Symonds wants F1 to use simulators more to get away from 'knee jerk' rule changes

F1 technical director Pat Symonds believes that Formula 1 should use technology in decision-making processes.

Pat Symonds believes that simulators are helping F1 get away from 'knee jerk' reactions when it comes to rule changes.  

“Things are very fundamentally different in F1 now. When we make changes they’ve got to be based on evidence,” Symonds said to crash.net.

“We do want to make our decisions based on evidence and sometimes that’s quite difficult. Looking at the grid layout, in the ‘60s, there were a lot of cars side by side and over the years we’ve moved to this eight metre staggered grid formation.

“We ask ourselves the question, what would happen if we move the cars closer together and have them side-by-side again, maybe two by two. Would we get a more exciting first lap with closer racing or would we just get more accidents?

“When you want to simulate something like that for a physics problem, you get a trivial answer. If you start cars closer together and they accelerate at the same rate, they arrive at the first corner together, that’s not what you want to know.

“What we want to know is what’s going to happen, so we build a simulation to use as artificial intelligence but so we can also put a human in. So we can actually have 19 AI cars racing one human and then we can start to run say 50 races.

“We can say ‘OK when we did this to the grid, we got three per cent more accidents, we got five per cent more passes, we got 20 per cent more side-by-side action.’”

It is clear to see the benefit of using technology in order to make more educated decisions.