Ik had het artikel niet helemaal gelezen, enkel het gedeelte over de 3 pedalen van Mika.
Volgens Coulthard had hij 4 pedalen in zijn auto (helaas geen foto van gevonden). Van links naar rechts het ontkoppelingspedaal, fiddle-brake pedaal, rempedaal (zou kunnen dat die 2 laatsten in omgeekeerde volgorde zaten) en gaspedaal. Hij remde met dat systeem met zijn rechtervoet omdat het nodig was om gas te geven en te remmen tegelijk om het te laten werken. Waar McLaren de ruimte heeft gevonden om dat 4de pedaal in de auto te steken, is een goede vraag.
Citaat:
Coulthard soon became a fan, and he was quickly up to speed with it.
“It was a brilliantly simple piece of engineering, which worked,” says David. “It meant I had four pedals because I didn’t use the hand-clutch. Well, I had a hand-clutch – actually I had two hand-clutches, and one foot-clutch, which I preferred. I felt at that time it was still an advantage.
“I had tried left-foot braking in the ’96 car in Jerez and didn’t really feel comfortable with it, and reverted to right-foot braking. And it must have been 1999 before I got into left-foot braking again.
“We had to learn how to work with it, because you had to accelerate while you braked, otherwise you just locked the wheel. You could feel it was an advantage, because it yawed the car. So instead of riding over the front tyre, you could rotate the car without having to put steering lock on.
“And steering lock affects the aerodynamics quite a lot, so there was an advantage aerodynamically in having that. We could use it also to control a bit of wheel-spin on the inside wheel, coming out of tight corners. Independently Mika and I both worked that out. The theory had been proven in tanks and things like that, but actually doing it at speed out on the track was always going to be a bit different!”