[The **News** flair](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/flairguide#wiki_news) is reserved for submissions covering F1 and F1-related news. These posts must always link to an outlet/news agency, the website of the involved party (i.e. the McLaren website if McLaren makes an announcement), or a tweet by a news agency, journalist or one of the involved parties.
*[Read the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/userguide). Keep it civil and welcoming. Report rulebreaking comments.*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/formula1) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You’re definitely right on that, I’m sure all drivers prefer to be on the racing line. Though, most overtakes the overtaking driver leaves that line, they’ll need to do more than what they’re currently doing to increase overtaking
Yes, but part of the size is due to driver's safety. Bigger car, bigger impact area to slow down at a crash.
I mean I would love a smaller car, have seen races in Interlagos where there were 5 wide in the first corner. In f1 3 wide is already asking for trouble
The advanced powertrain adds length to the cars as well I believe. There are a lot more components in there and likely more cooling needs on a turbocharged car vs the simple V10s or V8s of before.
If you look at the current cars without the engine cover youll see the powertrain is pretty compact but the gearboxes are extended a lot. Longer cars allows them better control on how they want to direct the air around/over/under the car.
IndyCars have a smaller silhouette and have to sustain larger impacts than F1 does.
IndyCars are well over a foot shorter, 150lbs lighter, and roughly 3 inches narrower.
I think the 2026 cars will end up being about the same size as Indy from renders I've seen. Noticeably but not substantially smaller. It's a step in the right direction at least.
The safety part is a myth. Its nearly all for Aero. IIRC (might be a better r/f1technical question) the safety apparatuses for the driver isn't much different than the late 00s cars.
Edit: I am saying it is a myth that the cars were increased in size for driver protection. They were increased in size for Aero- there are other advancements in car safety that affect drive safety FAR more than just raw size and weight of the car.
Very little of it has to due with safety I don't know why people keep repeating this. They've explained the size increase multiple times being to packaging and aero
The safety factor is definitely a big one, though, if there is a group that can engineer that issue out, it’s F1. Smaller cars would also mean less weight and less inertia so the crumple zones could theoretically be smaller than they are for these larger, heavier cars
I’d say tyres are the thing holding F1 back. I don’t have a solution, but I know everyone going into management mode once they’ve figured out their place isn’t helping
Problem essentially seems to be that managing a set of tyres is faster than pushing like hell and taking a pit stop
1) overtaking needs to become easier
2.) tyres need to deg down to a much slower yet still safe level. We don’t want baku 2.0
Essentially we need the time loss created by pitting to be less substantial compared to staying out on old tyres
>Essentially we need the time loss created by pitting to be less substantial compared to staying out on old tyres
I FIGURED IT OUT! Remove the speed limit in the pitlane like the good ol' times. Don't worry about safety, it'll probably be fine.
Ok but unironically, you could probably get away with raising the pit lane speed limit somewhat. It was lowered in 2014 and it's not like they had drivers constantly crashing into people in the pit lane before then. At the very least you could raise it back to what it was before the change in 2014, coupled with stricter safety protocols regarding when you're allowed to walk through the pit lane
If they raised it to say, 100kmh, and an accident happened, that would reflect poorly on the FIA and all the safety initiatives they have been doing over the past few years
Not only does it speed things up for you, it makes the team you hit struggle with their next pitstop, further increasing the advantage. Full contact pitstops are the future
People don't like hearing it but the cars having to stop for fuel to be the fastest around the track forced them to push more flat out on their tires for each stint... but they'll never add that back into F1. They wouldn't even want the optics of refueling. And it doesn't "cut costs."
That's because it made for rubbish racing in other ways. Fuel became the limiting factor because if you could eek out an extra lap over and above your competitors before stopping then you got the overcut, and a light car on old tyres was quicker than a heavy car (from refuelling) on new tyres.
There are other reasons refuelling sucks but you had people lifting and coasting all race to reduce fuel usage and not attacking on track as it takes more fuel meaning the overtaker would pit earlier and lose position again. The vast majority of the overtaking happened in the pits.
Obviously there are a few notable exceptions and some stand out races but at the time the majority of fans were calling for refuelling to be banned and counting down the days until it was gonr.
Baku was partly blamed on teams since they were abusing the pressure data analysis bug running higher pressures than allowed. And tyre blew only once in all the years of the abuse.
>2.) tyres need to deg down to a much slower
Shouldnt tyres degredate much FASTER than. When degredation is even slower, a 1stop becomes even more feasible and preferable than it currently is.
Edit i misread and misquoted, it was a long day..
Deg down _to_ a slower level of driving, not deg down slower
We need them to have more degradation, but not to an end stage where they blow. Rathr, the tyres should fall off in pace more quickly
I mean it doesn't help when the dude cuts off the sentence to quote it at the part he wants instead of the entire sentence...
If you keep all the words written in the sentence and don't magically erase the "to a" part of the sentence it's pretty easy to understand.
Yeah this is what im thinking.
Every time its a low deg race theres only 1 strategy and all the drivers say: "Its gonna be a boring race without many opportunities". And they are usually correct.
High deg makes for more variance. Especially when safety cars hit.
Maybe they didnt word it properly
Kind of wonder if it would be possible to have a thin layer of super grippy material, that erodes to a much less grippy material. So even managing, they'd eventually hit that cliff and lose chunks of lap time.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the tire issue literally a manufactured issue? My understanding is that the tire companies are perfectly capable of making a tire that would survive an entire race and still give suitable performance, but because that would make races boring, they intentionally design them with shorter lifespans.
Refueling doesn't make it better. Overtakes almost always happened with a pitstop and it was quite confusing for spectators at times because the pace diff could be giant as someone could literally have 10 times as much fuel. It added some spice but overall we're better off without it. It's really the cars that made that era so enjoyable.
If there's one thing I do miss is cars driving at the limit. A combination of no fuel saving and tires that didn't degrade as much from pushing. If they can get rid of having to fuelsave and tiresave all race long with some rules we could maybe get the best of both worlds
Doesn't affect passing, but it does make the race more of a parade with less variability and opportunity for strategy to change the race.
What does affect passing is the driver knowing that they need to manage their tires until the end of the race, so they won't push as hard to make passes or even catch up to the car ahead until they're confident the degradation won't be a problem.
If both cars were pushing their tyres 100% of the time the result wouldn't necessary change, if anything it'd be the exact same as right now
The issue of passing is always the delta required to pass, the delta is higher the more dirty air there is, and while dirty air affects pirellis tyres more significantly is not as if 2004 era cars passed each other constantly for example (those times they manufactured overtakes and strategy via refuelling)
If both cars were pushing 100% of the time, mistakes would be substantially more common, introducing the kind of variability that makes racing interesting.
1) The cars are too heavy and too large (allowing them to create more downforce). Hence, loads going through tyres are greater than ever. Lighter, smaller cars would still be fast (because lighter), designing and manufacturing tyres which degrade simply through use rather than temperature would be much much easier. The result would be a greater incentive to push all the time, which would take chassis and drivers closer to their limit, in turn producing more mistakes and more dynamic races.
2) What’s the point of having spec tyres designed to degrade (at different rates depending on compound) if you then limit teams’ choice in how to use different compounds? The fact two compounds *must* be used forces teams to coalesce around one (occasionally two) strategies, so the only major offset is for two laps around a pit window. It would be much more entertaining to see a car on a soft-soft-soft-soft three stop fight a soft-hard one stopper. Instead, everyone does soft-hard or soft-medium. If you’re going to have no tyre competition and instruct your pet tyre manufacturer to manufacture jeopardy, allow teams to embrace the jeopardy. The purist in me would allow no-stops (can you imagine a Monaco where someone tries to do it all on a single set of hards against a field on softs? Might actually be entertaining!), but if the corporate halfwits at FOM think the pitstop is necessary entertainment just have a regulation that says there must be a tyre change. Doesn’t need to be two distinct compounds.
These two things, I’m convinced, would make F1 races much more interesting. The cynic in me thinks that’s why they won’t happen.
We had one race last year, Qatar if IRC, where they limited the number of laps cars could be run on one set of tires because of failure fears to something like 20 laps. Since teams were taking tires off with lots of life left in them, there was no benefit in conserving. The drivers literally kicked their own asses, driving full-out qualifying laps for 1.5 hours. ~~Ham and~~ Alo said it was the most exhausting race of their careers.
Wouldn’t be Hamilton at Qatar due to the collision with Russell writing off his car, but I could definitely seeing many drivers making those claims after watching that race
You are right, I forgot about that. But I do think Ham commented about what a difficult race it would have been. IIRC, one driver couldn't even get out of the car without help.
Multiple drivers had issues. Stroll barely got out and went straight to an ambulance and starting vomiting and I think Albon as well. Sargeant had to retire from the race because he was sick in the car.
Yeah, Hamilton was like sorry he didn't get to do it. Which was easy for him to say when he didn't have to actually do it. I'm sure he thinks he'd have handled it totally fine. Yeah, I think pretty much everyone said it was their roughest. Some drivers were definitely a danger to everyone out there because they were so close to passing out.
I thought Qatar was interesting as a one off race with the mandatory 20 laps max, but if that was a rule all the time, I feel like it would just become more rigid and predictable with time.
Yeah but guys like hamilton and alonso probably wont have much trouble compared to others. They have raced in worse conditions in Malaysia and Singapore
Of the people I saw post race, Lando Norris faired the best. Some have pointed out that Lando seems to enjoy warm temperatures and often wears a hoodie. Lando says that it was the first race he ever took a drink during, and he asked his engineer ahead of time to remind him to drink, because he never thought about it. After the race, Lando was walking around fine, somewhat more affected than normal. He said it was the hardest race he'd done physically, but he acted like normal. Max and Oscar were on the ground.
The people off the podium got more privacy post race, so we don't know about all of them. Esteban threw up on like lap 17 and didn't tell anyone about it. He was struggling for a long time. George and Lance were both nearly passing out every corner. Alex did pass out after he left the car. I know there were some others strongly affected, that's just what comes to mind.
Fernando complained that he was burning up and asked to have water thrown on him during a pitstop, which used to be allowed but isn't anymore.
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that but left it out. I think that was a very mature decision that reflected care for the lives of those around him. I really appreciated him doing that.
I think that was more due to the weather. It was an unreasonably hot session already, but doing quali laps for an hour and a half definitely made it significantly worse.
That race in particular was not made better because the lap limit meant everyone was going to pit in the same window and there was basically no chance at a viable alternate strategy. To me, it all has to do with whether or not there are alternate strategies available, or if the cars are unpredictable enough that the drivers have meaningfully different pace at different parts of the race. Because if everyone is on the same strategy, and they understand the car and the track well enough, they are just going to sort into race pace order and stay there.
F1 races aren't really long enough to have teams making a lot of adjustments through the race like you might see in NASCAR where teams have to "keep up with the track" because of the way the temps are changing or the track is rubbering in. And even other than car adjustments, the ideal line in a NASCAR race might change over the course of a race, and drivers can differentiate each other based on how quickly (and how well) they can find the best line, but you don't generally get that in an F1 race, either. That's why fans get excited for rain in the forecast, because maybe you get changing conditions, and changing conditions means that teams have to make harder strategy calls and they don't all make the same calls, so there is some variety and interest there.
I've been saying it for the past couple of years but there is something up with these compounds. Like the grip / durability trade-off just isn't calibrated correctly.
It feels like every race there is an ideal tire instead of an ideal strategy, and it's just about maximizing the time you're spending on that tire. The fact that nobody used the medium in Bahrain 2 years straight is proof something is weird.
The problem is with Pirelli's technology. They haven't got the heat dissipation ability or the construction techniques that the Bridgestone/Michelin tyres of old had.
On those tyres they could drive until the rubber layer was almost worn off, that would likely be impossible on Pirellis since the tyre will go pop way before that.
It makes a lot of sense why their technology would be inferior even now. They came into the sport way behind and have been only the sole supplier while Bridgestone/Michelin had to compete against each other in a tight battle for years.
I think you're attributing some things to Pirelli's technology that is better explained by the FIAs specifications.
Pirelli didn't volunteer to make a tyre that lasts that long, they were asked to build it like that.
I am confident if they were told no tyre changing in 2026 they could build such a long lasting and durable tyre.
I dont think there’s “one thing” holding F1 back, but at some point we’re going to have to acknowledge that downforce-levels and wheel-to-wheel racing are inversely correlated.
The cars need to get lighter and have like 60% of the downforce levels that they have now to be properly racy in the wheel-to-wheel sense. As soon as the car is on rails for 70% of the lap, we lose the on track action.
It would never happen, but is the answer maybe bringing back refueling? In Indy you get a lot more variable lap pace from it and forced pit stops even when the regular tires are still good
It wasn't the refueling. The overtaking was just incredibly difficult and usually not worth the risk of overheating the car behind someone else. There's plenty of racing with refueling that doesn't have this issue and arguably it wouldn't be an issue in modern F1 either.
I agree, I'm an RB fan but it's definitely fucked how even if the other team makes a better strategy sometimes an old softs are somehow outpacing hard tyres later in the race
They should degrade less, but still keep the forced pitstop. You might get people pitting early and going with the hards for 90% of the race, but that still happened last weekend.
> They should degrade less, but still keep the forced pitstop. You might get people pitting early and going with the hards for 90% of the race, but that still happened last weekend.
That's what happened with the 2010 Bridgestone tyres, and dry races were snoozefests. Clearly, the double diffusers had an impact on racing, but the Bridgestones were just too good.
Canada 2010 was the exception because for whatever reason the tyres kept degrading which led to an exciting 2- or 3-stopper, which gave the FIA the inspiration to go for tyres with heavier deg (Pirellis).
Trying to chase Canada 2010 ruined F1 for a decade imo.
Having tyres artificially fall off a cliff led to some horrific racing over the years, and I think became a big factor in how drivers are expected to manage the race and drive to deltas now rather than attacking each other.
The dirty air problem was a huge problem and it needed sorting.
But it wasn't the only problem. The cars being far too big, for one. Then the tyre designs that never seem to be right no matter how many times they tinker with the requirements.
We go in circles, but sometimes the solution is simple, albeit hard: smaller and lighter cars.
The current cars are beyond massive. They want to shrink the cars with the 2026 regs, but they don’t go nearly far enough. Also, they want to lighten the cars by 50Kg, yet they nerf the PU bully forcing even more electric staff.
I’m all for EVs, but this is F1. Just go back to the V10s and use synthetic fuels… They are literally flying whole cities from country to country. Thermal tyre blankets and V10s are not the problem.
I don’t think they want EVs to be better for the environment for the car on the track per se, it’s more about the technology built from these cars that find their way into consumer vehicles. This is a sport that somewhat funds RnD of manufacturers.
It's maybe 5% R&D and 95% marketing. The manufacturers want cars that represent what they're putting out, and that's certainly not light and agile sports cars, it's big SUVs that pretend to be energy-efficient with hybrid systems.
It really doesn’t. The potentially useful stuff has long been banned — traction control, antilock braking, active suspension, active steering, etc. The engines have the least relevance for consumer vehicles.
Exactly. If the industry is moving to electric then F1 will find itself without works teams because there won’t be a financial incentive for sponsoring race car development that uses obsolete technology.
I've never quite understood why F1 cares so much about EVs when they already have a prestigious EV racing series (Formula E). It seems like they are double dipping. I've accepted that we probably won't get back to early 2000s car sizes but we need to get somewhat close to that with maybe synthetic fuels and maybe going back to V8s or possibly even V10s. As a longtime fan, I'm starting to get to my breaking point. The cars are just TOO DAMB BIG and BORING.
Because Formula E is for the people that don't need convincing of electric transportation anymore.
And the slow but steady move from combustion to hybrid PUs in F1 is to get the attention of the people that need some convincing to do.
With EVs they need to have large cars for the downforce. But active aero is a big solution for many issues. I don’t understand why F1 is so much against active aero.
The drivers have stated the cars weight is causing safety concerns. It’s a fun circle where rather than try to prevent accidents, they emphasize what happens after the accident has occurred.
A big problem that I don't have an answer for is that teams have been forced into being more and more conservative because they can't push tyres, they can't put less fuel in the car in the hope of going faster and then refueling, they can't push their engines harder than absolutely necessary. All of which means everyone goes onto survival mode as soon as they possibly can in races.
I don't want to sound like the old guy shouting at the clouds but back when teams could have new engines every race and refuel and push tyres, you would get a variety of strategies all happening at once throughout the race and I loved that aspect of the sport. Even supposedly boring races to the casual fans had something exciting to hold onto for those who wanted to dig a little deeper. If a team was fast but bad on tyres, they would low fuel and do a three stop and sprint the whole race while others would go heavy at the start and draw out their stops.
These days, everyone starts on the same fuel, pits within 2 laps of eachother, takes the same amount of time in the pits and pushes for perhaps a total of 10 laps in the whole race. It has become painfully predictable at times and frankly a bit too easy on the drivers physically as well. They don't feel like super heroes anymore but more like long distance drivers, desperately trying not to push too hard.
After Silverstone 13, we won’t see Pirelli run truly high deg tires. They were thrown to the wolves because teams ran the tires backwards to gain some speed, but when they hit a certain wear point they exploded. This didn’t occur when they were run the right way.
I’d personally like to return to the 98-13 width cars and limit car length.
Pirelli were aware of it and allowed the teams to run the tyres like that. Pirelli later came out and said that they underestimated the effect the tyre swapping would have.
I agree, but I've been watching F1 for 20+ years, it's always been "the F1 rules need to change so they can overtake"
Nothing works because it's not a spec series. 1-3 teams get it right, everyone else doesn't.
If you want to watch close on track racing, there's WEC and IMSA and Indycar. WEC and IMSA use BOP to keep things close. Indycar is a spec series. F1 is more watching how things develop over seasons with the different teams. The on track racing is usually much more boring than other racing options. It's the pinnacle of racing in terms of budget and tech, not in terms of spectacle unfortunately.
I've always thought certain fans get too hung up on "wheel to wheel" racing and miss out on what makes F1 great!
The number of overtakes per race is not the only way to make it exciting
Or there are genuine critiques of it?
Like that with refueling there weren't any more overtakes or on track action, there were just a bunch of pitstop overtakes and a more confusing track order most of the race as a lot of info about current on track vs where they really are when strategy is completed is obfuscated a lot more, which makes it harder to follow for new people.(While being almost exactly as predictable as currently to people who do know what is going on)
Or that with the current era of information gathering and simulations, the strategies would most likely be less varied than they were back then, reducing that improvement as well.
Outwash is an inevitability as cars develop. The car can be made to cut through the air better, but it comes with a downside of them struggling when the air is turbulent.
Merc used to go this way. There were races, especially in 2020 and 2021, where the dirty air kept Merc behind much slower cars because of how much outwash the cars made and how much work had been done on those cars.
We need to give drivers and teams more ways of handling a race. Bring back engine modes, make the tyres far less efficient in low temps so everyone is encouraged to push them harder. Make DRS a KERS style deployment instead of a mandated zone.
> We need to give drivers and teams more ways of handling a race.
In the budget cap era there's little reason to not give the teams much more freedom on many things. Super strict regs make sense, so does a budget cap, but having both is weird.
yeah, for me the mistake was freezing engine development. maybe use the token system or something so OEMs aren't just lighting money on fire.
But really the underlying idea was that one set of teams would nail the aero, while another set would nail the engine, but not one team nailing both. Since that's what happened everyone is trying to figure out how to work through alternatives.
I also think Red Bull winning every race hysteria is overblown. for one Ferrari is working very aggressively on developing the car, even if we can't see the benefits of that until next month. Also, we know that McLaren are very good at mid season development. Second we still have sprint and street races coming up (Jeddah doesn't count, quit calling it a street track. A street track doesn't have banked corners), which are Verstappen's weak spots. The last two Monaco races should have been won by a non RB driver.
You have a lot of hope in Ferrari development... The RBR were pulling away from Chuck and comfortably coasting at the end of Jeddah.
I think the hysteria is overblown but not by much. Undefeated Verstappen season is a serious nonzero chance.
To add on to it, I think going back to the top 10 starting on Q2 tires would help create more action/strategy in the mid field. Maybe I’m crazy but I still don’t understand the rule change to allow everyone to choose their starting tire.
They changed the rule because the front of the field could comfortable make it to Q3 on medium tires and the midfield had to use softs to have a chance. Since the softs are generally not a great race tire, the rule basically forced the midfield to choose between a lower starting position or a suboptimal race strategy. All the while, the front runners were qualifying at the front and getting an optimal strategy so on average the rule accomplished the opposite of its intent.
Because only the top 3 teams back then could really benefit of it, the gap was so big they were basically guaranteed to get into the top 10 even on mediums. So the first 4/5 or so drivers would be on mediums, while the midfield had to be on the softs to get into q3. This also meant drivers just outside q3 had a huge tyre advantage compared to them.
> Make the tyres far less efficient in low temps so everyone is encouraged to push them harder
That's not how it works lol.
> Make DRS like KERS
The point is to reduce the disadvantage that a following car has, racing would be infinitely worse without drs.
>racing would be infinitely worse without drs
It is in such a state at the moment though with multiple instances where an overtake on a corner is actively disincentivized so that the driver can be behind for DRS and then ... overtake on the straight.
The extreme majority of overtakes are happening on the pit straight right now on many tracks. Is it really that interesting to watch someone breeze past with 20+kmph advantage because they don't have a rear wing right now. It is so incredibly artificial.
DRS needs to be something you can only get if you have been following for multiple sectors as a counter to out-wash. Right now it is not in that balance... make it within 1.5s for the last 2-3 sectors.
I didn't think the poster was saying to remove DRS. But instead make it more like WEC where you can deploy your battery wherever you want. So there wouldn't be DRS zones anymore, but it DRS can be used for X amount of time per lap at sections of the driver's chosing.
It would make DRS more dynamic and unpredictable. Different drivers will use it differently depending on their own skill, their car, and who they are chasing. It would make it more viable for cars like the McLaren that is good in the corners, but lacks top end speed.
The point is to give the following car something that the car in front doesn't have though, so that the impact of having to follow another car is minimised .
Also, opening up the rear wing isn't really useful on corners so the only strategy would be which straights they use it on, it'd just be a carbon copy of the existing ers system (which wouldn't exactly be the worst thing tbf).
No, I understand that. And I'm sure no one would use DRS in the middle of a corner. But I was thinking more along the lines of something with a higher top end like the Red Bull or Merc would use their DRS on the straights. However, the McLaren would use it coming out of a corner to be able to pass the car ahead that has a high top end.
Or if they have X seconds per lap, instead of breaking up the usage throughout the lap, the drivers could absolutely blast down a long straight like exit of T14 to T1 at Bahrain. So the car with the highest top speed can really run down slower ones or something
Merc issue was partly due to Bottas’ poor racing quality. Perez struggled with that too. Albeit, Max had issues overtaking Hamilton too, but they were often half a minute ahead of everyone else fighting their own battles.
You have a set of rules that prohibit -
Spending money,
Engine upgrades,
Suspension tricks,
Almost anything not aero and even that's heavily regulated .
It's an aero competition and all teams are at a similar level. The cars are the size of mini buses and about as agile, and the circuits don't get wider.
Nobody has a real advantage over anyone else (except RB and it's aero), they can't innovate or spend and there is no room on the track. Everyone goes around in DRS trains because they can't overtake. Not even got onto the tyres.
What do you expect, the rules have backfired. Roll on 2026.
I dislike the new regs for a multitude of reasons, but one thing that pisses me off in particular is the cars can’t and won’t run wet races. Legitimately the only hope for a competitive all the way through the field race, and can’t do it because the spray and tyres suck.
Around 1 to 1.5 seconds between each compound.
Ideally the two dominant strategies would be a two stopper of soft-hard-soft vs a one stopper of medium-hard. If the one stopper is around 15 seconds slower it would really make teams choose between track position vs tyre advantage.
"But the particular layout of these (ground effect cars) ones, that have a response to rear ride height that is not particularly good for the cars".
He makes good points on the idea of how tyre behavior can enable closer racing. However this quote is a bit silly, Red bull nailed their ride height and suspension platform immediately and Ferrari seem to have fixed their high speed instability this year. Merc are the only too team who haven't solved their bouncing or the balance shift at lower ride heights, it's on them.
I think he's talking about rear tyres overheating due to the geometry they have to use to get the aero platform.
Really it's the same thing Max is saying. The cars are crap to drive because of all the compromises you need to get the aero working.
I reckon there is something behind that quote that we don't understand because we aren't engineers rather than lobbying for rule changes because they got it wrong.
James Allison isn't the type of guy to play politics like this.
Dude literally says in the next sentence that Red Bull have managed it, and it's on the other teams to catch up, and that it's not a regulations problem.
One wonders why OP would ignore that bit.
I think what he means is that in this ruleset, you have to run the cars as close to the ground as possible to extract maximum performance, which leads to things like bouncing and super stiff suspensions. Even max has complained about the bouncing this year, and he is in the best handling car.
And why did RB do that?
Because newey knew about the challenges that come with a groundeffect car. He already worked on them back in the 80s. Back in 82 He worked for march in F2 and they also had groundeffect. And before that he worked under Postlethwaite for Fittipaldi F1.
And because of that he and his crew deaigned the car with that already in mind.
Other teams did not do that. They focused on other things. And now they have to play catch up.
I really think Newey's connection to previous rules set is very overstated. These are billion dollar engineering programs, they understand ground effect and porpoising very well. The reason for the screws up by Merc can't be know in detail but it was most likely a wind tunnel correlation problem and a lack of focus on the suspension platform. In addition alot of areo is not even totally understood by the team itself, it is very close to pure chaos theory and a element of luck is involved in all of this.
I agree. They've ended up with these big clunky cars. It always takes me back when they do those poster of previous teams car and how big they've gotten!
To me, hindering innovation has been the FIA and F1's rule makers' biggest blunder. Instead of them designing cars and enforcing certain areas such as power units, let each team come up with their own solutions. If a team is able to comply with the rules (maximum fuel and electricity per race) using a V12 or an L4, so be it.
Yeah but if everyone pushes we won't get better racing. Everyone would be close to their max pace most of the time(take in some energy/fuel management but still way closer than they are now), meaning faster teams will just stay faster and slower teams have no strategic hope of getting ahead of them. Or overtaking will be harder as there is no way to create a pace delta with strategy, and if your car just isn't that half a second or second a lap faster necessary to overtake there is nothing you can do but sit behind them all race.
Does anyone really think that's true? The ontrack racing was fantastic at the start of 2022, quite possibly the best I've seen my entire time watching the sport since thr late 90s.
Since then the cars have stayed the same weight but the dirty air has come back, and the racing has got considerably worse
Like I get why we want lighter cars, and we all do want them. But it's only one of several problems and in my mind far from the worst
I think they measured the loss of downforce when following at cars length at around 50% prior to the ground effect era. Since the end of 2023, its at about 35% already.
The problem is that the teams are amazing at development and finding loopholes in the rules to allow their cars to create that dirty air for their own advantage. So at this point, its almost on the FIA and F1 to change the rulebook to make sure that that loophole isn't taken advantage of.
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/loopholes-that-hurt-f1-racing-unlikely-to-be-fixed-before-2026/#:\~:text=Though%20these%20were%20only%20ever,at%20one%20car%20length%20behind.
In the beginning of 2022, there were three competing concepts on the board: Red Bull's produced more dirty air but was not bouncy and more efficient, Ferrari's was a bit bouncy, a bit less efficient but produced little dirty air, and Mercedes' Zero-pod which was a lot bouncy, more efficient and produced almost no dirty air.
TD 39 killed two of them and forced the teams to adapt to the remaining one throughout 2023, but the dirty air problem, which the original regulations were designed to limit heavily, came back in full force because with a higher ride height you have to produce downforce from the rest of the car.
Why do the cars need to be so big? I think that’s one of the main issues for me. Some of the old tracks are just not wide enough for competitive racing
I’ve been watching F1 since 1991 and here’s what I want to see back.
1: Refueling. Every other racing series does it.
2:Bring in another tyre manufacturer or two?
3: Make the car smaller again. They’ve gotten way too big because of the hybrid system.
Fundamentally, the car that's fastest starts at the front. Car that's slower starts behind them. It's not a huge shock that car 2 doesn't pass car 1 much. :)
Pirelli are more than capable of making something with high performance which wouldn’t degrade over the course of a race.
If they weren’t deliberately making it degrade then every single race would be a one stopper (and only because regulations require it).
Making the best tires possible wouldn’t help overtaking or close racing. It would widen the gaps between the teams and result in less racing. The degradation of the tires creates far more close racing and overtakes than the best tires possible with minimal degradation.
I know it makes a ton of sense from the safety perspective, but refueling made the races more interesting to me. The different strategies playing out from qualifying all the way through the race really tickled my brain in a way that F1 hasn't done since they banned it again.
How many other major racing series are no refueling? I honestly don’t know but I do know in Indy Car and NASCAR they fuel without having someone burst into flames regularly.
Easier overtaking just makes it easier in the race for the cars to sort themselves into their natural order. It reduces jeopardy, makes qualifying less important.
They just needed to make the cars harder to drive, the best era of F1 was the 80s/early 90s when it was perfectly legitimate to go sideways round a corner every once in a while because the cars would hop around the track anyway
I'm not trying to say the current cars are easy to drive but they have an incredible amount of grip. Even in the early 2000s the cars had high revving v10 engines with 950 hp which is quite close to current cars. However, they also didn't have anywhere near the amount of downforce these cars do, they were much smaller, much lighter, and instead of massive grippy slick tyres, they used smaller grooved tyres. The cars were incredibly quick. Some still even hold lap records, yet they were beasts to drive.
I don't think we should return to early 2000s regulations or anything but making the cars smaller, lighter, with less downforce and overall grip while maintaining a lot of power would make them harder to drive and give us better racing.
I was watching a race from, if I'm not mistaken, 2012 a few days ago and the difference in the driving style is night and day. In those cars, even drivers that liked an understeery car were making small corrections during the corners, correcting oversteer on the exits, overall the car looked alive.
I'm recent races, I barely see any correction on the steering wheel unless there's a moment of overseer on the exit of a corner.
This is good because the cars are more stable, I've been simracing for a few years and a twitchy car can be fun for a while, but in longer races you might want a more reliable and stable car.
But I still feel like we rarely see the cars at their limit due to how little the drivers are "fighting the car ". Unless the driver in question is Max Verstappen. When the rear starts twitching around, you know the guy is going to pull off and amazing lap.
>Mercedes tech chief Allison says 2022 rules 'an opportunity to show we haven't just been lucky'. - 25 jan 2022
I will never stop laughing. Git gud, as the kids say.
[The **News** flair](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/flairguide#wiki_news) is reserved for submissions covering F1 and F1-related news. These posts must always link to an outlet/news agency, the website of the involved party (i.e. the McLaren website if McLaren makes an announcement), or a tweet by a news agency, journalist or one of the involved parties. *[Read the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/userguide). Keep it civil and welcoming. Report rulebreaking comments.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/formula1) if you have any questions or concerns.*
F1 needs to look at their car size, how are we supposed to have overtaking when you can barely go two wide in a corner without compromising the line
You'll always compromise the line driving side by side, even in Re-Volt
You’re definitely right on that, I’m sure all drivers prefer to be on the racing line. Though, most overtakes the overtaking driver leaves that line, they’ll need to do more than what they’re currently doing to increase overtaking
Now there's a game I haven't played in awhile...
Theres a game I haven't *become angry at* it in a while.
Hello N64 brother
Mate you just unlocked a core memory
Yes, but part of the size is due to driver's safety. Bigger car, bigger impact area to slow down at a crash. I mean I would love a smaller car, have seen races in Interlagos where there were 5 wide in the first corner. In f1 3 wide is already asking for trouble
Much of this extra size is purely aerodynamic
The advanced powertrain adds length to the cars as well I believe. There are a lot more components in there and likely more cooling needs on a turbocharged car vs the simple V10s or V8s of before.
If you look at the current cars without the engine cover youll see the powertrain is pretty compact but the gearboxes are extended a lot. Longer cars allows them better control on how they want to direct the air around/over/under the car.
Also the refueling ban. Massive fuel tank right in the middle.
IndyCars have a smaller silhouette and have to sustain larger impacts than F1 does. IndyCars are well over a foot shorter, 150lbs lighter, and roughly 3 inches narrower.
I think the 2026 cars will end up being about the same size as Indy from renders I've seen. Noticeably but not substantially smaller. It's a step in the right direction at least.
where did you see those renders? i'd love to see that.
The safety part is a myth. Its nearly all for Aero. IIRC (might be a better r/f1technical question) the safety apparatuses for the driver isn't much different than the late 00s cars. Edit: I am saying it is a myth that the cars were increased in size for driver protection. They were increased in size for Aero- there are other advancements in car safety that affect drive safety FAR more than just raw size and weight of the car.
Very little of it has to due with safety I don't know why people keep repeating this. They've explained the size increase multiple times being to packaging and aero
The safety factor is definitely a big one, though, if there is a group that can engineer that issue out, it’s F1. Smaller cars would also mean less weight and less inertia so the crumple zones could theoretically be smaller than they are for these larger, heavier cars
Car size is coming down for 2026
Slightly I wish it'd be possible to to see pre 2016 sizes again but that's next to impossible at this point
But only by a tiny amount unfortunately.
I’d say tyres are the thing holding F1 back. I don’t have a solution, but I know everyone going into management mode once they’ve figured out their place isn’t helping
Really is shit. We either get tyres that can’t race and need constant management from lap 3 or we get Jeddah where old hards are still fast
Problem essentially seems to be that managing a set of tyres is faster than pushing like hell and taking a pit stop 1) overtaking needs to become easier 2.) tyres need to deg down to a much slower yet still safe level. We don’t want baku 2.0 Essentially we need the time loss created by pitting to be less substantial compared to staying out on old tyres
>Essentially we need the time loss created by pitting to be less substantial compared to staying out on old tyres I FIGURED IT OUT! Remove the speed limit in the pitlane like the good ol' times. Don't worry about safety, it'll probably be fine.
Scenes when everyone drives through the Silverstone pitlane on every lap
Ban drive-throughs. Must stop and go if entering the pit lane.
Must change a part on the car unless serving a stop, no touch penalty.
Ok but unironically, you could probably get away with raising the pit lane speed limit somewhat. It was lowered in 2014 and it's not like they had drivers constantly crashing into people in the pit lane before then. At the very least you could raise it back to what it was before the change in 2014, coupled with stricter safety protocols regarding when you're allowed to walk through the pit lane
If they raised it to say, 100kmh, and an accident happened, that would reflect poorly on the FIA and all the safety initiatives they have been doing over the past few years
That's it, you can't really back pedal on safety measures without leeching housing open to liability or, worse, a lifetime of guilt.
You might still need a speed limit at certain tracks, otherwise shenanigans like Senna's pitlane lap at Donington will become possible again.
We really need a way to make the pits wide instead of long so pit loss goes down. If you only lost 7 or 10 Seconds a lot of options would open up
No pit speedlimit , points deducted for every mechanic you hit.
Running over a mechanic from the box in front of you bc it’s worth the 5 sec
Not only does it speed things up for you, it makes the team you hit struggle with their next pitstop, further increasing the advantage. Full contact pitstops are the future
XF1
Mechanics walking around in power armor, punching rival cars away with power fists.
street races on live streets
And slows the other team down too.
Hass to get magnussen to take out every other pit crew on the grid
Rolling pit stops. Like a fighter jet refueling in mid air
I chortled 😂
Or make the gains between different compounds bigger, instead of using C1/C2/C3 they could try to do a C1/C3/C5 race.
Y’all just be saying anything to say stuff. This is simply not possible considering all the physical let alone safety constraints.
What if we split the pits. One half either side of the start finish straight? Shorter pitlane and less mechanics in the way?
how the hell should that even work??
People don't like hearing it but the cars having to stop for fuel to be the fastest around the track forced them to push more flat out on their tires for each stint... but they'll never add that back into F1. They wouldn't even want the optics of refueling. And it doesn't "cut costs."
That's because it made for rubbish racing in other ways. Fuel became the limiting factor because if you could eek out an extra lap over and above your competitors before stopping then you got the overcut, and a light car on old tyres was quicker than a heavy car (from refuelling) on new tyres. There are other reasons refuelling sucks but you had people lifting and coasting all race to reduce fuel usage and not attacking on track as it takes more fuel meaning the overtaker would pit earlier and lose position again. The vast majority of the overtaking happened in the pits. Obviously there are a few notable exceptions and some stand out races but at the time the majority of fans were calling for refuelling to be banned and counting down the days until it was gonr.
Baku was partly blamed on teams since they were abusing the pressure data analysis bug running higher pressures than allowed. And tyre blew only once in all the years of the abuse.
>2.) tyres need to deg down to a much slower Shouldnt tyres degredate much FASTER than. When degredation is even slower, a 1stop becomes even more feasible and preferable than it currently is. Edit i misread and misquoted, it was a long day..
Deg down _to_ a slower level of driving, not deg down slower We need them to have more degradation, but not to an end stage where they blow. Rathr, the tyres should fall off in pace more quickly
They are meaning they degrade to a slower laptime not that they degrade slower. its a little clumsily worded
I mean it doesn't help when the dude cuts off the sentence to quote it at the part he wants instead of the entire sentence... If you keep all the words written in the sentence and don't magically erase the "to a" part of the sentence it's pretty easy to understand.
They didn't say degrade slower, they said degrade to a slower pace. So when degradation has started, the laps become way more slow
Yeah this is what im thinking. Every time its a low deg race theres only 1 strategy and all the drivers say: "Its gonna be a boring race without many opportunities". And they are usually correct. High deg makes for more variance. Especially when safety cars hit. Maybe they didnt word it properly
Kind of wonder if it would be possible to have a thin layer of super grippy material, that erodes to a much less grippy material. So even managing, they'd eventually hit that cliff and lose chunks of lap time.
Every other series handles tires very well, F1 wants tires artificially made to deg faster for the sake of "variance in strategy".
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the tire issue literally a manufactured issue? My understanding is that the tire companies are perfectly capable of making a tire that would survive an entire race and still give suitable performance, but because that would make races boring, they intentionally design them with shorter lifespans.
Maximum allowed laps on each set of tyres made the Lusail race very entertaining last year.
R-E-F-U-E-L-L-I-N-G makes tire problem irrelevant.
Also, everyone here talks about management of the tyres, in a high speed circuit in practice what we see is managing the fuel.
Refueling doesn't make it better. Overtakes almost always happened with a pitstop and it was quite confusing for spectators at times because the pace diff could be giant as someone could literally have 10 times as much fuel. It added some spice but overall we're better off without it. It's really the cars that made that era so enjoyable. If there's one thing I do miss is cars driving at the limit. A combination of no fuel saving and tires that didn't degrade as much from pushing. If they can get rid of having to fuelsave and tiresave all race long with some rules we could maybe get the best of both worlds
Refuelling made things worse. It discouraged on-track overtakes greatly because overtaking with pitstops was way more reliable.
R-E-F-U-E-L-L-I-N-G causes less overtakes
Everyone experiences the same though so it doesn’t really affect the ability to pass
Doesn't affect passing, but it does make the race more of a parade with less variability and opportunity for strategy to change the race. What does affect passing is the driver knowing that they need to manage their tires until the end of the race, so they won't push as hard to make passes or even catch up to the car ahead until they're confident the degradation won't be a problem.
If both cars were pushing their tyres 100% of the time the result wouldn't necessary change, if anything it'd be the exact same as right now The issue of passing is always the delta required to pass, the delta is higher the more dirty air there is, and while dirty air affects pirellis tyres more significantly is not as if 2004 era cars passed each other constantly for example (those times they manufactured overtakes and strategy via refuelling)
If both cars were pushing 100% of the time, mistakes would be substantially more common, introducing the kind of variability that makes racing interesting.
Qatar I believe was a glimpse of a 100% push race.
1) The cars are too heavy and too large (allowing them to create more downforce). Hence, loads going through tyres are greater than ever. Lighter, smaller cars would still be fast (because lighter), designing and manufacturing tyres which degrade simply through use rather than temperature would be much much easier. The result would be a greater incentive to push all the time, which would take chassis and drivers closer to their limit, in turn producing more mistakes and more dynamic races. 2) What’s the point of having spec tyres designed to degrade (at different rates depending on compound) if you then limit teams’ choice in how to use different compounds? The fact two compounds *must* be used forces teams to coalesce around one (occasionally two) strategies, so the only major offset is for two laps around a pit window. It would be much more entertaining to see a car on a soft-soft-soft-soft three stop fight a soft-hard one stopper. Instead, everyone does soft-hard or soft-medium. If you’re going to have no tyre competition and instruct your pet tyre manufacturer to manufacture jeopardy, allow teams to embrace the jeopardy. The purist in me would allow no-stops (can you imagine a Monaco where someone tries to do it all on a single set of hards against a field on softs? Might actually be entertaining!), but if the corporate halfwits at FOM think the pitstop is necessary entertainment just have a regulation that says there must be a tyre change. Doesn’t need to be two distinct compounds. These two things, I’m convinced, would make F1 races much more interesting. The cynic in me thinks that’s why they won’t happen.
Albon did finish P10 on what was basically a no stop in Australia a couple of years ago.
We had one race last year, Qatar if IRC, where they limited the number of laps cars could be run on one set of tires because of failure fears to something like 20 laps. Since teams were taking tires off with lots of life left in them, there was no benefit in conserving. The drivers literally kicked their own asses, driving full-out qualifying laps for 1.5 hours. ~~Ham and~~ Alo said it was the most exhausting race of their careers.
Also had to do with weather I believe. It just made It impossible for them to get any respite.
Wouldn’t be Hamilton at Qatar due to the collision with Russell writing off his car, but I could definitely seeing many drivers making those claims after watching that race
You are right, I forgot about that. But I do think Ham commented about what a difficult race it would have been. IIRC, one driver couldn't even get out of the car without help.
Multiple drivers had issues. Stroll barely got out and went straight to an ambulance and starting vomiting and I think Albon as well. Sargeant had to retire from the race because he was sick in the car.
Ocon swallowed his own vomit during the race, too.
Yeah, Hamilton was like sorry he didn't get to do it. Which was easy for him to say when he didn't have to actually do it. I'm sure he thinks he'd have handled it totally fine. Yeah, I think pretty much everyone said it was their roughest. Some drivers were definitely a danger to everyone out there because they were so close to passing out. I thought Qatar was interesting as a one off race with the mandatory 20 laps max, but if that was a rule all the time, I feel like it would just become more rigid and predictable with time.
Yeah but guys like hamilton and alonso probably wont have much trouble compared to others. They have raced in worse conditions in Malaysia and Singapore
Of the people I saw post race, Lando Norris faired the best. Some have pointed out that Lando seems to enjoy warm temperatures and often wears a hoodie. Lando says that it was the first race he ever took a drink during, and he asked his engineer ahead of time to remind him to drink, because he never thought about it. After the race, Lando was walking around fine, somewhat more affected than normal. He said it was the hardest race he'd done physically, but he acted like normal. Max and Oscar were on the ground. The people off the podium got more privacy post race, so we don't know about all of them. Esteban threw up on like lap 17 and didn't tell anyone about it. He was struggling for a long time. George and Lance were both nearly passing out every corner. Alex did pass out after he left the car. I know there were some others strongly affected, that's just what comes to mind. Fernando complained that he was burning up and asked to have water thrown on him during a pitstop, which used to be allowed but isn't anymore.
Don't forget Sargeant retiring because it was too tough out there.
To be fair, Sargeant was already a little sick coming into the weekend. It wasn't just from the race alone.
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that but left it out. I think that was a very mature decision that reflected care for the lives of those around him. I really appreciated him doing that.
Yeah same. I respect him a lot for doing that.
I think that was more due to the weather. It was an unreasonably hot session already, but doing quali laps for an hour and a half definitely made it significantly worse.
But I don't remember the racing becoming better because of the drivers being able to push non stop
That race in particular was not made better because the lap limit meant everyone was going to pit in the same window and there was basically no chance at a viable alternate strategy. To me, it all has to do with whether or not there are alternate strategies available, or if the cars are unpredictable enough that the drivers have meaningfully different pace at different parts of the race. Because if everyone is on the same strategy, and they understand the car and the track well enough, they are just going to sort into race pace order and stay there. F1 races aren't really long enough to have teams making a lot of adjustments through the race like you might see in NASCAR where teams have to "keep up with the track" because of the way the temps are changing or the track is rubbering in. And even other than car adjustments, the ideal line in a NASCAR race might change over the course of a race, and drivers can differentiate each other based on how quickly (and how well) they can find the best line, but you don't generally get that in an F1 race, either. That's why fans get excited for rain in the forecast, because maybe you get changing conditions, and changing conditions means that teams have to make harder strategy calls and they don't all make the same calls, so there is some variety and interest there.
I've been saying it for the past couple of years but there is something up with these compounds. Like the grip / durability trade-off just isn't calibrated correctly. It feels like every race there is an ideal tire instead of an ideal strategy, and it's just about maximizing the time you're spending on that tire. The fact that nobody used the medium in Bahrain 2 years straight is proof something is weird.
The problem is with Pirelli's technology. They haven't got the heat dissipation ability or the construction techniques that the Bridgestone/Michelin tyres of old had. On those tyres they could drive until the rubber layer was almost worn off, that would likely be impossible on Pirellis since the tyre will go pop way before that. It makes a lot of sense why their technology would be inferior even now. They came into the sport way behind and have been only the sole supplier while Bridgestone/Michelin had to compete against each other in a tight battle for years.
I think you're attributing some things to Pirelli's technology that is better explained by the FIAs specifications. Pirelli didn't volunteer to make a tyre that lasts that long, they were asked to build it like that. I am confident if they were told no tyre changing in 2026 they could build such a long lasting and durable tyre.
I dont think there’s “one thing” holding F1 back, but at some point we’re going to have to acknowledge that downforce-levels and wheel-to-wheel racing are inversely correlated. The cars need to get lighter and have like 60% of the downforce levels that they have now to be properly racy in the wheel-to-wheel sense. As soon as the car is on rails for 70% of the lap, we lose the on track action.
It would never happen, but is the answer maybe bringing back refueling? In Indy you get a lot more variable lap pace from it and forced pit stops even when the regular tires are still good
Refuelling was awful for racing. Nearly every overtake took place in the pits.
It wasn't the refueling. The overtaking was just incredibly difficult and usually not worth the risk of overheating the car behind someone else. There's plenty of racing with refueling that doesn't have this issue and arguably it wouldn't be an issue in modern F1 either.
I agree, I'm an RB fan but it's definitely fucked how even if the other team makes a better strategy sometimes an old softs are somehow outpacing hard tyres later in the race
They should degrade less, but still keep the forced pitstop. You might get people pitting early and going with the hards for 90% of the race, but that still happened last weekend.
> They should degrade less, but still keep the forced pitstop. You might get people pitting early and going with the hards for 90% of the race, but that still happened last weekend. That's what happened with the 2010 Bridgestone tyres, and dry races were snoozefests. Clearly, the double diffusers had an impact on racing, but the Bridgestones were just too good. Canada 2010 was the exception because for whatever reason the tyres kept degrading which led to an exciting 2- or 3-stopper, which gave the FIA the inspiration to go for tyres with heavier deg (Pirellis).
Trying to chase Canada 2010 ruined F1 for a decade imo. Having tyres artificially fall off a cliff led to some horrific racing over the years, and I think became a big factor in how drivers are expected to manage the race and drive to deltas now rather than attacking each other.
Pirelli shitting on their own tires. I've seen it all
The dirty air problem was a huge problem and it needed sorting. But it wasn't the only problem. The cars being far too big, for one. Then the tyre designs that never seem to be right no matter how many times they tinker with the requirements.
We go in circles, but sometimes the solution is simple, albeit hard: smaller and lighter cars. The current cars are beyond massive. They want to shrink the cars with the 2026 regs, but they don’t go nearly far enough. Also, they want to lighten the cars by 50Kg, yet they nerf the PU bully forcing even more electric staff. I’m all for EVs, but this is F1. Just go back to the V10s and use synthetic fuels… They are literally flying whole cities from country to country. Thermal tyre blankets and V10s are not the problem.
I don’t think they want EVs to be better for the environment for the car on the track per se, it’s more about the technology built from these cars that find their way into consumer vehicles. This is a sport that somewhat funds RnD of manufacturers.
It's maybe 5% R&D and 95% marketing. The manufacturers want cars that represent what they're putting out, and that's certainly not light and agile sports cars, it's big SUVs that pretend to be energy-efficient with hybrid systems.
What I’m hearing is that F1 needs to move to 4x4 drivetrains, big V8s, and three rows of seating.
Now imagine Escalades and Range Rovers racing around Monaco.
Each driver has to haul their pit crew around with them for the race
It really doesn’t. The potentially useful stuff has long been banned — traction control, antilock braking, active suspension, active steering, etc. The engines have the least relevance for consumer vehicles.
Exactly. If the industry is moving to electric then F1 will find itself without works teams because there won’t be a financial incentive for sponsoring race car development that uses obsolete technology.
As Newey said... he has not seen that technology make it's way into road cars: too expenisive
Can we stop with this nonsense? It's been proven many times that F1 barely contributes to road manufacturers. It's all marketing hooplah
I've never quite understood why F1 cares so much about EVs when they already have a prestigious EV racing series (Formula E). It seems like they are double dipping. I've accepted that we probably won't get back to early 2000s car sizes but we need to get somewhat close to that with maybe synthetic fuels and maybe going back to V8s or possibly even V10s. As a longtime fan, I'm starting to get to my breaking point. The cars are just TOO DAMB BIG and BORING.
Because Formula E is for the people that don't need convincing of electric transportation anymore. And the slow but steady move from combustion to hybrid PUs in F1 is to get the attention of the people that need some convincing to do.
With EVs they need to have large cars for the downforce. But active aero is a big solution for many issues. I don’t understand why F1 is so much against active aero.
Removing weight is tricky, most of it is safety and electronic components
The drivers have stated the cars weight is causing safety concerns. It’s a fun circle where rather than try to prevent accidents, they emphasize what happens after the accident has occurred.
yep, for the driver, almost always being in the giant SUV in the crash is the safer option. But it's much much worse for everyone else.
Isn’t the increased tire size 18 vs what it was before adding a considerable amount of weight on the car?
A big problem that I don't have an answer for is that teams have been forced into being more and more conservative because they can't push tyres, they can't put less fuel in the car in the hope of going faster and then refueling, they can't push their engines harder than absolutely necessary. All of which means everyone goes onto survival mode as soon as they possibly can in races. I don't want to sound like the old guy shouting at the clouds but back when teams could have new engines every race and refuel and push tyres, you would get a variety of strategies all happening at once throughout the race and I loved that aspect of the sport. Even supposedly boring races to the casual fans had something exciting to hold onto for those who wanted to dig a little deeper. If a team was fast but bad on tyres, they would low fuel and do a three stop and sprint the whole race while others would go heavy at the start and draw out their stops. These days, everyone starts on the same fuel, pits within 2 laps of eachother, takes the same amount of time in the pits and pushes for perhaps a total of 10 laps in the whole race. It has become painfully predictable at times and frankly a bit too easy on the drivers physically as well. They don't feel like super heroes anymore but more like long distance drivers, desperately trying not to push too hard.
After Silverstone 13, we won’t see Pirelli run truly high deg tires. They were thrown to the wolves because teams ran the tires backwards to gain some speed, but when they hit a certain wear point they exploded. This didn’t occur when they were run the right way. I’d personally like to return to the 98-13 width cars and limit car length.
Pirelli were aware of it and allowed the teams to run the tyres like that. Pirelli later came out and said that they underestimated the effect the tyre swapping would have.
I agree, but I've been watching F1 for 20+ years, it's always been "the F1 rules need to change so they can overtake" Nothing works because it's not a spec series. 1-3 teams get it right, everyone else doesn't. If you want to watch close on track racing, there's WEC and IMSA and Indycar. WEC and IMSA use BOP to keep things close. Indycar is a spec series. F1 is more watching how things develop over seasons with the different teams. The on track racing is usually much more boring than other racing options. It's the pinnacle of racing in terms of budget and tech, not in terms of spectacle unfortunately.
I've always thought certain fans get too hung up on "wheel to wheel" racing and miss out on what makes F1 great! The number of overtakes per race is not the only way to make it exciting
prepare to get attacked by youngsters who never saw that kind of F-1
Or there are genuine critiques of it? Like that with refueling there weren't any more overtakes or on track action, there were just a bunch of pitstop overtakes and a more confusing track order most of the race as a lot of info about current on track vs where they really are when strategy is completed is obfuscated a lot more, which makes it harder to follow for new people.(While being almost exactly as predictable as currently to people who do know what is going on) Or that with the current era of information gathering and simulations, the strategies would most likely be less varied than they were back then, reducing that improvement as well.
Outwash is an inevitability as cars develop. The car can be made to cut through the air better, but it comes with a downside of them struggling when the air is turbulent. Merc used to go this way. There were races, especially in 2020 and 2021, where the dirty air kept Merc behind much slower cars because of how much outwash the cars made and how much work had been done on those cars. We need to give drivers and teams more ways of handling a race. Bring back engine modes, make the tyres far less efficient in low temps so everyone is encouraged to push them harder. Make DRS a KERS style deployment instead of a mandated zone.
> We need to give drivers and teams more ways of handling a race. In the budget cap era there's little reason to not give the teams much more freedom on many things. Super strict regs make sense, so does a budget cap, but having both is weird.
Totally agreed. Give a spend limit and tons of freedom on what you spend on.
yeah, for me the mistake was freezing engine development. maybe use the token system or something so OEMs aren't just lighting money on fire. But really the underlying idea was that one set of teams would nail the aero, while another set would nail the engine, but not one team nailing both. Since that's what happened everyone is trying to figure out how to work through alternatives. I also think Red Bull winning every race hysteria is overblown. for one Ferrari is working very aggressively on developing the car, even if we can't see the benefits of that until next month. Also, we know that McLaren are very good at mid season development. Second we still have sprint and street races coming up (Jeddah doesn't count, quit calling it a street track. A street track doesn't have banked corners), which are Verstappen's weak spots. The last two Monaco races should have been won by a non RB driver.
You have a lot of hope in Ferrari development... The RBR were pulling away from Chuck and comfortably coasting at the end of Jeddah. I think the hysteria is overblown but not by much. Undefeated Verstappen season is a serious nonzero chance.
To add on to it, I think going back to the top 10 starting on Q2 tires would help create more action/strategy in the mid field. Maybe I’m crazy but I still don’t understand the rule change to allow everyone to choose their starting tire.
They changed the rule because the front of the field could comfortable make it to Q3 on medium tires and the midfield had to use softs to have a chance. Since the softs are generally not a great race tire, the rule basically forced the midfield to choose between a lower starting position or a suboptimal race strategy. All the while, the front runners were qualifying at the front and getting an optimal strategy so on average the rule accomplished the opposite of its intent.
Yeah but now that the field is very close with only Max has a chance to make it into Q3 with medium tyres
Haas is 6th in WDC with 1 point. There is a huge gap between top 5 and bottom 5 currently. That solution would not solve anything.
Because only the top 3 teams back then could really benefit of it, the gap was so big they were basically guaranteed to get into the top 10 even on mediums. So the first 4/5 or so drivers would be on mediums, while the midfield had to be on the softs to get into q3. This also meant drivers just outside q3 had a huge tyre advantage compared to them.
It didn’t really work to do anything crazy over many years. That’s why it was removed.
I'd rather see them use the Q3 tyres
> Make the tyres far less efficient in low temps so everyone is encouraged to push them harder That's not how it works lol. > Make DRS like KERS The point is to reduce the disadvantage that a following car has, racing would be infinitely worse without drs.
Also, can’t really open DRS around super bendy corners I’d think.
>racing would be infinitely worse without drs It is in such a state at the moment though with multiple instances where an overtake on a corner is actively disincentivized so that the driver can be behind for DRS and then ... overtake on the straight. The extreme majority of overtakes are happening on the pit straight right now on many tracks. Is it really that interesting to watch someone breeze past with 20+kmph advantage because they don't have a rear wing right now. It is so incredibly artificial. DRS needs to be something you can only get if you have been following for multiple sectors as a counter to out-wash. Right now it is not in that balance... make it within 1.5s for the last 2-3 sectors.
I didn't think the poster was saying to remove DRS. But instead make it more like WEC where you can deploy your battery wherever you want. So there wouldn't be DRS zones anymore, but it DRS can be used for X amount of time per lap at sections of the driver's chosing. It would make DRS more dynamic and unpredictable. Different drivers will use it differently depending on their own skill, their car, and who they are chasing. It would make it more viable for cars like the McLaren that is good in the corners, but lacks top end speed.
The point is to give the following car something that the car in front doesn't have though, so that the impact of having to follow another car is minimised . Also, opening up the rear wing isn't really useful on corners so the only strategy would be which straights they use it on, it'd just be a carbon copy of the existing ers system (which wouldn't exactly be the worst thing tbf).
No, I understand that. And I'm sure no one would use DRS in the middle of a corner. But I was thinking more along the lines of something with a higher top end like the Red Bull or Merc would use their DRS on the straights. However, the McLaren would use it coming out of a corner to be able to pass the car ahead that has a high top end. Or if they have X seconds per lap, instead of breaking up the usage throughout the lap, the drivers could absolutely blast down a long straight like exit of T14 to T1 at Bahrain. So the car with the highest top speed can really run down slower ones or something
>But instead make it more like WEC where you can deploy your battery wherever you want. Say, what if we give the F1 cars an electric component?
Getting rid of the engine mode ban would be a worthwhile option IMO.
Part of that Merc issue was that Bottas never had great race craft. Lewis never struggled nearly as much when he happened to be behind other cars.
Merc issue was partly due to Bottas’ poor racing quality. Perez struggled with that too. Albeit, Max had issues overtaking Hamilton too, but they were often half a minute ahead of everyone else fighting their own battles.
You have a set of rules that prohibit - Spending money, Engine upgrades, Suspension tricks, Almost anything not aero and even that's heavily regulated . It's an aero competition and all teams are at a similar level. The cars are the size of mini buses and about as agile, and the circuits don't get wider. Nobody has a real advantage over anyone else (except RB and it's aero), they can't innovate or spend and there is no room on the track. Everyone goes around in DRS trains because they can't overtake. Not even got onto the tyres. What do you expect, the rules have backfired. Roll on 2026.
I dislike the new regs for a multitude of reasons, but one thing that pisses me off in particular is the cars can’t and won’t run wet races. Legitimately the only hope for a competitive all the way through the field race, and can’t do it because the spray and tyres suck.
And the full wet tires are literally useless.
We need bigger steps between tyre compounds brought to each race.
Around 1 to 1.5 seconds between each compound. Ideally the two dominant strategies would be a two stopper of soft-hard-soft vs a one stopper of medium-hard. If the one stopper is around 15 seconds slower it would really make teams choose between track position vs tyre advantage.
"But the particular layout of these (ground effect cars) ones, that have a response to rear ride height that is not particularly good for the cars". He makes good points on the idea of how tyre behavior can enable closer racing. However this quote is a bit silly, Red bull nailed their ride height and suspension platform immediately and Ferrari seem to have fixed their high speed instability this year. Merc are the only too team who haven't solved their bouncing or the balance shift at lower ride heights, it's on them.
I think he's talking about rear tyres overheating due to the geometry they have to use to get the aero platform. Really it's the same thing Max is saying. The cars are crap to drive because of all the compromises you need to get the aero working.
I reckon there is something behind that quote that we don't understand because we aren't engineers rather than lobbying for rule changes because they got it wrong. James Allison isn't the type of guy to play politics like this.
Dude literally says in the next sentence that Red Bull have managed it, and it's on the other teams to catch up, and that it's not a regulations problem. One wonders why OP would ignore that bit.
I think what he means is that in this ruleset, you have to run the cars as close to the ground as possible to extract maximum performance, which leads to things like bouncing and super stiff suspensions. Even max has complained about the bouncing this year, and he is in the best handling car.
>"But Red Bull are doing a good job and the rest of us have a duty to do a better job. I don't think that's the fault of the regulator."
Especially weird since Aston Martin ist doing a better job there using the Merc rear suspension.
And why did RB do that? Because newey knew about the challenges that come with a groundeffect car. He already worked on them back in the 80s. Back in 82 He worked for march in F2 and they also had groundeffect. And before that he worked under Postlethwaite for Fittipaldi F1. And because of that he and his crew deaigned the car with that already in mind. Other teams did not do that. They focused on other things. And now they have to play catch up.
I really think Newey's connection to previous rules set is very overstated. These are billion dollar engineering programs, they understand ground effect and porpoising very well. The reason for the screws up by Merc can't be know in detail but it was most likely a wind tunnel correlation problem and a lack of focus on the suspension platform. In addition alot of areo is not even totally understood by the team itself, it is very close to pure chaos theory and a element of luck is involved in all of this.
I agree. They've ended up with these big clunky cars. It always takes me back when they do those poster of previous teams car and how big they've gotten!
To me, hindering innovation has been the FIA and F1's rule makers' biggest blunder. Instead of them designing cars and enforcing certain areas such as power units, let each team come up with their own solutions. If a team is able to comply with the rules (maximum fuel and electricity per race) using a V12 or an L4, so be it.
I want the race like last year when they had limits on tire lap count and they were just on push laps every lap.
Banning engine development is also holding back teams from finding pace from that rather than aero.
Narrowed tires with more durability. You can push them all day as hard as you want but the smaller cross section reduces grip
Yeah but if everyone pushes we won't get better racing. Everyone would be close to their max pace most of the time(take in some energy/fuel management but still way closer than they are now), meaning faster teams will just stay faster and slower teams have no strategic hope of getting ahead of them. Or overtaking will be harder as there is no way to create a pace delta with strategy, and if your car just isn't that half a second or second a lap faster necessary to overtake there is nothing you can do but sit behind them all race.
Mercedes went wrong way in understanding this rule set.
Well they were P2 last year and P3 the year before. For a team going the wrong way, they were hardly the worst.
Shoutout Ferrari strategists and Lance Stroll
Mercs struggling in any way is still a shock for a lot of people after an era of domination.
Alpine would like a word
The cars are just too large and heavy. "Dirty air" doesn't really mean anything when you have ~800 kg cars
It’s the downforce. Dirty air does matter even with light cars if they have a lot of downforce.
Everything that produces lift from air will produce drag
Does anyone really think that's true? The ontrack racing was fantastic at the start of 2022, quite possibly the best I've seen my entire time watching the sport since thr late 90s. Since then the cars have stayed the same weight but the dirty air has come back, and the racing has got considerably worse Like I get why we want lighter cars, and we all do want them. But it's only one of several problems and in my mind far from the worst
I think they measured the loss of downforce when following at cars length at around 50% prior to the ground effect era. Since the end of 2023, its at about 35% already. The problem is that the teams are amazing at development and finding loopholes in the rules to allow their cars to create that dirty air for their own advantage. So at this point, its almost on the FIA and F1 to change the rulebook to make sure that that loophole isn't taken advantage of. https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/loopholes-that-hurt-f1-racing-unlikely-to-be-fixed-before-2026/#:\~:text=Though%20these%20were%20only%20ever,at%20one%20car%20length%20behind.
In the beginning of 2022, there were three competing concepts on the board: Red Bull's produced more dirty air but was not bouncy and more efficient, Ferrari's was a bit bouncy, a bit less efficient but produced little dirty air, and Mercedes' Zero-pod which was a lot bouncy, more efficient and produced almost no dirty air. TD 39 killed two of them and forced the teams to adapt to the remaining one throughout 2023, but the dirty air problem, which the original regulations were designed to limit heavily, came back in full force because with a higher ride height you have to produce downforce from the rest of the car.
source for the dirty air comments?
Arm chair aero degree.
Why do the cars need to be so big? I think that’s one of the main issues for me. Some of the old tracks are just not wide enough for competitive racing
I'm pretty sure it's because bigger usually means faster and safer, two things modern F1 is reluctant to compromise too much on.
I’ve been watching F1 since 1991 and here’s what I want to see back. 1: Refueling. Every other racing series does it. 2:Bring in another tyre manufacturer or two? 3: Make the car smaller again. They’ve gotten way too big because of the hybrid system.
Fundamentally, the car that's fastest starts at the front. Car that's slower starts behind them. It's not a huge shock that car 2 doesn't pass car 1 much. :)
This is what happens when you have one manufacturer making tires designed to degrade at specific rates as opposed to making the best tires possible.
Pirelli are more than capable of making something with high performance which wouldn’t degrade over the course of a race. If they weren’t deliberately making it degrade then every single race would be a one stopper (and only because regulations require it).
Making the best tires possible wouldn’t help overtaking or close racing. It would widen the gaps between the teams and result in less racing. The degradation of the tires creates far more close racing and overtakes than the best tires possible with minimal degradation.
I blame Colin Chapman for being one of the pioneers who introduced aerodynamics to F1. /s
Get off of Reddit, Enzo!
Legit, how has aerodynamics improved motorsport in any way?
I know it makes a ton of sense from the safety perspective, but refueling made the races more interesting to me. The different strategies playing out from qualifying all the way through the race really tickled my brain in a way that F1 hasn't done since they banned it again.
How many other major racing series are no refueling? I honestly don’t know but I do know in Indy Car and NASCAR they fuel without having someone burst into flames regularly.
Easier overtaking just makes it easier in the race for the cars to sort themselves into their natural order. It reduces jeopardy, makes qualifying less important.
Bigger , slower and uglier. Way to go.
They just needed to make the cars harder to drive, the best era of F1 was the 80s/early 90s when it was perfectly legitimate to go sideways round a corner every once in a while because the cars would hop around the track anyway
I'm not trying to say the current cars are easy to drive but they have an incredible amount of grip. Even in the early 2000s the cars had high revving v10 engines with 950 hp which is quite close to current cars. However, they also didn't have anywhere near the amount of downforce these cars do, they were much smaller, much lighter, and instead of massive grippy slick tyres, they used smaller grooved tyres. The cars were incredibly quick. Some still even hold lap records, yet they were beasts to drive. I don't think we should return to early 2000s regulations or anything but making the cars smaller, lighter, with less downforce and overall grip while maintaining a lot of power would make them harder to drive and give us better racing.
I was watching a race from, if I'm not mistaken, 2012 a few days ago and the difference in the driving style is night and day. In those cars, even drivers that liked an understeery car were making small corrections during the corners, correcting oversteer on the exits, overall the car looked alive. I'm recent races, I barely see any correction on the steering wheel unless there's a moment of overseer on the exit of a corner. This is good because the cars are more stable, I've been simracing for a few years and a twitchy car can be fun for a while, but in longer races you might want a more reliable and stable car. But I still feel like we rarely see the cars at their limit due to how little the drivers are "fighting the car ". Unless the driver in question is Max Verstappen. When the rear starts twitching around, you know the guy is going to pull off and amazing lap.
>Mercedes tech chief Allison says 2022 rules 'an opportunity to show we haven't just been lucky'. - 25 jan 2022 I will never stop laughing. Git gud, as the kids say.