The first time I sat in the cockpit I thought the steering wheel was way too complex.
There were 26 switches and buttons, compared to my previous steering wheel, which might have had about 10.
I was thinking: "Jeez, when am I ever going to get on top of all this?"
And then my next question was: "What do I need out of all the stuff you're providing me with, and what can I do without?"
I still want to be able to change my car settings - but because I'm coming to a new team I need to quickly learn and I want to have just what I need and not extra stuff that I will only need once in a blue moon.
When I'm driving, the fewer distractions there are, the better it is to focus on the job in hand.
If the engineers could, they'd give you 40 buttons, but when you're driving it's not that easy to use them all, so it's better to have the ones you really need.
The key thing is to make it simpler without getting rid of stuff that I might need to make the car go quicker.
I'm also thinking about trying to lose weight from the car - the fewer buttons we have on the steering wheel, the less weight we have on it, and we can put it in other places.
So, instead of tons of different buttons, we now have default switches - on one button you can access three or four different settings.
In terms of switches and dials, I have taken off three from the back, two off the front, and removed one of the rotary dials.
Instead of a brake-bias button, we now have a red switch with 'X' on it, and all I have to do is press it and see what my brake bias is. And I have three different settings rather than six or seven. The clutch bite-point is on the same button.
In total, that might be 100g, which doesn't sound like much, but it all counts in an F1 car.
Even then, the current steering wheel we have is still too complicated for my taste, so I am working on designing a new one, which we will have next year.