F1's new 'mudguards' fail to reduce spray – but wet weather solution still needed

Cricket fans were gutted and furious. Nine months later Davis was released on the advice of home secretary Roy Jenkins. Shortly afterwards he was caught red-handed robbing the bank of Cyprus…

Nigh on 50 years later I could still recall the disappointment of that day as I watched from the relative comfort of the Channel 4 commentary box as the images of bedraggled Spa 2021 spectators who had endured a full day soaking in the hope of seeing a race. What they got was a couple of laps behind a safety car which ticked the necessary box for a ‘race’ having taken place, making things much simpler on the commercial side.

Predictably, it sparked the whole range of comment, from the pragmatic view that you simply couldn’t race in such conditions to the view that the over-paid, over-protected wusses needed to get on with it.

For me, there’s a great romance about the challenge and skills of racing in the rain. Who can forget Stewart at ‘The Ring’ in ’68, Senna’s first GP win at a soaking Estoril in ’85, Hamilton’s awe-inspiring drive at Silverstone in ’08, Verstappen’s instinctive ‘save’ at Interlagos in 2016.

But it’s not me having to do it. Since time immemorial any racing driver will tell you that driving on a wet track is a great and enjoyable challenge, but that racing in zero visibility is horrible. But they have no choice. You see them strapped in and sent out to race at a wet Spa and imagine they feel similar to conscripts being sent off to war.

Ahh, I hear you cry, they’re not conscripts, they’ve chosen to do it!

Alain Prost didn’t agree with that. At a dark, wet, dank Hockenheim in ’82, with spray and fog hanging between the trees, Didier Pironi, flat-out in his Ferrari during a Saturday morning practice session, pulled out to overtake Derek Daly’s Williams. Unsighted, he hadn’t seen Prost in front of it, took off over the back of the Renault, somersaulted and suffered a violent, catastrophic, career-ending shunt that ultimately required more than 30 leg operations.

Prost stopped to help and saw the damage to Pironi’s legs. So did Nelson Piquet, who immediately vomited into his crash helmet. From that moment Prost told Renault team boss Gerard Larrousse that he wasn’t happy to drive in the wet. In fact, contrary to the myth, Prost was actually very quick on a wet track. What he wasn’t prepared to do, was risk his life for a couple of extra points racing in blinding spray. Larrousse understood.

Six years later, Prost arrived at Silverstone leading Senna in the championship 54 points to 39, the McLaren team-mates having won the first seven races on the way to establishing the record 11 consecutive victories that Red Bull broke at the Hungaroring last weekend.

It was raining heavily. Both McLarens had qualified on row two, beaten by the Ferraris for once. But Senna did what Senna did in the rain, disappearing up the road to beat Nigel Mansell by almost half a minute. The official results tell you that Prost retired 24 laps in with handling problems. The reality was, Alain thought the conditions were too bad and he parked it.

In the final analysis he lost the championship to Senna that year by three points. In the French media, Alain was crucified. He was unrepentant. In his mind it wasn’t racing, it was Russian roulette. It was his life, his choice. Hell, he pointed out, they’d even stopped the Open Golf because of rain and stormy weather. Alain figured there was a lot more chance of him suffering injury due to someone else’s error than Jack Nicklaus’s five iron being struck by a lightning bolt…

Pironi’s circumstances were about as bad as it got: Hockenheim topography, thousand horsepower plus ground effect cars throwing out ever greater spray as downforce grew, allied to aluminium-folding, limb-mangling chassis. Even Rene Arnoux, reacquainted at Goodwood with that era’s Renault RE30, legs well ahead of the front axle, had a wry smile at how crazy it all was.

Today, things are better. I find it hard to believe how fortunate we were to have so few injuries or worse caused by racing with exposed crash helmets until the halo was introduced in 2018, the deaths of Henry Surtees, Justin Wilson, Jules Bianchi – and Felipe Massa’s fortunate escape – attributed to ‘freak’ circumstances.

Once that had been addressed, the great remaining elephant in the room is visibility in the rain. Most of us have no idea what faces an F1 driver in those circumstances. You might have felt a bit of unease passing an artic in heavy rain on a motorway. And those who’ve done a bit of karting in the rain will know that following closely is like having a hosepipe turned on your visor. But the worst that’s likely to happen is that you go off, get a punch in the stomach from the steering wheel or break a toenail.

But imagine the first lap of a GP, being flat-out, blind at 200mph. Terrifying for anyone with any imagination. You keep your boot in while hoping that the guy in front is doing the same because, if you lift, the guy behind is in the back of you. Nobody likes it. Everyone bar the leader is scared to lesser-or-greater degrees, but not about to admit it.

Okay, in a carbon fibre chassis you can probably survive a big shunt, but not always. Not if you end up stationary, side-on to oncoming cars, as in the recent cases of poor Anthoine Hubert and 18-year-old Dilano van ’t Hoff at Spa.

Post-Silverstone, the FIA took its first steps towards addressing the problem. Mercedes lent an adapted car and Mick Schumacher to try small spray guards fitted to the wheels with the aim of reducing spray by 50%. A section of the track was flooded and McLaren lent Oscar Piastri to drive behind Schumacher and see what difference the guards made.

The answer was not a lot, the FIA admitting that they didn’t make a ‘tangible’ difference. Predictable perhaps, given that a greater proportion of the offending spray is thrown up by ground effect diffusers rather than wheels.

It’s not an easy problem to solve. For them to be useful, the guards need to be able to be attached to the cars quickly enough to fit in with a situation where, say, a race has been red-flagged due to rain. The initial ones trialled are in two parts, attached to the suspension uprights behind the front and rear wheels. Initially they were small, too small to make a significant difference, because of the additional forces that would be put through the uprights by bigger ones. They needed data first.

Another big challenge is not disrupting the aerodynamics too much. Remember ’94? When post-Imola, F1 had a political problem safety-wise, and FIA president Max Mosley wanted the diffusers chopped. That caused some scary moments in testing and a few incidents. Flavio Briatore publicly had a go at him, calling it irresponsible and threatening legal action if one of his drivers was hurt, which ultimately didn’t work out too well for Flav when he was daft enough to deliberately crash Nelson Piquet Jr in Singapore and then sack him a year later…

The lesson from ’94 is not to make knee-jerk disruptions to aerodynamics but you feel that, ultimately, if visibility is to be meaningfully improved, the diffusers need to be addressed, not just the wheels.

Hats off to the FIA for trying to address it, but the initial work is just a sighter and the eventual solution complex. It’s probably not coming anytime soon. And so, just as Clark, Stewart et al hated Spa in the rain, this weekend’s mixed forecast will no doubt strike a similar degree of foreboding, if not fear, in today’s aces. For a moment, it’s still a case of blind faith and popping the courage pills…