What would you do with a steering wheel with around 15 buttons where each is essential? What would you do if you added a digital screen with around 14 key indicators to get the car running at its best? And did you also have to operate the levers on the back of the steering wheel? At the very least you would collapse on the first lap, because driving a Formula 1 car is not just going around a circuit, it also means knowing what temperature the tires must not exceed to make the most of them, charge the battery, lower the times before the end of a practice. or a race and, obviously, communicate with the team, among the many other functions that yes or yes the 20 drivers must understand and implement not only to be the best; also to start the car.

The steering wheel hides secrets but also displays buttons, knobs, levers and a digital display more like an airplane dashboard compared to that of a car that a person drives on the street. If more than one person who has not learned to drive is still concerned about how to shift gears, what would happen when you enter a car with a very small and uncomfortable cockpit (the passenger compartment) and have the reflexes to touch the buttons you have to turn at more than 300km / h? It seems like an impossible taskbut in reality it’s not because everyone drives, for better or for worse, every race weekend.

Therefore, for a driver who strives to reach the highest category in motorsport, once there it will be the ultimate challenge understand the steering wheel perfectly and be one hundred percent focused when using it. “When I first arrived in F1, I had a book of 70 or 80 pages to learn. But I’m bad at studying and learning things. so in a nutshell I decided to train more in the simulatorusing it for hours and hours, ”recognized Charles Leclerc in 2020, two years after joining Sauber in F1 through the Ferrari Young Drivers Academy.

That’s right, it was the eye cam of the Italian team, located in the pilot’s helmet, the one who revealed the secrets of his steering wheel this season. It happened at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix with Leclerc. The specialized Twitter account Data driven It was up to her to reveal the meaning of each number that was seen on the digital screen as the Monegasque returned a pass to Max Verstappen, who eventually won the race.

The flyer can be divided into four parts: the left, the center, the right and the display. And on the screen is where the core information appears.

In that Ferrari photo you analyzed Data driven You see that at the top, from left to right, there is the most recent lap time, the number of engine revolutions and the reference of lap-to-lap time difference per second. On the left are the speed and laps completed in the current session. On the right, the rider sees the brake bias compensation. In the center, you can know the temperature of the tires, both front and rear. The session time is displayed below. Also, basically there is a bar indicating the charge of the car battery, that changes color according to a minimum and a maximum.

With so many features, it makes sense that the first thing a driver grabs when getting out of a car if he leaves the race is that little command that has carbon fiber, fiberglass, silicon, titanium and copper among its components. While up to four flyers are used during a season, each carries approximately 80 hours of construction – in which the engineers will work together with the pilot who will use it – and thousands of dollars. Here because, its price is around 66,000 and 100,000 dollars.

Not all flyers are the same

When Leclerc was the companion of Sebastian Vettel, then Ferrari’s number 1 driver – as a four-time F1 champion -, he chose a slight change in the controls: the Monegasque had the clutch lever on the right, while the German had it on the left. .

“What’s behind the wheel are things you use on the qualifying lap or the race that help performance a bit. Like this are things you need to know”Noted Leclerc in that interview two years ago.