With the aim of making overtaking in Formula 1 easier by mandating less disruptive aerodynamic aids, the International Automobile Federation's World Motor Sport Council has approved changes that will be made to the technical regulations starting from 2019.
It is a move that is long overdue but is essentially a small step before F1 makes far greater and sweeping changes to car design (as well as commercial and sporting aspects) from 2021. The initial vote to put these changes before the WMSC was not believed to have been unanimous among the teams, but change is indeed coming. And it's about time.
The changes are as follows.
- A simplified front wing with a larger span and low outwash potential.
- Simplified front brake ducts with no winglets.
- A wider and deeper rear wing.
Ross Brawn is known to many F1 fans as the technical and strategy wizard who partnered with Michael Schumacher and car designer Rory Byrne to devastating effect in the erstwhile Benetton F1 team in the mid-90s and at Ferrari from the late 90s to the mid-00s.
As of last year, he is F1's director of motorsport, part of a strategy by the sport's new commercial bosses (Liberty Media) to delegate various responsibilities to qualified individuals instead of just one 'tsar', as used to be the case until 2016 when Bernie Ecclestone was in charge.
He also cited the incident between Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen in this year's Azerbaijan Grand Prix as an example of how ineffective a following car's aerodynamic aids become behind another, even on a straight, thereby adversely affecting braking performance.
Brawn and his team coming up with these changes and planning a greater overhaul for later is not without irony, especially after years of trying to one-up rival teams. This is not lost on fans and clearly not on F1's new owners. Think of it like when 'ethical' hackers are hired to design security systems for computers or how Leonardo Di Caprio's character, in the movie Catch me if you Can, becomes a famed FBI consultant against bank fraud after years of committing it himself!
SOME BACKGROUND
I have been following Formula 1 for almost 30 years now. And pretty closely for most of that time through whatever means were available to me. Which means that the F1 I grew up with was that of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Team budgets went through the roof, thanks to tobacco advertising, and the aero war among the biggest spenders was exacerbated due to the change in how F1 went racing. See, I missed following the '70s and '80s when aerodynamics was still not a potent enough area of development for teams and there was a ban on strategic mid-race refuelling, which originated at the Bernie Ecclestone managed Brabham F1 team in 1982. Drivers still raced each other on the track. Tyre life was an area of concern, as it is now and as it should be, so drivers needed to manage wear through their driving style and time their attack for positions.
All this changed in 1994 when Ecclestone, now the commercial chief and promoter for F1, championed the idea of strategic mid-race refuelling as a way for team sponsors to get more visibility. This time also coincided with a huge investment in aerodynamic aids. But one aspect of F1 that had been banned in 1982 did not make a comeback in 1994.
A DEADLY CATALYST
Due to the death of Giles Villeneuve, while furiously trying to beat Ferrari teammate Didier Pironi's qualifying time, F1 cars had to have a completely flat floor from 1983 onwards. Until 1982, cars were essentially designed to be a giant wing on wheels. Ground effects aerodynamics was a term given for teams applying the Bernoulli Equation (let's see how many of you remember that from school.) so that their cars were 'pushed' into the ground. Or 'downforce', a term that you may have heard used often.
Downforce simply refers to a low-pressure area being developed below an F1 car so that the high-pressure area above creates force that pushes the car down towards the ground. The wing shaped underbody that ran pretty much the whole length of the cars from 1977 (when the Lotus F1 team first applied it successfully) until 1982 created a lot of downforce because air was basically forced out from below the car.
Creating downforce this way allowed teams to create F1 cars that barely needed any external wings. You have seen those make up the most commonly known shape of an F1 car; one at the nose and one near the rear wheels. The ground-effects cars had such levels of downforce simply from the underside of the car that at a high-speed track like Monza, many cars ran without a front wing. The rear wing was still required in order to control the power sent to the rear wheels, but for the most part, F1 car design was as clean as could be.
This led to airflow that was not as disruptive as that from external wings. Downforce generated this way is still applied by racing series other than F1 to this day – the LMP1 class in the World Endurance Championship, Formula E and Indycar being the most notable.
Villeneuve's death at the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix led to an immediate reaction by the sport's governing body with regard to bringing the speeds down. Because back then neither cars nor race tracks were designed with as much attention to safety as in the present day.
CUT BACK TO THE '90s
Those who were following F1 closely in the 90s and through to the present day will be well familiar with two words that are often used by television commentators as well as those who cover and discuss it – dirty air.
Put simply, dirty air is the turbulent airflow produced by an F1 car that is moving through the air at high-speed and creating disruption in the airflow and subsequently heating that air and decreasing the volume of it that is available to a car that follows it.
This dirty air would not be such an issue for a car that is not very dependent on external wings that require relatively 'clean' airflow in order to produce as much downforce as possible. And with limits in the size of an aerodynamic aid known as a diffuser (located at the rear of a car and recreating ground effects at a much smaller scale) and the ban on underbody aerodynamics, F1 cars had become extremely fussy creatures.
Normally, when a faster driver sets off to overtake someone, the following car will be tucked in close to the lead car through a corner so that by the time the cars make it to a straight, the following car will be pulled along, so to speak, by the 'slip-stream' of the car ahead of it. To put it plainly, a slip-stream is the result of air rushing in to fill the space created by a car traveling at high-speed. It is the reason why, for example, a plastic packet or a piece of paper on a road follows the direction of a car that goes past it.
Even without a slip-stream, you can see how an equal sized body moving at speed in front of another will help in reducing air resistance for the one behind it. You can see this in effect even in Olympic speed cycling, where the many cyclists in a team will ride one after the other and take turns in being in the lead.
Single-seat racing in America has an even simpler term for it – tow. In oval course racing, you can see a following car get 'towed' by the one in front of it until it decides to dart into the lead.
WHERE AND HOW TO PASS?
In a racing series like F1, the racing is held on road-courses rather than oval tracks. Which means that even though the racetrack eventually loops back to the same point from which it started, the layout mimics a winding road filled with straights and corners of various speeds. This automatically makes overtaking tricky. But now with dirty air phenomenon in effect, followers of F1 were increasingly treated with sights of cars following each other around tracks. This was because whenever a chasing driver tried to follow the one ahead in a corner, the dirty air meant that the downforce produced by the front wing would drastically reduce and there was a big risk of the car going wide and off the track entirely.
This meant that pretty much every overtaking move was compromised. By the time the two cars would get on to a straight, the trailing car would still be so far behind the lead one that even with a slip-stream there would be too much distance between the two to allow the trailing car to attempt an overtaking move while heading into a braking zone before the next corner.
So, with the dirty air phenomenon in effect and mid-race refuelling leading to cars running light on fuel and not taxing their tyres as much, we had drivers running pretty much flat-out but unable to race on track. Strategy was considered to be the best way to fight for position, with drivers working on building as much of a lead as possible so that a mid-race refuelling and tyre stop would not cost them enough time to fall behind their rivals during a round of pit-stop. And even with pit-stops completed, F1 car design would ensure little or no way past for a chasing driver in most situations unless there was a technical issue with another car or a big performance disparity.
But what about in the case of equally matched cars and drivers? No chance. You would have to head over to other racing series to watch close racing.
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AN INITIAL ATTEMPT
In 2009, many areas of the car were made off-limits to designers to stick an aerodynamic aid designed to 'clean up the airflow' to the rear wing and diffuser. Front wings were made wider, and the rear wing was made narrower and raised in order to limit the dirty air sent to a following car. But teams set in motion other expensive developments that eventually resulted in trick diffusers and then using the exhaust gases to send more air through a diffuser to produce downforce.
Mid-race refuelling was banned in 2010, following a series of dangerous incidents and people wanting to see drivers to fight on track instead of only in the pit-lane. But the problem of F1 car design was still there. You see, F1 car development had come to the point that races were pretty much decided during qualifying. If you had a car that worked well over a single lap, thanks to aerodynamic aids that work best when a car is running undisturbed and all by itself, then you were pretty much assured of pole position.
And if your car was reliable as well as being fast, then you could disappear into the distance and control the race from the front, where the only time you would have to deal with other cars would be those from teams that run at budgets at a fraction of yours and have no choice but to be lapped.
DODGY DECISIONS
Now this was still very much in the Bernie Ecclestone era. For his own benefit, and to ensure that teams never unify against him, Ecclestone had created a situation in which any changes to F1 regulations needed unanimous agreement from the teams, and Ferrari held a veto power that it would use to aid whoever saw things their way. Not to mention decision making was done in a decidedly knee-jerk manner. And although Ecclestone had some suggestions to improve racing, they were designed more to grab attention than to achieve anything concrete.
He once suggested that roundabouts should be put in the middle of a track, along with sprinklers to artificially wet the circuit, in order to shift the emphasis from aerodynamics to mechanical grip. Quite loony but not particularly productive suggestions, as they weren't meant to be. The one sensible thing that Ecclestone did want to implement was a limit in how much money teams could spend to develop their cars, so that there was less disparity and the crazy aero war could be curbed too.
But the system he himself created prevented this, and teams ultimately accepted two stop-gap solutions for the 2011 season. The first was a single, control tyre-supplier in Pirelli that would make tyres that would force drivers to race with tyre life as a consideration and know when to push and when to hold back. Then there was the Drag Reduction System (DRS) that would allow a chasing car to flatten a large section of its rear wing to gain time on the car it was chasing. The DRS, however, would only be operational if a car was within one second of the car being chased. And it would only be operational in designated sections of a track during a race as opposed to being used whenever the driver wanted to during qualifying.
Teams could still burn millions of dollars on testing cars in a wind tunnel or even using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to create wings and other aerodynamic aids that would work best when the car ran on its own. The dirty air phenomenon still existed through corners and now with tyres designed to wear and degrade faster, following a car too closely could lead to the destruction of tyres of the following car.
So, the number of overtaking moves did shoot up in 2011, but it was very much a stop-gap solution.
HOW THINGS STAND NOW
From 2011 to 2016, F1 went through a tumultuous period of yo-yoing tyre performance, trying to balance the creation of performance differentiators and safety (think back to the 2013 British Grand Prix), and a debate over how to go racing. This was until changes made for 2017 allowed teams some aerodynamic freedom, which was denied to them from 2009 to 2016. Some of the dirty air producing aero aids came back, but at least the powers that be saw it fit to allow wide and grippier tyres that were now set wider apart from each other at the front and rear.
The driving force of these changes were the desire to increase cornering speed and get drivers to push flat out through a race and also make the cars significantly faster. But it also made it harder for cars to follow each other through corners again, and this became worse this year as teams developed their aerodynamic aids even more.
Thankfully, various factors have led to some entertaining races and, of course, the cars look visually very aggressive and purposeful, as they should, and are indeed ridiculously fast, especially with the hybrid power-units of top manufacturers producing 1,000bhp while being more thermodynamically efficient ever than any internal combustion engine on the road.
CHALLENGES TO BE MET
But a race like the season opening Australian Grand Prix at the Melbourne Park Circuit – a more traditional F1 venue in terms of the track layout – showed why the current situation in F1 is anything but ideal as drivers complained of not being able to follow cars closely in sections where one corner leads into another. This was also the case in pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which will be the next stop on the F1 calendar for the Spanish Grand Prix.
That circuit is not a 'Tilke-drome', a term given to circuits designed by F1's default circuit designer Hermann Tilke. The first of which was the Sepang International Circuit, which like other Tilke circuits features tight corners followed by a very long straight that allows drivers time to try and get as close as possible while heading into a braking zone.
The Buddh International Circuit is also such a circuit, and these are all modern, high-tech venues. However, circuit design can only do so much. Especially if the F1 teams' desire to chase lap-time through disposable and expensive aero aids keeps making it hard even for racers like Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo, Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso to get their cars close enough to their prey on track.
The changes that will come into effect, in the grander scheme of things, are a small step. Hopefully the long-term changes that will be made in 2021 will be a giant leap.
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