Barrichello feeling blue at Honda

[Matra et Alpine]

Hah hah! That's very true! But if he's that far behing the rest of the field - should he have a drive? As far as I know he's the only top flight F1 driver who doesn't left-foot.

Dont' under-estimate the finesse on the left foot it takes to use it for braking instead of the right.

Try writing with your other hand ?
Get ahywhere CLOSE to the speed and quality of the right ?
Braking a racing car needs THAT level of control.

Can't be learned over night ( tho' you'd have thought he'd be workgin hard on it by now ) )

The Scandinavians taught the world to left foot brake the Mini's. But NOBODY got close to them for a decade !!!!

[MrKipling]

Yeah, I can left foot brake (front wheel driver ) so I understand how hard it is to learn (read: weeks of coasting up to junctions in neutral, learning how to feather with my 'wrong' foot), obviously not to a highly advanced degree but having said that, I'm not an F1 driver!

I understand that the car is causing him difficulties, but I just done have any sympathy for him. I don't think it's debatable that Rubens has ballsed up!

[Jack_Bauer]

Here's an interesting Autosport article on the subject entitled "Rubens' Struggle"

These are troubled times for Rubens Barrichello. After six seasons in the support role to Michael Schumacher at Ferrari he came to Honda on absolutely equal terms to the incumbent Jenson Button. In fact for a time it looked like Rubens might even get to be the clear No1, with Button maybe obliged to fulfil his contract with Williams, leaving Barrichello to be supported by Takuma Sato. It didn’t work out like that of course. In fact so far it’s not working out at all.

Although his problems adapting to the Honda only really became apparent in Bahrain, he’d been protected by his team to an extent during winter testing. Then, while often nip and tuck with Button on the timesheets, in reality they were usually on very different programs and within the team it was obvious he was not quite on Button’s pace.

At this stage it was a minor problem. But in trying to put it right its become a great looming monster in Rubens’ mind, a monster that is coming to life with ever greater reality each GP weekend.

The trigger for the problem was that Button has inherently around 0.3 seconds faster. No serious F1 driver would be prepared to accept a team-mate’s superiority without a lot more evidence than that. He’d averaged a similar deficit to Michael Schumacher – even though on his day Rubens could give Michael a seriously hard time – but that was Michael, the world’s greatest driver, one of the greatest of all time. Much as that will have sat uncomfortably in the competitive heat of the moment, at least he could comfort that itch with the rationalisation of Michael’s standing. But Button? A man who hasn’t even won a race? That couldn’t be true.

So he set about studying the telemetry, pored over the data. He found a couple of key things. Well, three actually – braking, steering and throttle, the three fundamentals of driving, in fact. ‘Soft’ was the word that that kept coming to Ruben’s mind when he analysed Jenson’s inputs in these areas. Button would be less aggressive on the brakes and more progressive on the pedal and thereby keeping the diffuser airflow attached better. But then he’d come off earlier too, sometimes almost coasting into the corner entry – but with massively high entry speed. Rubens had always found himself to be smoother on the steering than Schumacher, but to his amazement that Button was yet smoother again. Minimal inputs, laser precision. Rubens always felt that his throttle application was ‘soft’, sympathetic to the melding of lateral and longitudinal grip. In fact he felt traction control was taking away some of the advantage of that facet of his ability. But now he was seeing that was yet softer – and that the more peaky V8 engines were favouring Button further in this.

It could not have been a balder, more horrifying thing to discover: that the three fundamental things that determine your speed as a racing driver, Button was doing better than him. Okay, it only mounted to 3 tenths of a second per lap. But that’s an age, a geological era in terms of driver in Rubens position.

But he’s a man with depth. So he set about understanding. Maybe Button was only doing these things better because he’d moulded the car around him his style better and that in working with his engineer, Jock Clear, Rubens could fine tune his car differently. After all, it wasn’t the just a change of team and car, but one of tyres too. There was a lot to learn, a lot of parameters to play with. This problem was solvable. For a start, such a fundamental tool such as the traction control worked in a way that was completely alien to Rubens. It had been developed that way to suit Jenson’s preferences. There was one thing they could play around with for sure.

Button prefers not to trigger the TC at all if he can help it. You hear it out on track. Go to a slow corner – the exit of China’s 1/2/3 for example – and listen to everyone else flooring the throttle and letting the traction control TC monitor the power. Then listen to Jenson waiting longer before he gets on the power, then feeding it in progressively with his long-travel pedal, like he hasn’t even got TC. And sometimes when it does trigger – and he doesn’t want it to – its programmed so that if he then goes full throttle, the TC will cut out and he can then come back from there if it begins to get too much out of line. For Rubens this was a counter-intuitive thing to drive.

Jock’s been around the block, he race engineered for David Coulthard, Jacques Villeneuve and Takuma Sato. After 2 years of trying to smooth out the sharp peaks and dips of Sato’s performances, he appreciated the consistency of performance and feedback from Barrichello, felt he was back with a seasoned professional. All that was needed was a little bit of massaging to find the missing tenths.

So together they begin making changes. Still the gap is there. In fact it seems to increase. Altering the fundamentals of the traction control has not been feasible so far, but there are plans for Rubens to try the new significantly tailored version next week. In the meantime he and Jock have been playing with other chasis settings. It feels better – and yet its slower. So then he drives as Jenson’s telemetry says he should – it feels horribly wrong. But yet his times improve! But not to Jenson’s levels. So Jock starts making bigger changes. Rubens raises his eyebrows and then goes along with it. It gets worse. At Malaysia they’ve made such little progress by Saturday morning that they are forced to concede and simply copy Jenson’s settings for qualifying and race.

The engineer/driver relationship is getting a little terse at times as this problem continues to snowball. The deficit’s no longer 0.3sec but more like 1sec. Now way is that representative. The snowball of fortunes is never more apparent than in Q1 for Melbourne when Rubens gets caught behind the Super Aguri of Ide at a critical moment – and fails to make it past the cut off into the next session. “Okay Rubens, that hasn’t done it, we’re not through. Pit at the end of this lap.” Barrichello angrily stays on the gas, as though he were another lap together. “Repeat Rubens, pit at the end of this lap”.

“Oh shut up” comes the static crackly reply. When a relationship breaks down…

It seems from this, and from interviews with Rubens after the Malaysian GP, that it is not so much an issue of which foot he uses on the pedals but more an issue of finesse and delicacy. Rubens has spoken of the Ferrari having controls you could just prod at and great things would happen instantly. It's gonna take a while for him to adapt to the smoothness required to drive the Honda quickly, but I hope he manages it. Apart from the fact that he's a likeable guy and I want to see him do well, it'll be good for Button to have someone pushing him hard from within the team, something he never had with Taku alongside him

[cp01ae]

I'm sure its quite difficult to left-foot brake, I've tried it. However most people that are serrious about racing start left-foot braking when they are racing carts at the age of 10. I have no idea why Rubens never got into the habit.

[magracer]

Can't be learned over night ( tho' you'd have thought he'd be workgin hard on it by now )

Just last week I left foot braked like a champ when I tried to engage the clutch in my mother's automatic , then I remembered my old trick of storing my left foot below the seat while driving automatics...

Seriously, I read somewhere that Barichello did indeed left foot brake for a while, but he was always a little bit faster while right foor braking, so he stuck with that.

[Jack_Bauer]

Just last week I left foot braked like a champ when I tried to engage the clutch in my mother's automatic , then I remembered my old trick of storing my left foot below the seat while driving automatics...

I remember when I was trying to teach myself left-foot braking. It was all going swimmingly well until once when I was accelerating OUT of a corner I went to upshift, so quickly buried my left foot to the floor but had forgotten to slide it across to the clutch pedal! Cue unintentional emergency stop in the middle of the road. How embarrasing!

I think everyone in F1 tried left-foot braking after Michael Schumacher came onto the scene in the early 90s. Until then left-foot braking had been the territory of rally drivers and the like, but once everyone saw how quick Michael was with it they all hastily adapted their styles. Rubens raced right through the transition from stick shift to pedals too, when everyone went to left-foot braking for obvious reasons. It is rather baffling why he never caught on.