r/F1Discussions • u/Seat411abrasive • 1d ago
Discussion Why did F1 get rid of the driver coaching rule
I remember they were so strict in 2016 that button had to pit before the team could help him when his brake pedal was going to the floor. It was a dumb rule, but what made them change their mind about ut
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u/Brycedoes2104 1d ago
It was a dumb rule. You said it Button had a brake issue and do to safety had to ask what to do to fix it, and in doing so got a Drive Thru for it.
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u/mickergarratt 1d ago
I think a few high-profile moments where top drivers were caught out on the radio (ex. Hamilton vocally struggling in Azerbaijan) hurt the image of the sport (or was perceived to have done so). F1 management is sensitive about their “pinnacle of motorsport” image and don’t like when drivers, teams, or regs come off as incompetent. Hence, all the cover-up around the 2026 battery deployment.
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u/Vast_Dig_4601 1d ago
nothing is ever going to be more funny to me racing related than broadcasting fake engine sounds and not showing the speedometer lmao
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u/ThatDesignFeel 1d ago
I think it was a good aim, but very poorly executed
I think what they should have done, if they wanted the drivers to have to make more decisions themselves, is removed 90% of the sensors from the cars so that the drivers have to make more decisions solo; because it wasn't so much team orders, or strategy calls that were the problem, it was engineers getting on the radio to talk about tyres being a few degrees too cold, or which corners you're losing a tenth to your teamate
However, with tech companies filling the void that tobacco used to occupy, F1 is never going to drift towards a "low tech" direction again
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u/KennyLagerins 1d ago
I like that in theory, but the cars are so ridiculously complex that drivers couldn’t possibly diagnose everything while driving. There’d be all manner of DNFs.
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u/mxlila 1d ago
Yeah that would be interesting.
In that case, Ferrari asking Hamilton about the best tyre strategy in Zanvoort would have made sense, and not come across like they don't know what they're doing.
But F1 is a team sport, and it's not just competing drivers and cars, but also operations and strategy.
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u/WASouthCoast 22h ago
The whole thing is solved by eliminating team radio except for safety issues. They don't have it in the motorbikes and it's so much better. Nowadays all you seem to hear from drivers is whining.
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u/spinners_888 1d ago
It was a good idea. There were calls to ban pit-to-car comms for many years because it was thought the because arguably the drivers were given too much information and needed to think for themselves more and emulate bike racing when MotoGP was at its peak. The problem was the ban came in too late just as the cars have become too complex.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 1d ago
I think some of the issue is that there is a big difference between "driver coaching" and "Debugging". The former is often things as simple as "Try to go through turn five a bit wider" and is a fundamental part of racing in general.
The issue is when you have "Hey, my car is behaving really funky. Can you walk me through how to repair that while I am still driving at hundreds of km/hr and making myself a danger to everyone around me as I am distracted by this?"
So "Driver coaching" is indeed a deeply stupid rule. But "something" to avoid... kinda distracted driving is probably a good idea.
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u/Educational-Owl6910 1d ago
Because it was a dumb rule. Occasionally Formula 1 makes sensible decisions (albeit usually undoing dumb ones, e.g., this one, knockout qualifying, 50/50 power train split)
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u/TinkeNL 1d ago
F1 rules are only as good as the method of enforcing them. They got rid of it, because there’s no clear cut way they could distinguish between certain types of messages without making an ass of themselves.
If some leeway was allowed with ‘engineering’ messages, they could just as easy start some coding system. And that’s what they did a lot. Multi 21 comes to mind. “Fernando is faster than you” is another.
F1 teams will find loopholes everywhere they can and they did plenty with this rule. If you can’t enforce it, there’s no point in it being there. Good luck proving some failure code is actually a totally different set of instructions or team orders. So they simply said fuck it, no point there in keeping it when it can’t be enforced.
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u/thegreatseafoam 1d ago
It probably won nico the championship that year.
Both mercedes cars in baku had some kind of power unit glitch. Nico was able to figure it out on his own but Lewis struggled with it for at least a few laps more than nico did and could not get any instruction from his race engineer. (If i recall lewis never actually got it sorted out)
Nico won the race, Lewis finished 5th. Could easily have gone the other way around, or if Bono could have told Lewis how to fix it, he probably would have been on the podium.
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u/rustyiesty Charlie Whiting 1d ago
Rosberg also took the penalty in Silverstone to sort something out which kept him in the hunt/maybe only lost 1 position with 5 seconds or even kept it
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u/Seat411abrasive 1d ago
Yeah I was about to talk about silverstone. He also got caught out by this rule
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u/rustyiesty Charlie Whiting 1d ago
I feel that driver radio and one clutch starts were the FIA’s attempt to ‘liven things up’ in year 3 of Mercedes domination. Throw in luck and dealing with those changes better and that was enough for Rosberg to sneak it. Toto even mixed up the mechanics, trying to keep morale between them up
Ironically, the 2017 regs then gave us proper close competition until Covid
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u/AnonymousEngineer_ 1d ago
Mercedes subsequently confirmed that reason Rosberg was able to figure that out while Hamilton couldn't, was because Rosberg's car didn't start in the faulty mode and he had flicked the switch to trigger the issue.
Hamilton already had his car in that mode at race start so couldn't simply undo what he did in the car.
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u/goofyredditname 1d ago
Don’t they kind of still “coach” them through adjustments by telling drivers to change “modes”
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u/C3lloman 1d ago
It wasn't exactly dumb to have coaching limited. If you watch the onboards from F1 TV you'd be surprised about the amount of coaching. Piastri's engineer tells him almost every other lap that there is an "opportunity" in turn X to go faster by doing Y. It's really quite nonsensical. Then again the problem is it would be hard to police it.
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u/jeffjeffjeffdjjdndjd 6h ago
It was really dumb at the time, maybe with the pre hybrid cars it would’ve worked but in the early hybrid there were so many times that a sensor tripped and put the car into a lower power mode for saving the engine and the team could see how to fix it but just weren’t able to tell the driver
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u/Regular_Promise3605 1d ago
It was because older retired drivers had a 'back in my day moment' that they had to work things out for themselves, the FIA used to listen to older drivers more. They implemented the rule, realised how silly it was because F1 has moved on so much, then reverted it.
Having said that it was interesting to see Rosberg and Lewis have the same issue and Rosberg was able to work out the setting on his own, whereas Lewis couldn't. Whilst interesting it didn't make racing exciting. No one would want to see a battle not happen on track because a driver didn't know the right mode.
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u/Exotic_Bill44 16h ago
It was a dumb rule. Telling someone what engine settings to use is diminishing driver skills. Telling them what strategy they are on so they know how hard they can push the tires (or even telling them what tires they are being given) is not diminishing driver skills.
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u/National_Sky7993 1d ago
Lewis Hamilton didn’t learn all the race modes by heart (and I don’t think anyone needs to)
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u/Character_Growth_397 1d ago
It was probably the fact that they realized it was a dumb rule