Jock Clear, the well-known English Senior Performance Engineer working for Scuderia Ferrari where he is currently the Driver Coach for Charles Leclerc, feels that the next Formula 1 championship will be ‘desperately close’ in terms of performance and competition.
Formula 1 has decided to introduce new aerodynamic regulations for next season, with the goal of reducing the “dirty air” created by the Formula 1 cars, that at the moment is overtaking difficult. The new single-seaters will feature a simpler front wing and a rear wing designed to push the aerodynamic wake up and over the car following behind. This should lead to closer competition while at the same time should create the conditions for improved racing.
Jock Clear has been involved in Formula 1 since the late 1990s, working for Williams, BAR/Brawn/Mercedes before moving to Scuderia Ferrari six years ago.
“It’s not difficult to predict, it’s impossible to predict and actually, you’re asking me to go out of my comfort zone and I spend a lot of my time talking to drivers, Formula 1 drivers and our academy drivers about objective expectations,” – the Senior Performance Engineer explained, when asked about the prospects for next season.
““You can’t know what the opposition are doing, you have no idea what the other drivers are capable of. You only know what you’re capable of. You can only influence what you can do. Where that puts us in the pecking order is really depends on technically what other people come up with and what we come up with. And I have no idea what other people are going to come up with. It really is impossible to say, and you might say you’re Ferrari for god’s sake, you should be fighting at the front. But you can’t know whether that’s going to happen, if you look at where all the teams are, you have to just have huge respect for all of them at the moment. They’re very, very capable and that’s a testament to the sport itself, that’s how it should be. Teams are not separated by seconds anymore. It’s not like the guys back in P20 are five seconds off the pace, the people in P20 are 1.4 seconds off the pace and everybody is in between and that means for the want of a tenth, you can be P5 or P10.” – Jock Clear concluded.
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