This article appeared in the Technofile section of the Summer 2001 edition of J magazine.

There are many unsung heroes at Jordan Grand Prix, and among the folk who don't normally get a lot of recognition from the public are the guys in the electronics department. But this year they've been in the spotlight thanks to the new regulations introduced at the Spanish GP. Suddenly everyone is talking about traction control, launch control and automatic gearshifting. "It's a great technical challenge as far as our department is concerned," says Jordan electronics head Mike Wroe. "We have a real input now into the performance of the car, to a much larger extent that we had previously, because of the regulations and the restrictions placed on us."

Mike's department has a staff of 11. They began work on traction control back in December, when the new rules were announced. "We have four control engineers who are responsible for developing the software, and also supporting the cars at the circuit. We have a couple of hardware design engineers who are working on electronic circuit design. Two technicians travel round to the races doing the harness support, and looking after that side of things. And we have other technicians back at base looking after the service and repair of components and organisation of the manufacture of harnesses, sensors and that sort of thing."

The phrase 'traction control' has been Formula One's buzzword over the past few months. But what exactly does it do? "As far as traction is concerned the rear tyres operate at their best when you have a balance of just over 10%," says Mike. "That means that rear tyres are spinning about 10% faster than the front tyres. We were already allowed to measure the speed of the front and rear wheels, but now we're allowed to use that information to calculate how much wheelspin we've got, and then modify the engine torque to actually control it to a specific level. Basically we communicate with the Honda engine management system. We ask it to modify the ignition parameters to reduce the torque output of the engine."

Traction control was originally banned at the end of 1993. Since then the teams and engine suppliers have worked hard to improve traction through other legal means, so that the difference between running a system today and not running one is not as great as it once was. "In the old era there were big gains - as soon as you turned it on you got a second improvement in lap time. But because everything's been progressively developed, there's less of a gain when we turn it on." When traction control first hit Formula One, Mike worked at TAG Electronics, part of the McLaren empire, and was thus very much at the centre of the action. He admits that the basic principals have not changed in eight years."The concept is basically the same. We have more processing power, we have more inputs, we can actually develop the strategy more fully. We're not completely down that road yet, and I don't think anybody is. It's quite difficult to introduce something as big as this mid-season. We're very much at an initial level, but obviously we've got a plan to develop that."

The other key area is gearshifting. "We've got none of the artificial restrictions on gearbox control that were imposed previously. Now it's been opened out. There's a lot of extra functionality as far as automatic upshifting and downshifting is concerned." However, for the time being drivers prefer to control their own destiny, at least as far as downshifting is concerned. "With the new regulations you can operate a fully automatic gearbox if you want to. But it's very much determined by the drivers, and what they are comfortable with. It may not be ideal as far as they are concerned. "They need a certain amount of consistency, and things need to happen when they want them to happen, so we're not exactly sure where it's going to end up. We've got to work with the drivers to see what they want to do as far as consistency is concerned. They feel more comfortable calling for the downshifts at the moment. But there are lots of things that we can do in the fullness of time to improve the quality of the automatic downshifting, so I'm sure that's something that we're going to be working on."

Traction control and automatic shifting come together come together at the start of the race as the key elements of launch control. You don't need me to tell you how complex an operation it is, and Jordan is not the only team to have had teething troubles. But don't worry - Grand Prix drivers aren't becoming robots yet, as some key areas are now off limits. "The thing that the regulations haven't legalised this time round is there's no possibility to have any control input into the brakes, steering or suspension. There's no scope for us in those areas, whereas in the previous era we had active suspension, power braking and so on." Despite all the gizmos, it's still about the man in the cockpit...