Double take

RBS: In your columns for the RBS World of Sport website, you've both talked about Lewis Hamilton's relative inexperience in F1. Do you have to wait for experience to come in its own time, or can you do anything to speed up the process?

Sir Jackie Stewart: F1 is the only sport I can think of that doesn't have coaches. You have coaches in football, rugby, cricket, golf… Yet racing drivers claim they don't need any help at all. I can tell you, I have almost never been asked by another driver for any observations that might help him. I'll never forget being in a car with Fangio. He was the greatest driver of all time and I was privileged to be sitting in a car with him. I wanted to constantly ask that man questions.

Gary Anderson: I agree, but sometimes in a race there's no time to ask questions, and the driver needs his team to step in and make the decision. Sometimes they don't. Take China last year, where McLaren didn't call Hamilton in to change his tyres. That was a typical example of nobody making a decision. The team had all the information necessary. You can't put a car in a position where you have no tyres, no temperature, no thread: you'll lose more and more time and then you'll fall off the road. That's like a company knowing they're losing money but sitting back and saying, "OK, we're going to keep on losing more and more money."

RBS: How about the psychological aspects of a driver's performance? Can anyone on the outside help?

JS: A bit like Gary said, it's about clear communication again. For example, the pit lane accident at Montreal. That happened because there was so much distraction going on; so much interference going on in Lewis and Nico's (Rosberg) heads that they didn't hear the message, the red light is on.

Lewis had pulled away from the rest of the field. And Nico, too, was up for a podium. Then the safety car comes out – and I don't care who you are, you're going to be upset and annoyed. That's where the coach comes in. A man who specialises in good, clear communication; someone to bring the guy's head down so that when he accelerates out of the pits again he knows: "Nico, the red light is on, repeat, do you understand?" And that needs to be done. What actually happened was he looked up and, bang!

GA: It's like Barrichello in Barcelona, he went through the red light and he got done for it. Same with Montoya in Montreal in 2005. It's been happening a lot.

RBS: What about a driver's little personal quirks, like having a favourite circuit, for example. Can the team use that?

GA: I've always hated it when a driver does well at his home track. Because that means there are 17 other ones you're not going to go well at. So that's always been a nightmare to me.

JS: Yes, but it is also an advantage to know a circuit. You just don't understand what it looks like until you've done it in a single-seater, particularly a quick one. You need to know the geography of a track.

But how you balance the car and make it work is another matter. Some racing drivers are very fast on the track but actually don't consume a lot of information about how they can best make the car work. Prost was an example of the opposite. In my opinion, he was one of the greatest drivers of all time, because he made a car work for him. As RBS would say, Prost 'Made it happen'. In fact he made the car work for Senna too, when they were team-mates.

RBS: So you think a team can learn a lot from the drivers, as well as the other way around?

GA: There are so many ways of doing it. Team management is something that needs to be good from my point of view (the engineering side), in judgement and continuity. You want to keep the car on track, picking up what's going on, picking up the lines, how's it going to help the car, how does it bump, how is it going to address the bumps, all that sort of stuff.

JS: You know, we spend in some case hundreds of millions of dollars on technology, but in fact we don't spend a great amount of money or time looking at what needs to be done in human terms.

GA: All the stuff we've talked about; the pit-lane accidents, Montoya in Montreal, Lewis's problem in China… It all comes from mistakes during your strategies and your plans. And communication is what makes it work.