There is still far too long to go until the Australian GP opens the season. I do not think that I am the only one who has found the break interminably long this time - it feels at least twice as long as last year's. That may be the result of our expectation that the competition will be extremely close this time, our desire to put the political events of 2007 firmly in the past or, from the F1 blogger's point of view at least, the dearth of really interesting off season news with which to create new posts. It might even be a combination of all of these.
The hidden Williams diffuser
The result is that we have fingered the season until it has become dog-eared. We have endlessly predicted the outcome of both championships, resorted to gossip about the most flimsy and unlikely rumors, torn Max and Bernie to pieces several times over, and yet nothing really satisfies our craving. We are addicts indeed.
It was interesting, however, to see the amount of comment generated by my last post regarding KERS. Even more so than with predictions or driver assessments, technical matters seem to elicit a wide range of opinions, many of which are quite passionately held. This interest in the minutiae of the sport is fairly exceptional, I think - how many football fans do you know who could pontificate upon the flight characteristics of the ball or the composition of the goal net?
My obvious conclusion is that I should be writing more technical posts to meet this demand. The problem is that I am no techie. What understanding I have of the engineering behind F1 cars comes entirely from my own investigation of matters that happen to interest me. For instance, I was looking at aerodynamics in the sixties, long before the actual engineers began to use them in any significant way. But, if you had asked me about suspension design at the time, I would have had only a few remembered words (wishbones, de Dion) with which to hide my ignorance.
As Steven Roy put so eloquently in a comment today, however, our lack of any qualification to expound upon technical matters actually frees us to ignore the realities that hold the genuine experts so much closer to earth. And there is another factor that allows us to see further than the professionals on rare occasions - our greater understanding of matters totally unconnected with engineering can give us a better overall picture and may even open doors to fresh ways of viewing a problem.
A couple of years ago, on my personal blog, I wrote about a few of the wild ideas of my youth in a post entitled Inventions of a non-Engineer. Most of those inventions have turned out to be already existent but that does not discourage me - it merely proves that I was right, if not the first! And there are still a few ideas from those years that I have yet to see used in reality.
My point is that F1 enthusiasts will always want to know why the engineers are doing certain things to the cars and that we should not be too hesitant to debate the arcane sciences of aerodynamics, energy saving, safety systems or any of the myriad aspects involved in the creation of a F1 car. The experts may smile at the limitations of our knowledge but there will be occasions when we have the last laugh.
As an instance, I feel that the modern concern for and concentration on the diffuser is exaggerated. Teams go to extraordinary lengths to hide what they are doing with their diffuser each year, some distributing no photos of the rear of the car and Williams putting it in a box this time around. I think I know how the diffuser works but I am not sure, so I will not go into the reasons why I think it enjoys far too much hype; let me say only that the areas around the diffuser are just as important in creating downforce and should not be despised.
Of course, the engineers have access to wind tunnels and computers so they ought to know what they are talking about. My objections are inevitably theoretical and have little acquaintance with reality - yet they may still be proved correct one day.
And all of this is a very long-winded way of promising that I will try to do more technical posts in the future. At times the extent of my ignorance will become apparent but at least we can all learn from the experience and become more aware of exactly what is happening when a F1 car takes to the track. It's all part of the sport and ours to play with therefore.