Poppy asks: Do drivers wear the same helmet all weekend?<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t really a standard answer to this one. Most weekends, the drivers will have three helmets with them. As you can imagine, it gets pretty grotty in there across a session, and so as soon as the driver gets out of the car, the lid he\u2019s been wearing goes on the helmet drier to dry the liner.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s plenty of time between the sessions to have it ready to go again, so in theory, the driver might just wear the one helmet all weekend. That said, the team will want the driver to wear each one in practice to make sure the radio is working, that the microphone is in the correct position, and so on.<\/p>\n
Each one will usually be set up for different conditions. At some races, you’ll have a different configuration of ventilation bungs, at others you\u2019ll have different visors fitted for sunny\/overcast or day\/night. So, they\u2019ll likely wear them all across the weekend, even if it\u2019s just to test each one.<\/p>\n
@mareeunearthed asks: What\u2019s happening to the car when sparks are flying out the back? <\/p>\n
The sparks flying out of the back of the car come from the titanium skid blocks fitted underneath, impacting the surface. You get sparks when the track is bumpy, or towards the end of a straight, where high speeds and downforce hammer the car down into the surface. Walk around a circuit and you\u2019ll see tell-tale scorch marks on the asphalt where the impacts are heaviest.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s happening to the car when this happens? There\u2019s nothing particularly detrimental for the car in bottoming out in this way, as the skids are tough \u2013 though it’s often a precursor to something more damaging. It will, however, make the car difficult to control for the driver, and too much grounding runs the risk of excessive wear, which could result in the car being disqualified when measured at the end of the race.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s notable that recent disqualifications for excessive skid wear have come at Sprint events. It\u2019s something teams will address during practice, playing around with ride-height and stiffnesses \u2013 but of course during a Sprint event, there\u2019s just the one practice session, and fewer opportunities to experiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poppy asks: Do drivers wear the same helmet all weekend? There isn\u2019t really a standard answer to this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-157824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}