While Uncle Tony definitely has some knowledge on other aspects of these cars, he’s just proving further that he’s making it up as he’s going along on chassis reinforcement and handling. He’s out of his depth if he’s not talking about driving in a straight line.
Handling control is about precision and predictability. If your chassis sucks up all of your inputs and reactions with flex, you can’t be precise. If you can’t predict exactly how the chassis will react to a given input, you can’t control the car as well.
Yes, there’s a balance. If the chassis is rock hard and transmits every bit of chatter and noise to the driver then it will be more difficult to control. But here’s the thing, that’s not all chassis. A lot of that is how your suspension is set up, how your alignment is set, whether or not you’re in oversteer or understeer, etc. And the chassis isn’t even the biggest component of some of that set up.
And let’s face it, adding subframe connectors doesn’t make these cars all that stiff. I have a bunch of chassis stiffening on my car- torque boxes, subframe connectors, j-bars (forward chassis reinforcement), a tubular radiator support brace, etc. Yes, my car is much stiffer than it was from the factory. But it’s not anywhere near as stiff as a car with a full cage. Or even a high end modern performance car.
Yeah, the average driver would think an F1 car is insanely hard to control. But subframe connectors don’t make these cars anywhere near that stiff. Even the level of chassis reinforcement that my car has, which is more than a lot of these cars have, doesn’t make it overly stiff. If anything it still has more flex than would be ideal, even for a street car. Plus it’s a moving target- if you have 15” rims with crappy compound tires you don’t need as much chassis reinforcement, you’re not putting as much force to the chassis. If you’re running soft compound 275’s on all 4 corners even with a significant amount of reinforcement you’ll still get flex because you’re transmitting a lot more force.
