’s variability. But that is motor racing. Being better on your tyres, managing the car sympathetically is all part of the skill. In 2025 it’s hard for a driver to damage their car. They can’t miss a gear, over rev the engine and so on. The engineers have seen to those problems with semi-automatic gearboxes and rev-limiters. What’s left I things like tyre and fuel usage.
Lets leave some variables out on the track.
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