Pushing The Limits

It is no secret that the start of the 2020 F1 season for Ferrari has been disastrous. The team is lacking pace and can barely match up to Racing point let alone Mercedes and RedBull. Ferrari has been the challenger or No.2 team in the Mercedes dominant hybrid era.  However, the question remains as to why Ferrari have not been able to match up to the likes of Mercedes and RedBull in the past. Even with multiple world champions in their team like Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel, the team have not been able to return to form. Ferrari's main problem seems to be its tendency to lean towards one driver and its poor communication. They seem to have been stumbling in places where they really shouldn't, making rookies mistakes. The most recent example I can think of is Canada 2019 where Ferrari allegedly forgot to tell Leclerc about his teammate's 5-second penalty. Lets not even get started on how bad the tyre strategies have been.  Mercedes, on the other han

 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