It's a pretty intense sport & that kind of timeline is fairly common. They'll do a full car rebuild right before the race, if the driver's had a crash in the session before it. So, the driver will be approaching a corner at 250kph+ in the full knowledge that the brakes were wired up to the pedal just ten minutes earlier. They'll make brake-balance adjustments on the fly in the car as they're speeding down the straightaway.

I think the drivers have some extraordinary capability for trust, because the chain of people who need to have got their job correct for that brake pedal to work in that moment is in the dozens, and the consequence for any of them getting it wrong is a particularly violent crash.

Move fast and try not to break things.

Every race is a different car, maybe a different engine, with different software, basically.

F1 vehicles have a lot of actively controlled systems - Engine, MGU, Diff, Brake Bias, Aero etc. Their way of allowing active control but preventing "driver aids" like traction control, torque vectoring is to tightly regulate and give them a box where they can place their controls and what inputs they are allowed to use.

As far as I'm aware the FIA can inspect whatever element of the car they like.

Traction control was allowed before 2008. The problem was that it trivialized some aspects of driving - drivers could floor the throttle through turns at little to no risk. (I suspect there may have also been some concerns that drivers who pushed traction control too far could have easily ended up in unrecoverable situations.)

There's some interesting discussion of the history and technical aspects at: https://www.f1-forecast.com/pdf/F1-Files/Honda/F1-SP2_25e.pd...

> Why? To increase chances of crashes that produces more views?

Why not allow traction control? To increase crashes?

Why not allow "lane keep assist"? To increase drivers crashing into walls?

Why not allow "automatic braking"? To increase drivers slamming into walls and other drivers?

Why do we still have the human in the car when a brick on the accelerator could do the same job? So when the cars crash people feel there are real stakes?

(Presumably they've decided they want the sport to be about the drivers to some extent.)

Crashes don't directly make for a better race; what matters is the amount of actual competition, and for that you need variation.

If every driver drove exactly the same way, then the race would be 100% down to basically just team strategy and the car itself. For fans of strategy that might be fine, but I think most people would find it much less interesting.

Basically, there's an endless struggle between "how much do we let automation control?" If there were no such rules, the role of the driver would be far less than it is now, which would effectively reduce competition.

I am not big in F1, but my understanding is that the primary goal is to have the driver be more relevant over the car/firmware producers.

Traction control removes of the most fundamental skills of a driver. It’s like allowing ABS.

The entire purpose of traction control is to reduce the driver skill required when cornering and braking. This is why traction control is omnipresent in consumer vehicles, because the vast majority of road drivers are awful.

FIA bans traction control so as to place more emphasis on driver skill.

We should allow batting machines for baseball players to hit the ball more reliably as well. Poker players should play with their cards face up. I agree.

Manually controlling to the limits of the car is a big part of the skill of racing.

They want them to engineer everything except the things that replace driver skill.

The problem happened during the formation lap. They red-flagged the race and brought all the cars off the track. I don't know any more about the update mechanism than you do, but GP's theory is plausible.