Pushing The Limits

It’s no secret that the start of Ferrari’s 2020 F1 season has been disastrous. The team is seriously lacking pace and can barely match Racing Point—let alone Mercedes or Red Bull. Ferrari has traditionally been the main challenger or the No. 2 team during the Mercedes-dominated hybrid era. However, the lingering question is: why hasn’t Ferrari been able to consistently challenge the likes of Mercedes and Red Bull in recent years? Despite having multiple world champions like Fernando Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen, and Sebastian Vettel in their lineup, the team has failed to return to its former glory. Ferrari’s main issues seem to stem from its tendency to favor one driver over the other and its poor internal communication. They continue to make mistakes that shouldn't happen at this level—rookie-level errors. A prime example is Canada 2019, where Ferrari allegedly failed to inform Charles Leclerc about his teammate's five-second penalty. And let’s not even start on their questionabl...

 Day 2 of Formula One pre-season testing at Barcelona, Spain saw Mercedes pull out a weird new system. Mercedes' technical director James Allison called referred to this system as "DAS" or "Dual Axis Steering"  The DAS works on the toe angle of the car. As explained briefly by motorsport magazine "Toe is the angle that the wheels sit in relation to dead ahead when the steering is straight. If the front of the wheels are pointing out then this is known as toe out, the opposite and they are toed in".   Engineers in F1 tweak the angle to counteract oversteer and understeer.  So what Mercedes's DAS does is that it varies the toe angle between zero toe and negative toe. On the straights the angle becomes zero, reducing drag and giving a slight speed boost. This system is not automatic. It is activated with a button on the steering wheel. The message "marker" is displayed on the dash everytime the system is activated.  The system allows...