When the FIA first unveiled its new rules for 2022, it billed them as the path towards closer racing and more frequently thrilling action.
Formula 1 was stuck in the doldrums of a long spell of Mercedes domination. Nico Rosberg had retired, and Valtteri Bottas wasn’t able to take the fight to Lewis Hamilton, who was having things largely his own way bar the rare skirmish with Ferrari.
The response was the most deeply researched set of regulations ever introduced to the sport allied with equalisation measures designed to close the gap between the back and the front. A cost cap would also be added to further tighten the field.
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The FIA outlined five key objectives of the new rule book. They are:
– cars that are better able to battle on the track;
– a more balanced competition on the track;
– a sport where success is determined more by how well a team spends its money, not how much it spends;
– a sport that is a more sustainable business for those participating; and
– a sport that continues to be the world’s premier motor racing competition and the perfect showcase of cutting-edge technology.
Now that we’re into the second season of these rules, how are they tracking?
WHAT’S WORKING
There’s no doubt a few of these targets have been hit emphatically.
On the first point, there have been strong signs since last year that the current generation of car is better behaved when racing at close quarters.
A major aim of the technical rules was to reduce aero wake — and reduce sensitivity to aero wake — to make following easier and to better facilitate passing. Last year the sport witnessed a 30 per cent increase in overtaking, suggesting that box has been ticked.
That said, there are some concerns that dirty air has increased this year as team push on with development, but that’s a question to be answered after a larger sample set of races.
On the financial side, Formula 1 is unquestionably a more sustainable business. The boom in interest in recent years has sent rivers of gold into the sport’s bank account, and around half of that flows onto the teams through prize money.
Thanks to the spending cap of around $200 million, most teams are covering the cost of going racing through prize money alone. The days of one or two constructors teetering on bankruptcy have been left long behind.
The sport’s popularity has ensured its status as the premier motor racing competition has been burnished spectacularly, and though ‘cutting-edge technology’ might be a stretch, the arrival of Audi from 2026 and Honda’s renewed interest in participating derive directly from the power unit regulations and their applicability to the automotive sector.
That’s three big ticks so far.
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BUT IT’S NOT A PERFECT PASS
There’s one big objective we can’t tick off without some analysis: competitiveness.
Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing won last year’s titles at a canter and look set to have an even easier time of things this year, with no obvious threat to their position emerging after the first three races, as analysed here this week.
This wouldn’t appear to be the hallmark of “a more balanced competition” the new regulations envisaged.
The FIA had hoped to close the field by making the regulations more restrictive, thereby preventing teams from stealing a march with some of the exotic performance solutions they’d come up with in recent seasons.
Indeed some technical directors complained during the rule-writing process that there wasn’t enough room left for genuine performance differentiation.
But proponents of that argument have gone quiet after just one season.
“I have to admit — and I think most teams should admit the same — that before the new generation of cars touched the ground we thought that the new regulations were quite restrictive,” McLaren principal Andrea Stella said. “But interestingly, as soon as you start the journey you realise there’s a lot of performance.
“There’s a lot of performance especially on the floor — this ground effect can be exploited from a technical point of view beyond what I think anybody in Formula 1 would have anticipated.
“If you see the level of sophistication of the geometries you may see on some cars — especially in the parts facing the ground, so not necessarily very visible — and the complexity of the flow field and the vertical structures that you want to generate under the car, then these I think went beyond what the regulations would have expected.”
What some thought would be a technical director’s nightmare turned out to me something of a sweet dream.
“That is from a technical point of view a fascinating journey,” Stella said. “But from a spectacle point of view it means that whoever does a better job, like Red Bull are doing at the moment, can gain a consistent competitive advantage beyond what could have been anticipated.”
After three races this season Red Bull Racing has a qualifying advantage of almost 0.4-seconds over Ferrari, more than half a second over the other frontrunners and more than a second over the rest of the field.
That advantage grows to over a second to the next-best car in race conditions.
WHERE PERFORMANCE MEETS FINANCE
The gap between Red Bull Racing and the everyone else has clearly caught several teams unawares — including RBR itself.
“At times, in all honesty, yes,” Christian Horner said when asked if he was surprised by his team’s advantage. “We see that some teams have made a step forward and some haven’t.”
It’s even more impressive given RBR is operating with reduced wind tunnel time after overspending the 2021 cost cap.
The punishment was a 10 per cent cut to the team’s wind tunnel time for 12 months from October last year — a critical development period for this year’s car, even if work would have already started on evolving last year’s dominant machine.
It was a saga that threatened to push to breaking point one of the other critical objectives of the rules — that “success is determined more by how well a team spends its money, not how much it spends” — and one that still irks Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur.
“The penalty, for me, was very low,” he said, per Racer. “If you consider that basically we will improve a bit less than a second over the season in terms of aero, you get a penalty of 10 per cent of this, it’s one tenth, and as it’s not a linear progression it’s probably less.
“And then you can spend what you are saving on the wind tunnel somewhere else — on the weight saving and so on.
“I’m not sure that the effect is mega.”
But putting aside the subjectivity of the penalty’s harshness, Vasseur’s argument might actually prove that the rules are working as intended.
Cutting Red Bull Racing’s wind tunnel time was only supposed to make it harder for the team to develop the car, not slow it down or prevent development entirely.
“Like anything, it’s how you use it,” Horner said. “We’ve got a limited amount of aero time. We’re almost six months through since the penalty started, and of course it’s not just this year’s car it affects, it’s next year’s as well.
“But one would assume, up to the point that it’s reset mid-season, Aston have got a lot of research time available to them. So, again, it’s how you utilise it — and certainly within the confines of the budget cap as well now.”
Aston Martin is another affirmative example. The team has enjoyed a similar amount of development time to Alfa Romeo and Haas in the last year but has been alone in making the huge leap from seventh in last year’s championship into the frontrunning pack.
Further, despite enjoying almost 60 per cent more wind tunnel time than Red Bull Racing, it hasn’t automatically moved ahead.
“It is what you make out of it,” Aston Martin principal Mike Krack said. “It is true that we have more development time, but we also must not forget we have a huge gap to close and we have to also anticipate and respect that they will also not stand still in the time, because they still have some (wind tunnel) time.”
THE UNDOUBTED POSITIVE SIGNS
And when you look at the numbers, it’s clear that Red Bull Racing is a bit of an outlier at the head of the field.
In fact the numbers suggest that the other nine teams are closer together than they were last season — admittedly with a sample size of only three grands prix.
Average qualifying pace over a 90-second lap
1. Red Bull Racing: 90.000
2. Ferrari: +0.361 seconds
3. Mercedes: +0.505 seconds
4. Aston Martin: +0.527 seconds
5. Alpine: +1.009 seconds
6. Haas: +1.037 seconds
7. McLaren: +1.434 seconds
8. Williams: +1.517 seconds
9. AlphaTauri: +1.669 seconds
10. Alfa Romeo: +1.694 seconds
The qualifying averages demonstrate clearly that the sport has become generally more competitive year on year.
Last year the entire field was spread over 2.439 seconds. So far this year it’s down to 1.694 seconds and features no obvious backmarker team, with Williams having joined the six-team scrap behind the leaders.
Last year the midfield — from Alpine in fourth to Williams in 10th — was spread across 1.188 seconds.
This year the midfield — from Alpine in fifth to Alfa Romeo in 10th — is split by just under 0.7 seconds.
The gap between the leaders and the midfield is also much closer.
In 2022 the gap between Ferrari in second and Alpine in fourth — ignoring Mercedes in no man’s land — was 0.999 seconds.
In 2023 the gap between Aston Martin in fourth and Alpine in fifth is 0.482 seconds.
Even the battle among the non-Red Bull Racing frontrunners is close. After three rounds Ferrari, Mercedes and Aston Martin are split by just 0.166 seconds.
Formula 1 isn’t a spec series that equalises performance. To use the words from the objectives, the “premier motor racing competition” is seeking only a “more balanced” competition, not a completely balanced one, that is still shaped by “how well” a team uses its resources, not just how much resource it has.
It’s hard to argue that the regulations have failed just because one team is doing better than the others. Perhaps it hasn’t been a roaring success — clearly there were hopes for a closer competition — but certainly the sport overall is tracking in the right direction with its new regulations.
Red Bull Racing breaking free from the pack shouldn’t define whether these rules have been successful or not. It’s up to the other nine teams to do a better job and catch the reigning constructors champion.
