Archief - FIA Formula One 2018 - Deel 1/2

Just 15 months ago, Stoffel Vandoorne was a bright Formula 1 rookie star, about to embark on his first full season at McLaren. But today, he's the most anonymous driver on the grid thanks to a combination of Fernando Alonso's headline-grabbing antics and McLaren's struggles.

Yet the only driver to have been outqualified by his team-mate every weekend so far this season, who has only contributed 20% of his team's points, is doing better than the numbers suggest. In fact, he's got a touch of the Sebastian Vettel about him.

That's not to say that Vandoorne is at Vettel's level yet, but there are similarities beyond their initials. Their driving styles are much the same, and therefore so is what they demand from the car.

"I like rear stability," says Vandoorne. "Our head of aero is Peter Prodromou, he's worked at Red Bull and a comment that often comes up is everything I want from the car is exactly like Vettel wants from his car.

"They believe if they can create the car like that, it's probably the quickest way of going around a circuit. But he said when something is not 100% right, then you struggle a bit more.

"We brake late into the corners, we require quite a lot of stability from the car and we want it to be progressive because you also need the rotation [in the corners]. But obviously you don't want the car to slide. It needs to be something controllable and that's very hard to create. But when you nail it, it is extremely fast."

Given McLaren started the season with a rear-end instability problem, it's no surprise that Vandoorne struggled early on. Upgrades and set-up work have ameliorated, but not eliminated, this. Tom Stallard, Vandoorne's race engineer, believes that's a part of the improvement, but that there's more to it.

"There's some of that, and some is genuine improvements he's making within himself," says Stallard. "His approach is always to try to carry a lot of speed [into corners], and sometimes that compromises the exit. As we've made the car a bit more stable and also worked with him, he's getting better at the balance between the two, so you carry the speed at the entry but you don't just pay back everything you've just cashed [at the exit].

"Vettel drives similarly, carrying a lot of speed in, and because he's normally in a good car he looks pretty good. To some extent, in his last year at Red Bull in 2014, [Daniel] Ricciardo made him look ordinary, which he clearly isn't. With Stoffel, we're going through the same process."

The upgrade introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix didn't do much for the overall pace of the McLaren relative to the rest, as proved by the fact the team was further off the pace in the French GP than at the season's previous seven races. But it did improve the consistency and stability of the car, which played in Vandoorne's favour.

That consistency and stability is so important because not only does his driving style require a rear end that sticks and is controllable as he carries the maximum speed to the apex, but the resulting lower apex speed than might be achieved by a more progressive approach to the corner means you then have to be able to get on the power as quickly as possible.

At times, Vandoorne has been getting from point A (the entry) to point B (the apex) very quickly, but then going onto point C and beyond is compromised. To balance things up, that approach needs the car to be more predictable and also for the driver to accept how attacking to be.

"The improvements to the car are definitely helping him," says Stallard. "And then he's getting better at judging how much speed he can actually get away with carrying in the entry rather than how much speed he wants to be able to carry. So that means he nails the exit more consistently and then he looks competitive."

Stallard points to the culture shock Vandoorne has had to deal with since starting his first full F1 season. During his stellar junior formula career, in which he won the Formula 4 Eurocup, Formula Renault Eurocup, Formula Renault 3.5 and GP2 crowns, Vandoorne often had the strongest equipment. But in F1 he's having to become far more adaptable. And he is on an upward curve.

Last season, on average, he was almost seven-tenths of a second slower than Alonso in qualifying by this stage in the season and a huge amount of work had to be done both at the track and away from it to get Vandoorne up to speed. That wasn't helped by myriad Honda engine problems. It's a process that's continuing, but he has made a step this year.

The improvement, unfortunately, has been difficult to detect for the casual viewer. Vandoorne is, on average, 0.227s slower than Alonso in qualifying - a gap the team is keen to see him close - and hasn't scored points in the last four races. But the devil is in the detail, and Vandoorne has been better than that. In Monaco, Vandoorne was quicker than Alonso during practice before problems struck.

"Monaco, he was quick all the time but we had a rear suspension problem in qualifying," says Stallard. "That cost him performance in qualifying, and it contributed to the massive graining he had in the race because it stopped the rear end coming up, created understeer and I think that wrote off our front tyres and ruined the race."

That's the kind of problem, one that takes a little off your lap time but that doesn't stop you completely, that can make a driver look worse than they are. And in the following race in Canada, Vandoorne was bang on Alonso's pace and qualified just 0.009s down. Come Sunday, he made a slightly worse start than his team-mate, then picked up a puncture that cast him to the back of the field.

That Canada performance was particularly important in plotting Vandoorne's progress. He struggled there last year, and it's a track where pace is heavily defined by the way you attack the corner and judge the entry speed. Last year, Vandoorne struggled to get that right, in 2018, he was as fast as Alonso. That's a big step.

There have been other largely unseen high points. In Bahrain, Vandoorne picked up massive wheelspin at the start and was last into the first corner. But he charged back through to finish eighth behind Alonso in what was his best race performance of the season so far. Not that you'd have seen much of it.

"He had a terrible start, which wasn't his fault and was more in the control of the car than the control of the driver, so he was last and then overtook loads of cars, but they didn't show a single overtaking move on TV, which I felt quite hard done by," says Stallard.

Starts have generally hurt Vandoorne. He has only gained positions twice this season on the first lap, most recently in France thanks to the chaos that struck at Turns 1 and 3, with the only other instance coming in Azerbaijan. This is particularly costly, as once he's into the race proper, his pace is similar to Alonso's.

This is just another one of the small challenges that's making life harder for Vandoorne - the fact that McLaren has struggled with its launches ever since the clutch regulations changed at the start of last season.

"It has a massive impact on your race and starts have been a weakness in terms of getting consistently good launches," says Vandoorne. "It has not been easy for us as a team, not only on my side, but for both it has been a bit inconsistent. In the position we start sometimes you often fall behind a slower car and you kind of get dragged out of the race."

Alonso, too, hasn't had the best of launches but excels at picking his way through the congestion in the early stages of the race. And Alonso is arguably Vandoorne's biggest problem, as not only does a driver capable of grabbing headlines render the Belgian almost invisible, it also gives Vandoorne an almost impossible yardstick to measure up against.

"Fernando's strength is that whatever the circumstances, he always gets at least 99% out of the car he has," says Vandoorne. "This makes him a very good benchmark for me because you know exactly where you are all the time.

"He's got 17 years of experience as well, so that definitely helps him. He's one of the greats of the sport and it has been very positive to be next to him. I've learned a lot in terms of how to build up a weekend, what is important, what is not important and I've moved on a lot."

But while Vandoorne is embracing what he can learn from Alonso, there is a danger the Spaniard's virtuosity is burying his career. The majority of Alonso's team-mates have ended up very much in his shadow, and given the most famous instance when that didn't happen - with Lewis Hamilton at McLaren in 2007 - was with another stellar rookie, it's easy to write off Vandoorne. After all, goes the logic, if Vandoorne was that good he'd have done what Hamilton did.

It's not that simple. Hamilton had 27 days of official testing under his belt before the start of 2007, while Vandoorne has still only logged 21 days midway through his second full season. And that's a run dating back four years.

What Vandoorne has done, however, is quietly get on with establishing himself and also becoming his own man. That's key to thriving in the shadow of Alonso. If he tries to beat, or even match, Alonso at his own game, Vandoorne will fail.

But while it's been difficult, doubly so given at times he's been in the queue behind Alonso for updates over the past 19 months, Vandoorne has gained a foothold. It's never as simple as just copying your team leader, even one as great as Alonso.

"The two drivers drive differently," says Stallard. "Fernando's approach is more to stop the car, get it rotated and straighten the exit whereas Stoffel's more to try and carry speed. So they need slightly different things from the set-up and slightly different things suit one or the other.

"That is always challenging when your team-mate has done 17 years in F1 and is as quick as Fernando Alonso. To say 'I know what I'm doing, I'm going to go in a different direction because this suits me' is not easy to do. So that's been one of the challenges for Stoffel and myself, to know when to plough our own furrow."

What's definitely unseen with McLaren is the contribution Vandoorne is making to the team as a whole. Given its very obvious problems, there's a huge amount of work going into how to understand the car and Vandoorne has invested plenty of time in working at the factory.

Inevitably, given Alonso's commitments with Toyota's World Endurance Championship effort, there's a chance there to ensure he's integral to McLaren's effort.

He has also struck up a good relationship with Prodromou. This initially followed Vandoorne's weakest weekend of the year in Azerbaijan, where he struggled to match Alonso's ability to hustle a tricky car to a lap time even though he plugged away and left Baku with a couple of points for ninth.

"He's got a very good feel for the car and gives very good feedback," says Stallard. "He's in the factory between all the races. And he spends a lot of time with Pete Prodromou, they have a very good relationship and Pete really trusts the feedback. They had lunch together after Baku and that conversation really drove some of the test parts for Barcelona and beyond.

"So he's genuinely involved in the mid-term and long-term development of the car. And he spends a lot of time with the vehicle dynamics department.

"Fernando's very authoritative with 17 years of experience, but Stoffel is just very involved, talks a lot of sense and has a very good feel for the car so in a quieter way he can have a very big influence."

So Vandoorne's season isn't as clear cut as it looks. But neither has it been as strong as it should have been. At times during the closing stages of last season, he strung together strong weekends - qualifying and finishing seventh in Malaysia stands out - and the hope was that that would happen more often this year. So far, it hasn't.

With question marks over McLaren's 2019 driver line-up and junior driver Lando Norris leading the Formula 2 standings and pushing for promotion, Vandoorne needs to tie those threads together and get the results on paper to prove that he's much closer to Alonso than is immediately obvious.

Vandoorne himself bats that suggestion away, stressing that there's always pressure on F1 drivers. But he's intelligent enough to know not to generate even more pressure by suggesting any uncertainty over his future.

It's too easy to dismiss Vandoorne as having been found out in F1 and declare what made him, in the words of Alonso last weekend, "the most talented young driver of the last couple of years" nothing more than hype.

Vandoorne has been in an extraordinarily difficult situation up against an all-time great in a team that is battling many problems with limited testing. Vettel took over a year to get on top of the demands of F1, with his big breakthrough only really coming during the 2008 European Grand Prix in Valencia 14 months after his debut. While it's his shock Monza victory a fortnight later that is remembered, Vettel getting on top of how to be super-quick on heavy tanks during Valencia practice is the key turning point that both Toro Rosso and Vettel himself believe unlocked his potential in F1.

It's time for Vandoorne to make a similar breakthrough and build on his unseen progress.