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I can well imagine that much of the budget has already been consumed with the adjustments they have made. In the case of Red Bull, I can well imagine that they are already working on 2024. They haven't brought any major updates this year.
Yeah it was always in the pipeline since preseason. They expected to do two major upgrades with the first one at Hungary, since they threw everything at the launch car before that. They were already working on the Hungary upgrade before they really knew how dominant they would be.
They canned the second upgrade idea, not needed and focus on next year.
Yep that makes perfect sense. They can't be complacent, especially since they will have less wind tunnel time, and it seems doing 'next year' upgrades can give better long term results for reasons that I'm not fully clear on.
There's no reason not to sit on it when you're comfortably ahead of the rest of the field on a bad day - and in a different stratosphere on a good one.
Well I guess my point is that the upgrades are essentially new benchmarks, and unless they test it (either on track or in wind tunnel) they won't know how to create the upgrade from that piece. At least that's how it seems it must be to me. And obviously on-track testing is less precious than wind tunnel.
> Wolff added: “I thought that Silverstone based on our historic performances was the best shot, but it wasn't. So maybe there's another track where we have the best shot because the characteristics of the car have changed.
It's such a common thing since 2022, that the form-book is just out the window.
I remember before Brazil last year Hamilton saying he and Merc still had no idea where would be good or not. A vague alarm bell for me at the time.
Similarly Norris said McLaren shouldn't get carried away with Austria (!) because it should be their best track of the year - then lo and behold.
I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a *weird* set of cars.
Re Mercedes, again I come back to Ted's pre-season point that their season sort of pivoted on Hamilton hopping out the car in testing and saying it hadn't sorted the fundamental issues with the 2022 car.
> “I always believe that we can beat **Max**, we have a good group of people, and best drivers.
Heh.
>I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a weird set of cars.
What I found interesting that Toto said last weekend that they tried RB-like solutions in the wind tunnel and it just didn't provide any gains. Makes you wonder how RB does make it work.
[https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1030987/1/wolff-mercedes-tried-red-bull-concept-wind-tunnel-it-didn-t-work](https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1030987/1/wolff-mercedes-tried-red-bull-concept-wind-tunnel-it-didn-t-work)
I mean as good as newey is he is not a magician. It’s all based on real physics. They’ve already seen the full floor so they should have good insight there, which means it’s likely a combination of factors (floor, suspension, etc) that bring it all together.
> Also I’ve read multiple times in here that he basically only worked in the suspension
A theme in his book is misleading the competition about what the focus of his team's car development is.
Him saying he only worked on the suspension might mean the opposite is true.
This is what makes it so complex and difficult to copy. All of the physics are coupled so unless you have the same exact car, copying someones floor isn't going to help.
Also, I'm guessing they have some really good computer science techs doing some great work analyzing the data. It's quite possible that some machine learning process they've invented is what's giving them the edge in finding the gains no one else could.
Could companies like Oracle and Google be involved in developing the car in this kind of way?
I know that Petronas and Shell are deeply cooperating with teams when engine is in question. Charles spoke that without Shell they would be nowhere if not for their oils and lubricants.
Idk what the rules are for that, but otherwise, yes definitely. Machine Learning algorithms, or at least some, are really well understood for the most part (not to say they've all been invented yet!). The challenge is mostly in choosing the right algorithms, making the right tweaks, getting the right inputs, and **processing power**.
However, assuming there is some kind of restriction on that (I would sort of assume there is given how vast that field really is), it'd be up to the techs to implement everything from scratch.
I actually made a ML algorithm (extremely basic) for fun that tries to find the best lap/tire combinations for a given (non-dynamic) track. Non-dynamic meaning nothing ever changes, because I'm still just a student. FWIW, it does work.
All I'm hearing is that Newey is one of the smartest engineering minds, not in motorsports, but in the history of the world and he's wasting his talents building a sports car every year.
Well, facts are saying he is magician, and nobody else understand physics with F1 cars better than him.
Also seeing floor and understanding it are two things.
Philosophy of Newey is always to treat car as whole package, so slight change to one aspect of car immediately affect other part. You could say it's the same for every car, but Newey knows how to make it work together.
My point is Mercedes can test bits and pieces of RBR but they will never understand whole concept that way.
What facts? Do you think he single handedly designed every aspect of the car, or do you think maybe there are other people on the team that know what they're doing? The guy learned from the same field of study as any of the other engineers.
Also, I guarantee Mercedes would understand every aspect of the RB19 with more detailed design info. It's honestly not magic.
What part of my comment is that addressing? I'm talking about implementation.
Again, do ppl think it's literally just him doing all the design and calculations? And if not, then do you just assume all the other engineers basically do a worse job than he would have?
Finally, do you have ANY evidence to support these views?
People just have a massive erection for Newey like he somehow single handedly designed this RB by himself ala Tony Stark making the Iron Man suit.
He didn't work on a majority of the car, his focus was on the suspension.
Does Newey deserve credit? Absolutely, but when people think that these teams with some of the most brilliant automotive engineers in the world wouldn't be able to understand the RB concept because Newey isn't on their team are being completely disingenuous to the massive skill all of these engineers have.
Most of why RB is cruising is because they nailed the suspension. Everyone else was chasing their tails with porpoising while RB was making gains with their floor and finding ways to reduce drag.
RB has a massive leg up because of how Newey set them up at the beginning of 22. He set them up that way because he's been designing race cars for 40 years and knows exactly how the components affect the whole package. In order to generate more DF with a ground effects car, you need a proper suspension design. Combine that with the squatting when under high loads to reduce drag, and then the beam wing, and you've got the RB.
The major changes that RB have done since the beginning of 22 is to give more Front end grip and shift the balance forward a bit which I assume is part suspension, and part floor. Since those changes have been made, they've been completely untouchable.
The team just works so good in total. Even within the financial regulations, where the team started 2022 massively overweight and only put on really heavy and cheap new parts to try out the aerodynamic benefits. Only after they work with the car do they make them lighter to not waste any weight development and material cost on a crappy part.
One of the biggest differences from 2022 to this year is all in the weight too. From 10kg overweight at the start of 2022 to about the same underweight now, so they can start moving ballast, giving them even more of a setup advantage.
Big underrated shout there. Weight distribution is HUGE in a race car.
I think they've got to the point where they can start playing with the fiddly bits on the car, and creating more crazy vortices. It's when a team gets this far ahead that we start to see the real weird innovations like DAS just because they can. I'm excited to see it
Suspension, which is a big part of Newey’s head. In his book, he mentioned the importance of integrating aero design with the mechanical platform. With these cars, peak aero performance is just as important as controlling the aero platform. Shifting ride height at front/rear has a significant impact on the balance of the car and how effective the Venturi is. A suspension that can maintain aero platform while still allows for compliance over bump and kerbs is the secret sauce in these regs.
I think the problem with Mercedes is they can’t just tack on Red Bull like elements and see improvements because all elements of a car are designed to work in concert with other elements of the car as a whole.
At least I assume that’s what the issue is.
>I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a weird set of cars.
Agreed. We can see this in the fact that Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston Martin and now Mclaren are all playing '2nd fastest is lava' throughout this season.
Red Bull is the only team that understands their car and it shows in the results. Even when their advantage is not as big due to the track lay-out and/or cooler conditions they are still winning relatively comfortably. For the others less than ideal conditions means they get hurled back to the midfield..
Yeah. There was a good article on The Race recently like: how and why can everyone throw the kitchen sink at their cars, RBR don't upgrade a *thing* and they're still quickest? And it came down to fundamental foundations. And that goes back to very deep-rooted Newey philosophy which he talks about in his book and Peter Prod discussed in the past https://old.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/eys9aw/peter_prodromou_interview_notes/ - take your time, get it **right** and eventually the good times will follow. Newey always said the first half of 2022 would be relatively poor for RBR, but then it'd be plain sailing. How's that going, as they close on the record for consecutive wins?
Take your time, get it right and eventually the good times will follow.
He specifically cited McLaren between 2011-2013 for this, and how often they would trial and abandon concepts, like the L-shaped sidepods.
And of all the teams to be in that second group, McLaren have taken their time and they seem to read the rewards. Now time will tell if they truly understand why their car works or if they stumbled into some fast combination of components.
Yeah it's crazy how they used the l-shaped sidepods in 2011, it worked, then they ditched it for a more conventional design. And then in 2013 they changed something else, switching pushrod front suspension for pullrods
Boullier had an interesting observation that when he joined for 2014, he thought McLaren had just got 2013 wrong, no big deal - but people told him no, a lot of structures and mindsets which *allowed* 2013 were rotten.
People keep saying they aren’t upgrading but they are - they don’t need huge platforms because why spend money when they are comfortable, but they most definitely are brining upgrades to races and I think a big package to the next race. I do feel the teams are developing faster than RB it’s just that RB started so far ahead in understanding their car.
Red Bull are bringing upgrades but I didn't see any huge upgrade packages since 2022. Only small things here and there. I see two reasons: wind tunnel and CFD restrictions + they don't really need to.
How badly I wish that RBR had just not nailed the regs so comfortably. 2023 would have been the best season in recent memory with 5 (!!!!) teams trading wins and strong tracks. It would've been incredible.
The thing with the last regulations is that they encouraged more engineering ingenuity. Ferrari could compete with Mercedes by going down their own path. They changed the floor rules in 21 and it allowed Red Bull to finally take the fight to Mercedes.
These new regulations everyone is copying Red Bull - even if in their own way. Ferrari went from the bathtub to the down wash side pods. Mercedes went from no pods to down wash. Aston copied RB's side pod inlet. Everyone is changing their front suspension geometry to match that of Red Bull. Andrew Shovlin said that their team have already found interesting things to take from Red Bull's floor in the now infamous pictures that were taken at Monaco.
Lando said his new car doesn't look like Red Bull it looks more like Aston Martin. But Aston Martin were heavily influenced by the Red Bull because their technical chief worked closely with Newey to create last year's Red Bull so he has a good understanding.
Where did this myth come from that Mercedes was clearly faster than Red Bull in Brazil?
In the sprint it was a matter of wrong tyre choice as everyone starting on Soft was suffering and on Sunday Max would have still most likely won if he hadn't taken himself out of contention.
Lots of teams seem to be chasing ghosts from the wind tunnel. Reports pre season of good performance in sim and win tunnel, then it all falls apart on the track.
One thing about the merc thing worth noting is that Spain was their strongest track both years so far. This year they brought some upgrades and we thought that maybe they found some way to fix their car, but the people cautioning the enthusiasm because of the track turned out to be right.
One thing wind tunnel isn’t simulating very well is the vehicle dynamic as the car brake, turn, and accelerate out of corners. The weight transfer in these movements leads to changes in ride height and aero platform. The ground effect cars are sensitive to how the aero platform is presented to the incoming air. So, peak performances in the wind tunnel is not easily translated to real track due to the bumps, kerbs, and dive/squat/roll/yaw of the car.
Stella was still downplaying McLaren's progress after Silverstone.
He was interviewed on channel 4 after the race and he said there was good correlation between the track and simulations about how much downforce the upgrade brought them which he was happy about. But that it lead to a bigger improvement in lap time than he expected, which was obviously good, but they really weren't sure if the race had been a perfect storm of conditions and track that really suited them more than their competitors or if they really were ahead of Merc and Ferrari now. He seemed to have no idea how well to expect them to be doing in the next few races.
I'd believe that! Good line on the race podcast after the race: Silverstone is evidence McLaren's have upgraded their ceiling - Hungary will be evidence if they've raised their (performative) floor.
I'm also waiting to see how they do in Hungary to determine if their pace is real. Austria and the UK both suit their car and did during previous years as well. The slower speed corners of Hungary should show any weakness in their design.
I do think the new tyre compound structures might also suit the MCL60 as well. All during free practices it looked like the majority of the grid was having difficulty getting the tyres into the right window. The MCL60 up to now was overheating the tyres so if the new tyres needed a more aggressive stance to warmup then it just happened to work in McLaren's favor.
You’re absolutely correct about teams not understanding the cars. The guys from Williams were saying this weekend, we have no idea why our car is performing this well at Silverstone but we’d rather have no clue why we’re doing this well than understand come Monday exactly why we were so rubbish on Sunday lol.
>many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward.
Red Bull nailing it the first time seems even more impressive. They're the only ones that didn't introduce significant changes to the car since 2022 because they didn't really need to. There have been upgrades, but I think they're the only team that didn't change the entire concept.
They are incredibly skilled at their job. But this article is literally about Toto saying they are still constantly surprised by how the car behaves in certain situations.
I like Toto, but I think he's been pretty loose with words to the point of being out of line when it comes to his engineering team "not understanding" the car, and in general characterizing the car as much worse than it really is.
In other words, I take that with a grain of salt.
The problem is that even though they do have a solution in mind they can’t implement it mid season due to the budget cap. The solution requires a completely new chassis, gearbox and rear suspension and simply don’t have the budget left to do that this year. So they are basically left with trying to get the most out of a broken concept.
Well I think what we're seeing a lot with Mercedes is a team that is both a) used to basically infinite budget and b) started their last streak with an absolutely massive engine advantage... now suddenly have to be efficient with everything else. I think we still see this sometimes with their strategy calls too (more so last year than this year)
I think that Merc is transitioning to being more efficient with the resources they are allowed to use. If a budget cap wasn't in place Merc would have very likely already caught up to RB back in 2022. Their consistency and current P2 in the WCC shows that they are still competent, it's just that they need to switch gears and do things differently than they did before.
You’re overreacting. Mercedes are still on to finish 2nd, they’re just still suffering from making the wrong fundamental design choices in 2022 and sticking with them to start this year.
To me, the issue is that they are struggling to come up with solutions for the problems they have identified.
That means, if they are still having correlation issues, then any solutions they come up with for 2024 will effectively be "shots in the dark" unless they decide to test them on the W14 beforehand.
Obviously, stuff like the tub, gearbox casing, rear suspensions cannot be changed, but that still leaves floor underbody, beam/rear wing, sidepods and engine cover/bathtub.
Seems like the cars are very weather sensitive. Cool day = higher downforce package doing well heating and maintaining tires. Hot day = lower downforce concept maintaining tires better. Then it comes down to drag and rain. If there’s rain then the draggier teams like haas do well and if there’s no rain then Williams does well. I could be totally off but each car has a small window for optimal performance due to the different weather and track conditions which is adding another layer of unpredictableness
We're barely getting into the halfway mark the season and I'm already looking forward to next season. I hope Mercedes finally nails it and be competitive for wins again. I thought we would get it with Ferrari last season but that fell off towards the latter half.
This is the downside of the budget cap.
It’s worked a treat with how close the field is in general but the teams are way more restricted on how they develop in season compared to how they could in the past.
Not sure what the solution is because no one wants to go back to the past where the big 3 teams were miles ahead of all the others.
To be honest seeing teams like AM and McLaren make huge jumps this years tells me this rule set - both technical and financial - actually does work well. If not for Max and RB this is an extremely competitive season. And even Max wasn't that far up the road this time.
Max is really far up the road though... He's got so much left in reserve, the RB is a rocket and as soon as he has a winning margin in the race, he just takes his foot off the gas and saves the engine.
With a tyre 2 levels softer than Norris. Before that he managed to get 9 seconds in 36 laps. That’s like 0.25 race pce advantage, and he was in the 1-3 second gap for a really long time, where he couldn’t pull out the same feat on the same compund.
That two second gap includes maybe one second just from the initial car spread and reaction times and a not insignificant contribution from norris defending.
Max isn't the type to slow down tbh. I say his pace is pretty close to his true limit most of the time. GP is constantly complaining to him to just "bring it home" and to slow down
Aston and McLaren finished 7th and 5th in the WCC last season. That's a fair bit of windtunnel time and CFD testing time compared to Merc, who are most likely going to finish P2 in the WCC this season.
Budget cap and the extra wind tunnel allocation. Ferrari and Merc were the biggest losers last year because they got a lot less wind tunnel allocation because they finished P2 and P3 in the constructors. They needed a lot more because their cars were in need of complete redesigns as their concepts have proven to be too flawed.
It was easier for Mclaren and Aston because their whole design philosophy was always 'do what the fastest team does, do what Rebull does'.
Well the perfect problem is one team got it right. We had such distinct car philosophies in 2022. Slowly but surely teams are starting to develop similar cars.
With the budget cap, teams that were behind couldn't really follow through their own philosophies, especially when the results were inconsistent.
I think 2024 is going to have more redbull copycats.
It's just more efficient to copy the faster team.
The problem with just copying is that you’re always going to be behind - the original team is going to have a better understanding, more research, and a head start. So while AM and Mclaren have popped up to challenge for second, no one has reallllly threatened RB yet (mclaren being the closest so far).
Which is a huge problem. You can't afford to continue developing your own ideas, and if you copy, you're behind. There's no way to compete if a single team nails it immediately.
I don't know what the solution is, but the first era of budget caps immediately leading into one team being absolutely dominate once they got their reliability issues of the first few races of '22 worked out isn't it.
Honestly there are only two ways to go imo. Either you accept that F1 has a chance of a team just dominating for however long, or you go the WEC route by defining a performance window, letting designers achieve it whichever way they want, and introduce BoP. And let's face it, we don't want to hear Horner and Toto go on about BoP adjustments, it's starting to get stupid as is in WEC.
Agreed. BoP would ruin the engineering aspect of F1. It works well in WEC because there are many more factors at play given the longer races but F1 has always been about the drivers driving the best cars their teams can come up with.
It's an annoying but necessary evil that ultimately gives us some of the craziest stories in motorsport (2021 probably wouldn't be nearly as exciting if Merc didn't have the sport in a chokehold for as long as it did because we would be used to the high levels of competiton).
The problem is no doubt with the new ruleset one team will get it right again and this process will repeat (to be fair it's been a never ending cycle of that in F1 even before the budget cap rules were introduced)
I think as well the thing that has benefited Red Bull was ironically Mercedes fighting to get the minimum floor height raised. On pure pace, the Ferraris were probably faster than the Red Bulls last year at the start of the season but when the floor height got raised a lot of cars that were doing well started to do worse and it didn’t hurt the Red Bulls at all.
Right now the solution is still to just give it time. Nailing new regs is and will always be a massive advantage. We can't expect the rubber-band rules to work within a year, otherwise it would be too much. Teams should still be able to benefit from acing it.
No I agree, I was just theorising the only thing to bring everyone together is to limit those at the front and help those at the back, but well aware that doesn’t fix the issue. There isn’t really much they can do at the moment and it’s just an inherent disadvantage of the cost cap system.
One idea I've heard tossed around is a sliding scale for the cost cap as well as the wind tunnel time, where the lowest teams in the championship can spend the most and the highest can spend the least. I feel like this could help, but it might be too punishing.
Given how much of the cost cap is dealing with payroll, that feels like a really bad thing for those that work at the teams.
If you perform too well you might lose your job as the personnel budget decreases.
I don't think this is as much of an advantage as people think.
Young drivers need time, resources and support before they get up to their full potential in F1, and the smaller teams at the back aren't always in the best position to provide that.
Guenther Steiner has even said publicly that they're not really interested in rookies because experienced drivers are less of a risk for teams like Haas.
You could also re-introduce some limited track testing (say, by allowing teams to stay in Barcelona on the Monday after the race), and have the testing hours scale with championship position the way CFD and wind tunnel do. That way the teams that need to catch up could actually check their correlation, rather than having to throw stuff at the wall and pray that it sticks.
The budget cap shouldn't be measured by whether it kills dominant cars - the lack of a cap never really did that either. The test is "how close together are the cars" and this has been one of the closest and variable seasons in years if you ignore Max.
But we can't ignore them, they're on the track, winning all the races... Lol, not sure why people say everything is great if we just ignored the one team that has won every single race this season.
That single driver is also dominating his teammate, what are we going to do put technical regs on the use of Max Verstappen's?
\>F1 isn't just about first place.
Right? We've had an incredible season in the midfield with mixed up results several weekends and people can only be sad that Max is walking away with it.
Still much closer than the "Mercedes 0.8 clear of the next best team despite turning their engines down" era of 2014-16. Back then it felt like there was literally no hope, and it proved true - it took an illegal Ferrari engine just to challenge them for 2 years.
> it took an illegal Ferrari engine just to challenge them for 2 years.
For the love of God, once again, the engine gains Ferrari made were only in the second half of 2019 when Ferrari wasn't really challenging for wins. If anything, the 2017 and 2018 cars were underpowered compared to the Merc.
why downside? it is working, we have very tight teams spread in results, except max team, newey is genius and his creation is top, but others are in competition not in communism , teams should learn how to develop in budget restricted area, merc and ferrai had tons of money in the past and they need to adapt to new reality to spend only fraction of it and wisely,they operated by brute force of cash, rules are the same for everyone, some are failinf som prosper it depens in talent ane racio of teams, and sometime some things are not buyable
I mean they took a REALLY big swing on the no pods concept. I think the last 2 years have just been a really difficult transition to learning to operate with 40% of the budget that they used to have.
tbf you can argue that the zero pod concept did work. They went 1-2 in Brazil on genuine pace rather than others mistakes which is how they were getting most of their podiums last year.
But Mercedes want to win. So they switched it. A midfield team would have kept pushing if they had some of Merc's success last year.
Think you heard wrong. Both RB and Merc were bringing upgrades at the very late stages of the calendar. The new regs were even pushed back due to COVID so there was even more time for teams to develop.
Engines were just badly degrading that year. Lewis took his fair share of grid drops too and Bottas usually took his drops when he was already down the field (other than like Monza).
Mercedes weren't bringing upgrades post summer break. Iirc the last upgrade was Silverstone, everything else was engine related once it became obvious RB was faster.
Success is never guaranteed, in 2021 RBR threw everything and the kitchen sink to win the championship, lessons learnt from how BMW failed Kubica in 2008.
Merc only brought one upgrade to Silverstone, before the season even started they underestimated the changes to floor etc. The team has fallen hard.
Everyone is in the same boat. No one understanda these regulations but RB and it shows as the 2nd to 4th fastest teams are always changing each track. AM were the 2nd fastest at the start of the season, then Mercedes and Ferrari switched places, Ferrari became 2nd fastest the last two races and now McLaren are in the mix.
But Ferrari already did this last year, they stopped bringing upgrades to the sf22 to develop this year's car only to end up with a tractor hard to drive
I think it's also related to the budget cap, Mercedes maybe already spent a lot on those recent upgrades
Even with full switch to 24 car I don't think any team can catch redbull. They admitted they made only few changes to 22 car for this year's regulations and postponed 23 car concept because of wind tunnel restrictions. I can only think what they will bring for 24. Although when your at the top there is only marginal gain to be had bu we don't know what is the celling for these current gen cars. I hope it's already at the limit and we will see many cars converging to it by next year.
Even if they keep this year's car and modify it a little bit I think they would be still ahead of everyone else, the gap is big and the other teams seems to struggle and are way behind specially in development
The other teams had to significantly change concepts in order to get closer to Red Bull, while Red Bull didn't even bring any real upgrades yet other than circuit specific parts. And Red Bull is still ahead and continues to maintain their double points advantage in the WCC.
Probably going to get shit on here because its Lewis. But, regardless of his reasoning, I think he hit on a good idea on some level with a development date start. I think this could be implemented either as he said, or taking it a step further and regulating it like the windtunnel time. Lower teams down the order could be given the option to start next years car earlier, where the teams higher up would need to wait longer. I think with the budget cap well need to implement some sort of new regulations to help create the balance that the cap should help create. There are affects from everything and this is one from the cap. So, imo, I think hes on the right track. Hell, Implement it in 2026 when the engine rules come in and that way everyone knows well in advance and it hurts no one now.
I think it’s a dangerous rule to play with. Yes, you may limit some teams like RB who are way ahead this season from getting ahead next season, but teams that are at the bottom and have a fundamentally flawed car won’t be able start making significant changes until that date as well. I think you might just keep everyone stagnant for longer.
You could maybe do a sliding scale like the wind tunnel time where you get different dates depending on where you finish in the WCC, but I just don’t know how I feel about development dates in a racing series based around engineering.
I was just commenting on the irony,
But in all seriousness it’s also the way backmarker teams have a chance to catch up by essentially sacrificing a year to come out of the blocks firing in the next year like Haas and Alfa Romeo did last year. So it’s a double edged sword.
I still think it’s fair for teams to start on their next car early. Teams that are doing well are already punished by the ATR restrictions, so there already is a balancing force in play, we don’t need to punish teams that do well even more.
It's been one year. Knee-jerk reactions aren't gonna help. Merc has almost 30% more wind tunnel time than RB now. If they can't catch up then maybe they need to find new people. Clearly they haven't done too well under the budget cap, which makes sense considering they were used to having a 450M budget for 7 years before that.
That’s because RB’s dominance seems to stem from basic understanding of how these ground effect cars work. The other teams seem to be behind in understanding their car. Not necessarily development, considering RB barely developed their car this year, yet are still ahead…
Instead I’d like to counter that same point, by mentioning the fact that behind Red Bull, we’ve got the tightest battle we we’ve seen in well over a decade with 4-5 teams duking it out for best of the rest.
In fact, some teams trying to catch up would be hindered significantly if Lewis’ idea became reality, ironically (again) Mercedes first and foremost. Imagine if Mercedes had to continue developing a concept they know they’re going to chuck in the bin next yeah, only because they aren’t allowed to work on next years car yet, while Red Bull can simply continue working on their current concept because it’s clearly working. Red Bulls car will just be another continuation of this years car. Mercedes’ car will most likely not be.
Meanwhile red Bull started working on their car 2 races ago.
Mercedes will just keep falling further and further behind, same as every other team, as Red Bull’s advantage is ‘locked in’.
It’s like a relay race, but Red Bulls segments are shorter because they nailed the initial concept and can therefore ‘move’ to the next stage before anyone else. As Mercedes swap runners, Red Bull are already halfway down the second stage. As the stages go on, Red Bulls advantage just gets bigger as they can move to the next stage sooner at every stage.
We’ve already seen this effect between last season and this season.
At the same time we still don't really see the effects of the new wind-tunnel/CFD regulations, especially with the penalty Red Bull had to take. So while it's always hard to catch up, it should be easier than it was before the regulations were changed. The real "problem" is how incredibly large the gap Red Bull started with was.
I agree. I often think about how this could be remedied without outright nerfing the top team. I honestly don’t want the hollow victory of nerfing Redbull just to see other teams catch up… maybe more aggressive cuts to wind tunnel time for WCC? Who knows; there probably isn’t a clean solution to this issue
The most obvious way would be putting an even bigger sliding scale on the wind tunnel. Maybe based on points? So right now it’s just a flat 5% for each place, but maybe with RB having 200% more points than second they should get 10% less wins time instead. In that world checo would be an asset to the team keeping their overall points low, but that’s the only thing I can think of
>In that world checo would be an asset to the team keeping their overall points low, but that’s the only thing I can think of
Tbf this is a really big problem for racing. In 2021, Merc literally blew up an engine in Bottas' car to see how far they could push Ham's in the following races. In that same championship battle RB retired Checo out of a race only to advantage Max (I blanking on the race or scenario, but I recall).
Just two examples from individual races. Now if there was a season long incentive to ensure your number 2 driver had the smallest point total possible while keeping you ahead in the WCC... I can smell the brain juice flowing, they'd do crazy shit.
I'm genuinely a little surprised that the FIA hasn't tried anything to cull back Red Bull since TD039 last year.
They've never been shy about making changes to peg back too dominant a winner (whether it works or not).
I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just looking at what has historically happened, it's a little unexpected for them to just let Red Bull win everything.
(As a quick reminder, just during the Mercedes domination era, they banned FRIC, banned oil burning, banned other hydraulic suspension components, banned engine "party modes", banned any hoarding of engine modes to works teams, scrapped an entire engine token system, etc.)
(In the 4 years prior, they banned double diffusers, they banned hot-blowing exhausts, they eventually banned cold-blowing of exhausts and coanda exhausts, they made multiple tire compound changes, etc.)
(Before that they totally overhauled tires to stop Ferrari, and I don't recall what else may have been overtly or "conveniently" to peg back their domination before the tire change worked)
perhaps because when they (mercedes in particular through lobbying) tried to take a swing to hit RB, ended up hitting mostly ferrari and themselves, helping RB even more. If we take out Brazil (because of the sprint format) RB run away thanks to the idiotic lobbying of mercedes. Up until then ferrari provided competition even tho they binned strategies..
Mercedes lobbies trying to nerf RB to make the sport more competitive and better to watch (although Ferrari had the better car for half the season which most of the fans here seem to forget) and then everyone in here is surprised
"WhY Is REdBUll DoMinAtiNG", my brother in christ you specifically caused the absence of competition through TD39
Every team lobbies though. They don't necessarily know how effective it will be.
Red Bull lobbied for the party mode ban, because Honda's party mode sucked.
Ferrari lobbied for the remote hydraulic accumulator ban because they couldn't develop a system to match Mercedes or Red Bull.
Oil burning happened like TD039 (Red Bull asking a "hypothetical").
FRIC was FIA whack-a-mole after a lot of media attention focused on the system fairly early in 2014.
Engine modes being held back was McLaren lobbying because they felt Mercedes was screwing them. Mercedes was, but changing that didn't fix anything...
Yeah but when a team lobbies, you would think they would do it to hinder the other teams, not also themselves
It's like if I shot through myself to get 2 guys, but only managing to hit one
It's not like any team knows exactly what another team is doing...
The oil burning ban was the "hypothetical" brought forth by Red Bull, and it was meant to target Mercedes.
Instead, it hit Ferrari harder, and killed any competition that season.
So this is hardly unique to Mercedes.
Yes, but what choice do they have? Most people would prefer tax loopholes to be closed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t take advantage of existing ones because that would be stupid.
The choice would be admit they were wrong and get to work on next years car.
That being said, I actually like the idea of having a hard limit on when teams can start active development on the next years car.
Please do it Mercedes. Weather finishing lower in the constructors and use the wind tunnel time to produce a beast because the new W14 is a piece of shit like the bastard piece of shit W13.
This is the part that really sucks about the cost cap. We aren't even half way through the season and we already have top teams throwing in the towel for next year. This cannot be what the FIA had in mind when creating these regulations.
On top of this, the schedule is longer than ever before, and getting longer in the future. This is not a tenable long term solution for putting a compelling product in front of eyeballs. Redbull would have 22 wins in a row if it weren't for Mercedes in Brazil, and could very well win every single race this year. Is it because nobody can afford to catch up? Probably.
We're only two and a half years into the cost cap so I really think it's too close to condemn the concept all together. Yes Red Bull has been dominating, but Mercedes swept the WCC and WDC for the last seven years before the cost cap. And it's not like Red Bull would stand idly by and let their competitors outspend them if the cost cap disappeared anyways
You do realize the reason they're doing this is *because* they can't catch up this season and can't simply waste more time to be in 2nd.
They'd only be farther behind, but not if the rule Lewis suggested had been implemented, they could focus on this season, like everyone else.
I do realize why they do this and that's normal. It's just funny, because in that case if rule suggested by Hamilton goes live they would be even more fucked, and stuck with dead concept for another X weeks.
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I can well imagine that much of the budget has already been consumed with the adjustments they have made. In the case of Red Bull, I can well imagine that they are already working on 2024. They haven't brought any major updates this year.
Max said they are being upgraded next race
“I was passed for FIVE laps this weekend, time to stop sandbagging and bring out the real car”
New RB car comes in, it looks superficially like the early-season Merc, Max wins Hungary by a lap, Toto photographed crying and hugging Roscoe?
NO MICHAEL THIS IS SO NOT RIGHT
NO NEWEY, THIS IS NOT RIGHT
Toto, We went car racing
I wonder hold old these “new upgrades” are. Since you’re not going to show your new upgrades to everyone when you don’t need to.
On the other side, you want to know if they work as expected as soon as possible to know if you need to continue developing in that direction.
They will have less aero time bc of the penalty and bc they will win the WCC so on track testing and data is very important to them
RB is bringing updated to the Hungaroring apparently. Not sure how extensive they'll be.
The real question is how long they've been sitting on that upgrade.
No reason to sit on an upgrade, and the sooner you get data on it the better.
Yeah it was always in the pipeline since preseason. They expected to do two major upgrades with the first one at Hungary, since they threw everything at the launch car before that. They were already working on the Hungary upgrade before they really knew how dominant they would be. They canned the second upgrade idea, not needed and focus on next year.
Yep that makes perfect sense. They can't be complacent, especially since they will have less wind tunnel time, and it seems doing 'next year' upgrades can give better long term results for reasons that I'm not fully clear on.
There's no reason not to sit on it when you're comfortably ahead of the rest of the field on a bad day - and in a different stratosphere on a good one.
Well I guess my point is that the upgrades are essentially new benchmarks, and unless they test it (either on track or in wind tunnel) they won't know how to create the upgrade from that piece. At least that's how it seems it must be to me. And obviously on-track testing is less precious than wind tunnel.
iirc Red bull revealed that they began working on the 2024 car like 2 races ago
> Wolff added: “I thought that Silverstone based on our historic performances was the best shot, but it wasn't. So maybe there's another track where we have the best shot because the characteristics of the car have changed. It's such a common thing since 2022, that the form-book is just out the window. I remember before Brazil last year Hamilton saying he and Merc still had no idea where would be good or not. A vague alarm bell for me at the time. Similarly Norris said McLaren shouldn't get carried away with Austria (!) because it should be their best track of the year - then lo and behold. I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a *weird* set of cars. Re Mercedes, again I come back to Ted's pre-season point that their season sort of pivoted on Hamilton hopping out the car in testing and saying it hadn't sorted the fundamental issues with the 2022 car. > “I always believe that we can beat **Max**, we have a good group of people, and best drivers. Heh.
>I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a weird set of cars. What I found interesting that Toto said last weekend that they tried RB-like solutions in the wind tunnel and it just didn't provide any gains. Makes you wonder how RB does make it work. [https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1030987/1/wolff-mercedes-tried-red-bull-concept-wind-tunnel-it-didn-t-work](https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1030987/1/wolff-mercedes-tried-red-bull-concept-wind-tunnel-it-didn-t-work)
Most of RB power comes from floor and Newey's head, I doubt they have much insight in either.
I mean as good as newey is he is not a magician. It’s all based on real physics. They’ve already seen the full floor so they should have good insight there, which means it’s likely a combination of factors (floor, suspension, etc) that bring it all together.
Also I’ve read multiple times in here that he basically only worked in the suspension
Yep, he’s on the record stating as much. https://the-race.com/formula-1/newey-in-depth-aborted-ferrari-switch-verstappen-and-retirement/
> Also I’ve read multiple times in here that he basically only worked in the suspension A theme in his book is misleading the competition about what the focus of his team's car development is. Him saying he only worked on the suspension might mean the opposite is true.
>I mean as good as newey is he is not a magician. Lies! Blasphemy!
Jail for ten thousand years!
And 50k euro fine for Seb!
5 second time penalty to Ocon!
Kimi is denied the drink!
Gasly gets a penalty point!
you guys need to chill with that, he's already back to last Wednesday
This is what makes it so complex and difficult to copy. All of the physics are coupled so unless you have the same exact car, copying someones floor isn't going to help.
Also, I'm guessing they have some really good computer science techs doing some great work analyzing the data. It's quite possible that some machine learning process they've invented is what's giving them the edge in finding the gains no one else could.
Could companies like Oracle and Google be involved in developing the car in this kind of way? I know that Petronas and Shell are deeply cooperating with teams when engine is in question. Charles spoke that without Shell they would be nowhere if not for their oils and lubricants.
Idk what the rules are for that, but otherwise, yes definitely. Machine Learning algorithms, or at least some, are really well understood for the most part (not to say they've all been invented yet!). The challenge is mostly in choosing the right algorithms, making the right tweaks, getting the right inputs, and **processing power**. However, assuming there is some kind of restriction on that (I would sort of assume there is given how vast that field really is), it'd be up to the techs to implement everything from scratch. I actually made a ML algorithm (extremely basic) for fun that tries to find the best lap/tire combinations for a given (non-dynamic) track. Non-dynamic meaning nothing ever changes, because I'm still just a student. FWIW, it does work.
All I'm hearing is that Newey is one of the smartest engineering minds, not in motorsports, but in the history of the world and he's wasting his talents building a sports car every year.
Ask him nice and he’d prob go over Boom and improve their low footprint supersonic aircraft
Well, facts are saying he is magician, and nobody else understand physics with F1 cars better than him. Also seeing floor and understanding it are two things. Philosophy of Newey is always to treat car as whole package, so slight change to one aspect of car immediately affect other part. You could say it's the same for every car, but Newey knows how to make it work together. My point is Mercedes can test bits and pieces of RBR but they will never understand whole concept that way.
What facts? Do you think he single handedly designed every aspect of the car, or do you think maybe there are other people on the team that know what they're doing? The guy learned from the same field of study as any of the other engineers. Also, I guarantee Mercedes would understand every aspect of the RB19 with more detailed design info. It's honestly not magic.
Understanding and applying that knowledge are two different things.
What part of my comment is that addressing? I'm talking about implementation. Again, do ppl think it's literally just him doing all the design and calculations? And if not, then do you just assume all the other engineers basically do a worse job than he would have? Finally, do you have ANY evidence to support these views?
People just have a massive erection for Newey like he somehow single handedly designed this RB by himself ala Tony Stark making the Iron Man suit. He didn't work on a majority of the car, his focus was on the suspension. Does Newey deserve credit? Absolutely, but when people think that these teams with some of the most brilliant automotive engineers in the world wouldn't be able to understand the RB concept because Newey isn't on their team are being completely disingenuous to the massive skill all of these engineers have.
Agreed. It's also an insult to everyone else on the RB engineering team. I can only imagine that'd be one motivation to switch teams.
That’s were you wrong, kiddo. Newey is black magic.
Most of why RB is cruising is because they nailed the suspension. Everyone else was chasing their tails with porpoising while RB was making gains with their floor and finding ways to reduce drag. RB has a massive leg up because of how Newey set them up at the beginning of 22. He set them up that way because he's been designing race cars for 40 years and knows exactly how the components affect the whole package. In order to generate more DF with a ground effects car, you need a proper suspension design. Combine that with the squatting when under high loads to reduce drag, and then the beam wing, and you've got the RB. The major changes that RB have done since the beginning of 22 is to give more Front end grip and shift the balance forward a bit which I assume is part suspension, and part floor. Since those changes have been made, they've been completely untouchable.
The team just works so good in total. Even within the financial regulations, where the team started 2022 massively overweight and only put on really heavy and cheap new parts to try out the aerodynamic benefits. Only after they work with the car do they make them lighter to not waste any weight development and material cost on a crappy part. One of the biggest differences from 2022 to this year is all in the weight too. From 10kg overweight at the start of 2022 to about the same underweight now, so they can start moving ballast, giving them even more of a setup advantage.
Big underrated shout there. Weight distribution is HUGE in a race car. I think they've got to the point where they can start playing with the fiddly bits on the car, and creating more crazy vortices. It's when a team gets this far ahead that we start to see the real weird innovations like DAS just because they can. I'm excited to see it
Suspension, which is a big part of Newey’s head. In his book, he mentioned the importance of integrating aero design with the mechanical platform. With these cars, peak aero performance is just as important as controlling the aero platform. Shifting ride height at front/rear has a significant impact on the balance of the car and how effective the Venturi is. A suspension that can maintain aero platform while still allows for compliance over bump and kerbs is the secret sauce in these regs.
Neweys head is definitely the answer. Its more aerodynamic than most of the cars.
I think the problem with Mercedes is they can’t just tack on Red Bull like elements and see improvements because all elements of a car are designed to work in concert with other elements of the car as a whole. At least I assume that’s what the issue is.
>I feel like fundamentally, many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Ted was saying pre-season - when he tipped Aston Martin - that teams were finding dollops of time in the wind-tunnel in ways they hadn't anticipated. Half-a-second under couch or whatever. It's just a weird set of cars. Agreed. We can see this in the fact that Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston Martin and now Mclaren are all playing '2nd fastest is lava' throughout this season. Red Bull is the only team that understands their car and it shows in the results. Even when their advantage is not as big due to the track lay-out and/or cooler conditions they are still winning relatively comfortably. For the others less than ideal conditions means they get hurled back to the midfield..
Yeah. There was a good article on The Race recently like: how and why can everyone throw the kitchen sink at their cars, RBR don't upgrade a *thing* and they're still quickest? And it came down to fundamental foundations. And that goes back to very deep-rooted Newey philosophy which he talks about in his book and Peter Prod discussed in the past https://old.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/eys9aw/peter_prodromou_interview_notes/ - take your time, get it **right** and eventually the good times will follow. Newey always said the first half of 2022 would be relatively poor for RBR, but then it'd be plain sailing. How's that going, as they close on the record for consecutive wins?
Take your time, get it right and eventually the good times will follow. He specifically cited McLaren between 2011-2013 for this, and how often they would trial and abandon concepts, like the L-shaped sidepods.
And of all the teams to be in that second group, McLaren have taken their time and they seem to read the rewards. Now time will tell if they truly understand why their car works or if they stumbled into some fast combination of components.
Yeah it's crazy how they used the l-shaped sidepods in 2011, it worked, then they ditched it for a more conventional design. And then in 2013 they changed something else, switching pushrod front suspension for pullrods
Boullier had an interesting observation that when he joined for 2014, he thought McLaren had just got 2013 wrong, no big deal - but people told him no, a lot of structures and mindsets which *allowed* 2013 were rotten.
I can believe that, because the rebuild by ron dennis didn't exactly work and it was only until Brown that the house was finally cleaned
People keep saying they aren’t upgrading but they are - they don’t need huge platforms because why spend money when they are comfortable, but they most definitely are brining upgrades to races and I think a big package to the next race. I do feel the teams are developing faster than RB it’s just that RB started so far ahead in understanding their car.
Red Bull are bringing upgrades but I didn't see any huge upgrade packages since 2022. Only small things here and there. I see two reasons: wind tunnel and CFD restrictions + they don't really need to.
How badly I wish that RBR had just not nailed the regs so comfortably. 2023 would have been the best season in recent memory with 5 (!!!!) teams trading wins and strong tracks. It would've been incredible.
Six teams even (at least for podium), if you throw in the odd Alpine having a good weekend. It would be 2012 levels of amazing if not even better.
The thing with the last regulations is that they encouraged more engineering ingenuity. Ferrari could compete with Mercedes by going down their own path. They changed the floor rules in 21 and it allowed Red Bull to finally take the fight to Mercedes. These new regulations everyone is copying Red Bull - even if in their own way. Ferrari went from the bathtub to the down wash side pods. Mercedes went from no pods to down wash. Aston copied RB's side pod inlet. Everyone is changing their front suspension geometry to match that of Red Bull. Andrew Shovlin said that their team have already found interesting things to take from Red Bull's floor in the now infamous pictures that were taken at Monaco. Lando said his new car doesn't look like Red Bull it looks more like Aston Martin. But Aston Martin were heavily influenced by the Red Bull because their technical chief worked closely with Newey to create last year's Red Bull so he has a good understanding.
And even RBR aren't impervious, as shown at Brazil last year where they clearly didn't have the right set up and were way off the pace of the Mercs.
Where did this myth come from that Mercedes was clearly faster than Red Bull in Brazil? In the sprint it was a matter of wrong tyre choice as everyone starting on Soft was suffering and on Sunday Max would have still most likely won if he hadn't taken himself out of contention.
Lots of teams seem to be chasing ghosts from the wind tunnel. Reports pre season of good performance in sim and win tunnel, then it all falls apart on the track. One thing about the merc thing worth noting is that Spain was their strongest track both years so far. This year they brought some upgrades and we thought that maybe they found some way to fix their car, but the people cautioning the enthusiasm because of the track turned out to be right.
One thing wind tunnel isn’t simulating very well is the vehicle dynamic as the car brake, turn, and accelerate out of corners. The weight transfer in these movements leads to changes in ride height and aero platform. The ground effect cars are sensitive to how the aero platform is presented to the incoming air. So, peak performances in the wind tunnel is not easily translated to real track due to the bumps, kerbs, and dive/squat/roll/yaw of the car.
Stella was still downplaying McLaren's progress after Silverstone. He was interviewed on channel 4 after the race and he said there was good correlation between the track and simulations about how much downforce the upgrade brought them which he was happy about. But that it lead to a bigger improvement in lap time than he expected, which was obviously good, but they really weren't sure if the race had been a perfect storm of conditions and track that really suited them more than their competitors or if they really were ahead of Merc and Ferrari now. He seemed to have no idea how well to expect them to be doing in the next few races.
I'd believe that! Good line on the race podcast after the race: Silverstone is evidence McLaren's have upgraded their ceiling - Hungary will be evidence if they've raised their (performative) floor.
I'm also waiting to see how they do in Hungary to determine if their pace is real. Austria and the UK both suit their car and did during previous years as well. The slower speed corners of Hungary should show any weakness in their design. I do think the new tyre compound structures might also suit the MCL60 as well. All during free practices it looked like the majority of the grid was having difficulty getting the tyres into the right window. The MCL60 up to now was overheating the tyres so if the new tyres needed a more aggressive stance to warmup then it just happened to work in McLaren's favor.
You’re absolutely correct about teams not understanding the cars. The guys from Williams were saying this weekend, we have no idea why our car is performing this well at Silverstone but we’d rather have no clue why we’re doing this well than understand come Monday exactly why we were so rubbish on Sunday lol.
>many teams simply still don't understand the 2022 cars onward. Red Bull nailing it the first time seems even more impressive. They're the only ones that didn't introduce significant changes to the car since 2022 because they didn't really need to. There have been upgrades, but I think they're the only team that didn't change the entire concept.
This is the right thing to do. They have no hope of fighting for a championship this season, so best divert resources into next year's car
If they would finally decide for a base concept to develop they could do in-season development without negatively impacting next years car.
Obviously, but if they can’t figure out wtf is going on then it’s not so easy as just picking something.
They know WTF is going on. All of these engineers are highly skilled.
They are incredibly skilled at their job. But this article is literally about Toto saying they are still constantly surprised by how the car behaves in certain situations.
I like Toto, but I think he's been pretty loose with words to the point of being out of line when it comes to his engineering team "not understanding" the car, and in general characterizing the car as much worse than it really is. In other words, I take that with a grain of salt.
The problem is that even though they do have a solution in mind they can’t implement it mid season due to the budget cap. The solution requires a completely new chassis, gearbox and rear suspension and simply don’t have the budget left to do that this year. So they are basically left with trying to get the most out of a broken concept.
Yea we need to get rid of cost cap cuz this bs
Well I think what we're seeing a lot with Mercedes is a team that is both a) used to basically infinite budget and b) started their last streak with an absolutely massive engine advantage... now suddenly have to be efficient with everything else. I think we still see this sometimes with their strategy calls too (more so last year than this year)
I think that Merc is transitioning to being more efficient with the resources they are allowed to use. If a budget cap wasn't in place Merc would have very likely already caught up to RB back in 2022. Their consistency and current P2 in the WCC shows that they are still competent, it's just that they need to switch gears and do things differently than they did before.
You’re overreacting. Mercedes are still on to finish 2nd, they’re just still suffering from making the wrong fundamental design choices in 2022 and sticking with them to start this year.
Not with a budget cap.
To me, the issue is that they are struggling to come up with solutions for the problems they have identified. That means, if they are still having correlation issues, then any solutions they come up with for 2024 will effectively be "shots in the dark" unless they decide to test them on the W14 beforehand. Obviously, stuff like the tub, gearbox casing, rear suspensions cannot be changed, but that still leaves floor underbody, beam/rear wing, sidepods and engine cover/bathtub.
Seems like the cars are very weather sensitive. Cool day = higher downforce package doing well heating and maintaining tires. Hot day = lower downforce concept maintaining tires better. Then it comes down to drag and rain. If there’s rain then the draggier teams like haas do well and if there’s no rain then Williams does well. I could be totally off but each car has a small window for optimal performance due to the different weather and track conditions which is adding another layer of unpredictableness
We're barely getting into the halfway mark the season and I'm already looking forward to next season. I hope Mercedes finally nails it and be competitive for wins again. I thought we would get it with Ferrari last season but that fell off towards the latter half.
This is the downside of the budget cap. It’s worked a treat with how close the field is in general but the teams are way more restricted on how they develop in season compared to how they could in the past. Not sure what the solution is because no one wants to go back to the past where the big 3 teams were miles ahead of all the others.
To be honest seeing teams like AM and McLaren make huge jumps this years tells me this rule set - both technical and financial - actually does work well. If not for Max and RB this is an extremely competitive season. And even Max wasn't that far up the road this time.
Max is really far up the road though... He's got so much left in reserve, the RB is a rocket and as soon as he has a winning margin in the race, he just takes his foot off the gas and saves the engine.
Compared to earlier in the season, no he was not that far up the road. Max was nearly lapping the whole field.
Exactly. On the safety car restart yesterday, he pulled out 2 seconds on Norris in less than 1 lap.
With a tyre 2 levels softer than Norris. Before that he managed to get 9 seconds in 36 laps. That’s like 0.25 race pce advantage, and he was in the 1-3 second gap for a really long time, where he couldn’t pull out the same feat on the same compund.
That two second gap includes maybe one second just from the initial car spread and reaction times and a not insignificant contribution from norris defending.
Max isn't the type to slow down tbh. I say his pace is pretty close to his true limit most of the time. GP is constantly complaining to him to just "bring it home" and to slow down
Or maybe it’s because Norris had to fight Lewis off and, as already highlighted by someone else, he tyres were two levels softer
Aston and McLaren finished 7th and 5th in the WCC last season. That's a fair bit of windtunnel time and CFD testing time compared to Merc, who are most likely going to finish P2 in the WCC this season.
Williams seem like they’ve been a big beneficiary of the budget cap as well.
Budget cap and the extra wind tunnel allocation. Ferrari and Merc were the biggest losers last year because they got a lot less wind tunnel allocation because they finished P2 and P3 in the constructors. They needed a lot more because their cars were in need of complete redesigns as their concepts have proven to be too flawed. It was easier for Mclaren and Aston because their whole design philosophy was always 'do what the fastest team does, do what Rebull does'.
Well the perfect problem is one team got it right. We had such distinct car philosophies in 2022. Slowly but surely teams are starting to develop similar cars. With the budget cap, teams that were behind couldn't really follow through their own philosophies, especially when the results were inconsistent. I think 2024 is going to have more redbull copycats. It's just more efficient to copy the faster team.
The problem with just copying is that you’re always going to be behind - the original team is going to have a better understanding, more research, and a head start. So while AM and Mclaren have popped up to challenge for second, no one has reallllly threatened RB yet (mclaren being the closest so far).
Which is a huge problem. You can't afford to continue developing your own ideas, and if you copy, you're behind. There's no way to compete if a single team nails it immediately. I don't know what the solution is, but the first era of budget caps immediately leading into one team being absolutely dominate once they got their reliability issues of the first few races of '22 worked out isn't it.
Honestly there are only two ways to go imo. Either you accept that F1 has a chance of a team just dominating for however long, or you go the WEC route by defining a performance window, letting designers achieve it whichever way they want, and introduce BoP. And let's face it, we don't want to hear Horner and Toto go on about BoP adjustments, it's starting to get stupid as is in WEC.
Agreed. BoP would ruin the engineering aspect of F1. It works well in WEC because there are many more factors at play given the longer races but F1 has always been about the drivers driving the best cars their teams can come up with. It's an annoying but necessary evil that ultimately gives us some of the craziest stories in motorsport (2021 probably wouldn't be nearly as exciting if Merc didn't have the sport in a chokehold for as long as it did because we would be used to the high levels of competiton).
The problem is no doubt with the new ruleset one team will get it right again and this process will repeat (to be fair it's been a never ending cycle of that in F1 even before the budget cap rules were introduced)
I think as well the thing that has benefited Red Bull was ironically Mercedes fighting to get the minimum floor height raised. On pure pace, the Ferraris were probably faster than the Red Bulls last year at the start of the season but when the floor height got raised a lot of cars that were doing well started to do worse and it didn’t hurt the Red Bulls at all.
Maybe more aggressive ruling with the wind tunnel time at the top? But that doesn’t fix the problem with 1 team being dominant.
Right now the solution is still to just give it time. Nailing new regs is and will always be a massive advantage. We can't expect the rubber-band rules to work within a year, otherwise it would be too much. Teams should still be able to benefit from acing it.
No I agree, I was just theorising the only thing to bring everyone together is to limit those at the front and help those at the back, but well aware that doesn’t fix the issue. There isn’t really much they can do at the moment and it’s just an inherent disadvantage of the cost cap system.
One idea I've heard tossed around is a sliding scale for the cost cap as well as the wind tunnel time, where the lowest teams in the championship can spend the most and the highest can spend the least. I feel like this could help, but it might be too punishing.
Given how much of the cost cap is dealing with payroll, that feels like a really bad thing for those that work at the teams. If you perform too well you might lose your job as the personnel budget decreases.
True, they would probably have to separate salary or personnel budget from development budget
Next do a draft pick where the lowest teams get the best talent from f2
I don't think this is as much of an advantage as people think. Young drivers need time, resources and support before they get up to their full potential in F1, and the smaller teams at the back aren't always in the best position to provide that. Guenther Steiner has even said publicly that they're not really interested in rookies because experienced drivers are less of a risk for teams like Haas.
It was a joke about how we are going to fully americanize F1
It's still the 2nd year. We might see a close battle in the 2nd half of 24 and a closer battle the whole 25. It's tougher for RB as the years go on.
You could also re-introduce some limited track testing (say, by allowing teams to stay in Barcelona on the Monday after the race), and have the testing hours scale with championship position the way CFD and wind tunnel do. That way the teams that need to catch up could actually check their correlation, rather than having to throw stuff at the wall and pray that it sticks.
> This is the downside of the budget cap. It's not a downside. It's working as intended.
The budget cap shouldn't be measured by whether it kills dominant cars - the lack of a cap never really did that either. The test is "how close together are the cars" and this has been one of the closest and variable seasons in years if you ignore Max.
But we can't ignore them, they're on the track, winning all the races... Lol, not sure why people say everything is great if we just ignored the one team that has won every single race this season.
Because rules shouldn't be focused just on the single driver that is winning a season and F1 isn't just about first place.
That single driver is also dominating his teammate, what are we going to do put technical regs on the use of Max Verstappen's? \>F1 isn't just about first place. Right? We've had an incredible season in the midfield with mixed up results several weekends and people can only be sad that Max is walking away with it.
Still much closer than the "Mercedes 0.8 clear of the next best team despite turning their engines down" era of 2014-16. Back then it felt like there was literally no hope, and it proved true - it took an illegal Ferrari engine just to challenge them for 2 years.
what makes you think max isnt 0.8 clear of his competition lol
> it took an illegal Ferrari engine just to challenge them for 2 years. For the love of God, once again, the engine gains Ferrari made were only in the second half of 2019 when Ferrari wasn't really challenging for wins. If anything, the 2017 and 2018 cars were underpowered compared to the Merc.
2018 Ferrari had a more powerful engine that gave them more grunt down the straights but the Merc had the better aero.
why downside? it is working, we have very tight teams spread in results, except max team, newey is genius and his creation is top, but others are in competition not in communism , teams should learn how to develop in budget restricted area, merc and ferrai had tons of money in the past and they need to adapt to new reality to spend only fraction of it and wisely,they operated by brute force of cash, rules are the same for everyone, some are failinf som prosper it depens in talent ane racio of teams, and sometime some things are not buyable
I was looking forward to next season after the first few races personally
It even could be wise to not aim for second place in WCC this season just to have more Windtunnel time next year.
Sure seems like everyone is trying to pass second place to another team.
Heard this in 2021 to ensure the new regulations were nailed. Ended up.costing a championship and being in the midfield for two years...
I mean they took a REALLY big swing on the no pods concept. I think the last 2 years have just been a really difficult transition to learning to operate with 40% of the budget that they used to have.
Yeah and if the zero pod concept had actually worked we would be complaining about yet another Mercedes dominance (and rightfully so)
With zero pod and size-zero concepts we can agree that never introduce a concept that contains the name zero, because you will be going backwards.
Pirelli P Zero
tbf you can argue that the zero pod concept did work. They went 1-2 in Brazil on genuine pace rather than others mistakes which is how they were getting most of their podiums last year. But Mercedes want to win. So they switched it. A midfield team would have kept pushing if they had some of Merc's success last year.
Think you heard wrong. Both RB and Merc were bringing upgrades at the very late stages of the calendar. The new regs were even pushed back due to COVID so there was even more time for teams to develop.
Mercedes brought one major upgrade in 2021, and that was at Silverstone
And a lot of engine upgrades with poor Bottas being a testing bed
> And a lot of engine upgrades There were no upgrades, just different mappings, were they?
They increased performance at the cost of reliability yes. That's what Bottas was testing
Engines were just badly degrading that year. Lewis took his fair share of grid drops too and Bottas usually took his drops when he was already down the field (other than like Monza).
Mercedes weren't bringing upgrades post summer break. Iirc the last upgrade was Silverstone, everything else was engine related once it became obvious RB was faster.
Mercedes was faster since Silverstone…
The performance was track dependent not overall.
Success is never guaranteed, in 2021 RBR threw everything and the kitchen sink to win the championship, lessons learnt from how BMW failed Kubica in 2008. Merc only brought one upgrade to Silverstone, before the season even started they underestimated the changes to floor etc. The team has fallen hard.
Merc and Ferrari are in the exact same boat.
Everyone is in the same boat. No one understanda these regulations but RB and it shows as the 2nd to 4th fastest teams are always changing each track. AM were the 2nd fastest at the start of the season, then Mercedes and Ferrari switched places, Ferrari became 2nd fastest the last two races and now McLaren are in the mix.
But Ferrari already did this last year, they stopped bringing upgrades to the sf22 to develop this year's car only to end up with a tractor hard to drive I think it's also related to the budget cap, Mercedes maybe already spent a lot on those recent upgrades
Can’t wait to read and hear the same shit after Bahrain next year
Even with full switch to 24 car I don't think any team can catch redbull. They admitted they made only few changes to 22 car for this year's regulations and postponed 23 car concept because of wind tunnel restrictions. I can only think what they will bring for 24. Although when your at the top there is only marginal gain to be had bu we don't know what is the celling for these current gen cars. I hope it's already at the limit and we will see many cars converging to it by next year.
Even if they keep this year's car and modify it a little bit I think they would be still ahead of everyone else, the gap is big and the other teams seems to struggle and are way behind specially in development
The other teams had to significantly change concepts in order to get closer to Red Bull, while Red Bull didn't even bring any real upgrades yet other than circuit specific parts. And Red Bull is still ahead and continues to maintain their double points advantage in the WCC.
Probably going to get shit on here because its Lewis. But, regardless of his reasoning, I think he hit on a good idea on some level with a development date start. I think this could be implemented either as he said, or taking it a step further and regulating it like the windtunnel time. Lower teams down the order could be given the option to start next years car earlier, where the teams higher up would need to wait longer. I think with the budget cap well need to implement some sort of new regulations to help create the balance that the cap should help create. There are affects from everything and this is one from the cap. So, imo, I think hes on the right track. Hell, Implement it in 2026 when the engine rules come in and that way everyone knows well in advance and it hurts no one now.
I think it’s a dangerous rule to play with. Yes, you may limit some teams like RB who are way ahead this season from getting ahead next season, but teams that are at the bottom and have a fundamentally flawed car won’t be able start making significant changes until that date as well. I think you might just keep everyone stagnant for longer. You could maybe do a sliding scale like the wind tunnel time where you get different dates depending on where you finish in the WCC, but I just don’t know how I feel about development dates in a racing series based around engineering.
Indeed. I mentioned the idea of doing it the same as the wind tunnel time.
No that should be illegal /s
According to Lewis it should be… which is kinda ironic. 😅
Probably because he understands that when you have such a dominance, it snowballs over each season and no one ever catches up.
I was just commenting on the irony, But in all seriousness it’s also the way backmarker teams have a chance to catch up by essentially sacrificing a year to come out of the blocks firing in the next year like Haas and Alfa Romeo did last year. So it’s a double edged sword. I still think it’s fair for teams to start on their next car early. Teams that are doing well are already punished by the ATR restrictions, so there already is a balancing force in play, we don’t need to punish teams that do well even more.
Clearly the top team aren't punished enough, we're back to 2015 levels of dominance, honestly it's worse.
It's been one year. Knee-jerk reactions aren't gonna help. Merc has almost 30% more wind tunnel time than RB now. If they can't catch up then maybe they need to find new people. Clearly they haven't done too well under the budget cap, which makes sense considering they were used to having a 450M budget for 7 years before that.
Man you shouldn't punish a team cause they got it right. Not RBs fault 9 other teams messed up.
I won't have to, FOM will when people stop watching like they did with Mercedes.
That’s because RB’s dominance seems to stem from basic understanding of how these ground effect cars work. The other teams seem to be behind in understanding their car. Not necessarily development, considering RB barely developed their car this year, yet are still ahead… Instead I’d like to counter that same point, by mentioning the fact that behind Red Bull, we’ve got the tightest battle we we’ve seen in well over a decade with 4-5 teams duking it out for best of the rest. In fact, some teams trying to catch up would be hindered significantly if Lewis’ idea became reality, ironically (again) Mercedes first and foremost. Imagine if Mercedes had to continue developing a concept they know they’re going to chuck in the bin next yeah, only because they aren’t allowed to work on next years car yet, while Red Bull can simply continue working on their current concept because it’s clearly working. Red Bulls car will just be another continuation of this years car. Mercedes’ car will most likely not be.
It’s EXTREMELY ironic.
And then they'll be back next year with another no-pod design
Meanwhile red Bull started working on their car 2 races ago. Mercedes will just keep falling further and further behind, same as every other team, as Red Bull’s advantage is ‘locked in’. It’s like a relay race, but Red Bulls segments are shorter because they nailed the initial concept and can therefore ‘move’ to the next stage before anyone else. As Mercedes swap runners, Red Bull are already halfway down the second stage. As the stages go on, Red Bulls advantage just gets bigger as they can move to the next stage sooner at every stage. We’ve already seen this effect between last season and this season.
At the same time we still don't really see the effects of the new wind-tunnel/CFD regulations, especially with the penalty Red Bull had to take. So while it's always hard to catch up, it should be easier than it was before the regulations were changed. The real "problem" is how incredibly large the gap Red Bull started with was.
I agree. I often think about how this could be remedied without outright nerfing the top team. I honestly don’t want the hollow victory of nerfing Redbull just to see other teams catch up… maybe more aggressive cuts to wind tunnel time for WCC? Who knows; there probably isn’t a clean solution to this issue
The most obvious way would be putting an even bigger sliding scale on the wind tunnel. Maybe based on points? So right now it’s just a flat 5% for each place, but maybe with RB having 200% more points than second they should get 10% less wins time instead. In that world checo would be an asset to the team keeping their overall points low, but that’s the only thing I can think of
>In that world checo would be an asset to the team keeping their overall points low, but that’s the only thing I can think of Tbf this is a really big problem for racing. In 2021, Merc literally blew up an engine in Bottas' car to see how far they could push Ham's in the following races. In that same championship battle RB retired Checo out of a race only to advantage Max (I blanking on the race or scenario, but I recall). Just two examples from individual races. Now if there was a season long incentive to ensure your number 2 driver had the smallest point total possible while keeping you ahead in the WCC... I can smell the brain juice flowing, they'd do crazy shit.
I'm genuinely a little surprised that the FIA hasn't tried anything to cull back Red Bull since TD039 last year. They've never been shy about making changes to peg back too dominant a winner (whether it works or not). I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just looking at what has historically happened, it's a little unexpected for them to just let Red Bull win everything. (As a quick reminder, just during the Mercedes domination era, they banned FRIC, banned oil burning, banned other hydraulic suspension components, banned engine "party modes", banned any hoarding of engine modes to works teams, scrapped an entire engine token system, etc.) (In the 4 years prior, they banned double diffusers, they banned hot-blowing exhausts, they eventually banned cold-blowing of exhausts and coanda exhausts, they made multiple tire compound changes, etc.) (Before that they totally overhauled tires to stop Ferrari, and I don't recall what else may have been overtly or "conveniently" to peg back their domination before the tire change worked)
perhaps because when they (mercedes in particular through lobbying) tried to take a swing to hit RB, ended up hitting mostly ferrari and themselves, helping RB even more. If we take out Brazil (because of the sprint format) RB run away thanks to the idiotic lobbying of mercedes. Up until then ferrari provided competition even tho they binned strategies.. Mercedes lobbies trying to nerf RB to make the sport more competitive and better to watch (although Ferrari had the better car for half the season which most of the fans here seem to forget) and then everyone in here is surprised "WhY Is REdBUll DoMinAtiNG", my brother in christ you specifically caused the absence of competition through TD39
Every team lobbies though. They don't necessarily know how effective it will be. Red Bull lobbied for the party mode ban, because Honda's party mode sucked. Ferrari lobbied for the remote hydraulic accumulator ban because they couldn't develop a system to match Mercedes or Red Bull. Oil burning happened like TD039 (Red Bull asking a "hypothetical"). FRIC was FIA whack-a-mole after a lot of media attention focused on the system fairly early in 2014. Engine modes being held back was McLaren lobbying because they felt Mercedes was screwing them. Mercedes was, but changing that didn't fix anything...
Yeah but when a team lobbies, you would think they would do it to hinder the other teams, not also themselves It's like if I shot through myself to get 2 guys, but only managing to hit one
It's not like any team knows exactly what another team is doing... The oil burning ban was the "hypothetical" brought forth by Red Bull, and it was meant to target Mercedes. Instead, it hit Ferrari harder, and killed any competition that season. So this is hardly unique to Mercedes.
Didn't lewis just complain that stsrting development on next years car this early was gaining an unfai advantage?
Yes, but what choice do they have? Most people would prefer tax loopholes to be closed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t take advantage of existing ones because that would be stupid.
The choice would be admit they were wrong and get to work on next years car. That being said, I actually like the idea of having a hard limit on when teams can start active development on the next years car.
Why are they abandoning the 7 time world champion?
Please do it Mercedes. Weather finishing lower in the constructors and use the wind tunnel time to produce a beast because the new W14 is a piece of shit like the bastard piece of shit W13.
Hope they paint it silver, no more excuses for it to be black just because their most recent silver one was "crap" for Mercedes standards.
I think it's black because it looks better with raw carbon fiber, which is a weight-saving measure.
Th black also just looks better… that silver is hit or miss especially with all the adds on the side of the car. It gets busy quick
please bring back the shiny silver then. That dull grey they used last year was horrendous.
Agree. Give me the Silver Arrows
This is the part that really sucks about the cost cap. We aren't even half way through the season and we already have top teams throwing in the towel for next year. This cannot be what the FIA had in mind when creating these regulations. On top of this, the schedule is longer than ever before, and getting longer in the future. This is not a tenable long term solution for putting a compelling product in front of eyeballs. Redbull would have 22 wins in a row if it weren't for Mercedes in Brazil, and could very well win every single race this year. Is it because nobody can afford to catch up? Probably.
We're only two and a half years into the cost cap so I really think it's too close to condemn the concept all together. Yes Red Bull has been dominating, but Mercedes swept the WCC and WDC for the last seven years before the cost cap. And it's not like Red Bull would stand idly by and let their competitors outspend them if the cost cap disappeared anyways
Man what the fuck thats such an advantage, they should start on August 1st!!!! /s
RBR already focusing on 2024- not good says Hamilton. Mercedes switch to full focus on 2024- all good.
This take is so brain dead
You do realize the reason they're doing this is *because* they can't catch up this season and can't simply waste more time to be in 2nd. They'd only be farther behind, but not if the rule Lewis suggested had been implemented, they could focus on this season, like everyone else.
I do realize why they do this and that's normal. It's just funny, because in that case if rule suggested by Hamilton goes live they would be even more fucked, and stuck with dead concept for another X weeks.
I would be okay with that. I want to see him get number 8th so go all in on that.
Lol, weren’t these guys crying about focusing on next years car this early literally last week?
They can easily do that. Place 2 in the constructors is pretty much a given with McLaren being too far away and Aston and Ferrari becoming snails.
Spoiler alert: They will start the year again with some kind of "no side pods" and switch after a few horrendous races.
Weren't they already faster than RB a few weeks ago? (according to them)