Q: I was just wondering with the amazing job Bugatti do with their engines if they have had or if they will ever have a team in F1? Martin

Bob: I am not really sure how to answer this.

Bugatti have certainly got a reputation for building fast and glamorous cars but they have never had an engine or a race team in Formula 1 in the modern era. (that is, since 1950)

Bugatti was based at Molsheim in France from 1910 till around 1939 and after the death of the Italian owner Ettore Bugatti in 1947 the cars faded away until their final appearance at the 1951 Paris motor show.

There was a Grand Prix project initiated in about 1956 but that proved abortive and no races were entered.

The marque was resurrected by the French company SNECMA, a government-owned jet engine manufacturer, after it had been an engineering contractor to the aviation industry.

My knowledge and memory of the facts are not that good but in around 1987 Bugatti, the name, appeared again in Italy at a factory near Modena and started building "super cars" - the first of which appeared in 1991 with, I think, the suspension being built in the original factory in Molsheim.

I seem to remember a lot of changes and "Italian politics" being involved with the new company and I believe the company has gone on to own the Group Lotus company in the UK and still produces a limited number of extremely expensive machinery, still with a vestige of the original classic radiator grill of the early 1900's and with engines producing 500-600 horsepower!

I am sure that there are many people who are vastly more aware and knowledgeable about the history of Bugatti, so I will not try to expand any further to save myself embarrassment!!!

So, to your original question:

No, they have never had a team or engine in modern F1 and no, I cannot see them competing with the likes of Toyota, Mercedes and Honda to ever enter F1.

Q: How do you see Montoya fitting in at McLaren? He is certainly no cool, calm and collected Finn like Mika or Kimi, and one could say he lacks the tact of David. Aleisha Millington

Bob: It will be interesting to see won't it?

As you say, JPM is no shrinking violet and it is reported that it was this attitude that saw him decide to leave Williams.

In fact I was witness to his Latin temperament recently in Melbourne when he walked out of a press conference that I was attending because of two unfunny jerks that he saw as taking the "Mickey" out of him.

He will definitely have something to say to McLaren if the car is not competitive or if he feels that Kimi is getting preferential treatment.

Kimi on the other hand will keep his own counsel and will tend to keep to the party line. Don't forget that he will have three seasons worth of experience with the team to fall back on and will have made the team "his own" by then as did Mika and Ayrton before him.

I foresee that both drivers will tend to polarise the mechanics and engineers into "camps" and that the rivalry and competition between theses camps will be intense. This is not meant to imply that it will be a bad thing. Internally at the McLaren garage it is a very tight camp and the mechanics are very loyal to each other and the whole team is a unit that operates as one. Internal competition can only benefit this team feeling and spur them on. I feel that the team at the moment desperately needs a Montoya to get in there and shake things up a little.

On current performance something needs to happen desperately and quickly.

One last point is that many in the team have seen it all before with the Senna/Prost combo. I firmly believe that very, VERY few teams could have coped with the internal politics and disruptions that were part and parcel of those great years.

Q: Can you explain in simple terms twin and single keels and the pros and cons of each approach to the front of the cars.

Bob: The so-called twin keel concept was first seriously used by Sauber.

First of all the "twin keel" name itself is a little misleading as it implies a keel as that in a yacht. It is nothing of the sort and any designer would be mortified to be told that he had to fit a ton of lead under his car just to keep it upright!

The name just got attached to an appendage that hangs down from the forward part of the tub (chassis) of a Formula 1 car that itself was a compromise to enable other things to happen.

As the noses of cars got longer and higher it was realised that there was nowhere to hang the front suspension wishbone pick up points and still maintain an effective set up for the suspension geometry.

Sergio Rinland, the then designer of Sauber, realised that the then common practice of moulding a piece on to the bottom of the tub had drawbacks in the aerodynamics of the car to do with cornering, because it presented a large surface to the airflow as the car slides sideways and promoted understeer and also interfered with the clean airflow from the front wing.

He cured this by dropping two vertical fins from the underside of the nose part of the tub which had a small frontal and side area and therefore assisting the airflow and he was able to mount the suspension pick up points as low as he wanted thereby increasing the efficiency of the suspension.

McLaren are the latest team to refine this principle on the MP4/19 and if you look at a frontal shot you will see that they have taken the twin keel into another level by curving the keels to meet the maximum width regulations.

It is still thought by some designers that the single keel approach is better because it is inherently stiffer and make the tub more rigid.

Q:  There is often talks about levels of teams, McLaren, Williams,

Ferrari at the top level for example and then two or three other groups of teams competing almost amongst themselves.

Often these other teams, Jordan, Jaguar for example seem to remain very static in their performance year after year, so why if they are not improving and not likely too, do they bother to continue in formula one? Surely someone like Eddie Jordan must ultimately be interested in winning at some point?

I appreciate there are budget constraints and that teams do come and go, but it often seems many are just treading water. Adam

Bob: I can see your point and sometimes wonder myself but let's just take a look a perhaps why each team is racing.

First and foremost they would not do it unless they made a profit so there is the first reason. Simple business economics just like any other commercial enterprise.

Secondly the team principle is passionate about racing no matter if he is Sir Frank Williams or Paul Stoddart. They want and need to do it and take enormous pleasure out of it.

Leaving aside the top five teams (for now we will call them Ferrari, Williams, McLaren, Renault, and BAR although even that is debateable these days) we will look at the Division Two teams.

Jaguar is in it for commercial reasons and surely must succeed soon or the plug will be pulled by Ford and the same can be said of Toyota. If they do not perform at the top level soon heads will roll - again. But that is the problem with having manufacturers in F1. If the commercial conditions are not right then they will leave without a look over the shoulder. Jaguar in particular have been excellent at taking the wrong turning whenever they reach a crossroads and patience is running thin now. If it were still Stewart racing then they would buckle down and keep going out of passion for the sport.

We come to Sauber. Very profitable and a team which is constantly threatening to achieve and always seems to fall short.

Peter Sauber is a passionate man about his racing and he is convinced that he will come through eventually and backs this up with a lot of investment in his team and to suggest to him that he should give up because he is "treading water" would not be the work of anyone but a fool.

Jordan. A team of extremes. However that is exactly what makes up Eddie Jordan himself. It was only last year that Jordan won the Brazilian Grand Prix and while there is breath left in him or his team he will try and try harder and he will be convinced that the next win is just around the corner.

You just have to understand these men and what makes them tick as well as all the people that work for them. Competition and the mindset that they can do it with more effort is what drives them on.

Minardi? That's anyone's guess.

Giancarlo Minardi was and still is one of the most liked and respected men in the paddock and almost the entire paddock would go out of their way to help the Minardi team, pre Stoddart.

That has changed somewhat due to politics but why do they go on?

For exactly the same reasons as all the others. Because it is racing at the top level.

What else could be better than to be in a different country every other weekend and to indulge your competitive passion at a Grand Prix at the same time having your ego fed with great dollops of admiration and hero worship and to come away with a profit?

Q: Could you tell me what difference the sliding skirts made to F1 cars and why they were banned? Joseph Suguturaga

Bob: Sliding skirts were part of a wider design to keep the cars glued to the track at speed.

They were all part of the "ground effect" era that was pioneered by the late Colin Chapman of Lotus fame.

In 1977-78 Chapman and others were developing cars with underfloors that were like inverted wings and produced huge amounts of downforce by simply creating a sort of vacuum under the cars. He reasoned that to make the vacuum complete the side pods of the cars had to touch the track to make a seal but as this was not practical, he developed the skirts.

Basically they were sliding boards that went inside the skin of the sidepods and were fitted with small springs to make sure they touched the ground and completed the vacuum effect. Add to this the increased tunnel effect of the underfloors and then the massive power of the turbo era with some cars having 1200-1300 horsepower in qualifying, and then imagine the large sticky Goodyear qualifying tyres and you had cars that would go around any corner at incredible speeds as if on rails!!

That is, until the skirt broke or stuck in the up position or the car bounced over a kerb and the vacuum effect was lost.

Then you had a projectile that was out of control and lethal.

The sliding skirts were then part of a battle between FISA and the fledgling FOCA and they were outlawed by M. Balestre the president of the FISA in 1982 although various versions of them (Variable ride height, progressive suspension etc) remained for some while.

The skirts were outlawed on the pretext that they were dangerous and that cornering speeds had to come down (all true incidentally) although it was a widely held belief at the time that they were outlawed because M. Balestre was French and he was trying to regain control of Formula 1 from Bernie and FOCA.

But that is another story.

Q: I have been amazed when reading through the press reports from just about all the F1 teams, that they don't appear to know exactly how fast their new cars are compared to last years' models.

Michael Schumacher is quoted as saying that the new car "is an improvement, but exactly how much and where, we don't know because none of us - Rubens, Luca or myself has stepped into the old car and back into the new car to do a real back to back comparison". From my viewpoint that would be THE thing to do to establish at an early stage if you had a good car or not!

Teams have all the telemetry from all their races and numerous practice sessions to work from, so I would have thought that it would be a relatively straightforward task to take a back-to-back performance test with the new and old cars, and transpose all the telemetry to show what the new car would have been capable of in all last year's races.

I have to think that the teams actually do this testing and that the drivers and teams are just being "cagey" about their new cars' performance!

What do you think?

Enjoy the season! Paul Stananought (Ardmore, Auckland) ex-home of the NZ Grand Prix!

Bob: You are quite right.

The teams all do have telemetry from every lap at every circuit and in every chassis.

To say they do not know how fast their car is compared to last years model is plainly wrong. I know from experience that the engineers and drivers are well aware very quickly if the car is quick "out of the box" or otherwise.

Obviously the conditions are changing day by day but in most teams' cases and even more so in Ferrari's case, they test at the same place all the time and have a huge bank of historic knowledge of all models in all conditions

I well remember a test that McLaren did at Mugello some time back and found out that there were sensors at regular distances of around 100 meters all over the circuit with many extras on the corners.

Ferrari own Mugello circuit and were monitoring it all the time.

I don't think McLaren tested there any more.

Much reference is made of "not knowing just how quick the car is" simply because a team is not sure just how fast other teams have gone. Sure you can read lap times and get speed trap times but: How much fuel? With or without ballast? Which tyres? Testing new aero package?  Doing corner speeds only? And so on.

It really is only at the first race when all, or at least most, of the cards are laid on the table but like good poker players the teams are aware of the probable hands around the table whilst keeping a straight face looking at the cards in their own hand.