F1's last brave-new-rules world

This is the first of a series of features about Formula 1's regulations from 2009-13 based on a six-page feature that appeared in AUTOSPORT magazine on December 5.

Fans demanding more action is how it began. The FIA's Charlie Whiting assembled the Overtaking Working Group early in 2007 to research and frame a set of regulations that would turn grand prix racing into the passing-fest everyone apparently craved.

Comprising Renault's Pat Symonds, McLaren's Paddy Lowe, Ferrari's Rory Byrne and Whiting himself, the OWG started out by understanding exactly why overtaking was so difficult and what regulations would make it easier for cars to pass each other.

While not the first time an attempt had been made to create ideas that would increase overtaking, it was the most far-reaching. Ideas such as the centreline downwash generating (CDG) wing, proposed by the FIA in October 2005 based on CFD work undertaken by Nick Wirth, proved unpopular among F1 teams.

The CDG wing was not a popular idea

Its introduction for 2007 was voted down by the teams, who wanted to conduct further research, and plans to bring it in for 2008 were eventually shelved. Effectively, the OWG was the best way for the FIA and the teams to collaborate to improve the regulations, something which the sport's governing body had already undertaken to do.

"There were a number of manoeuvres before the OWG project, " says Lowe. "It was done partly to head off some work that had originally been done by the FIA - the double rear [CDG] wing. It was supposedly going to reduce the updraft behind the car, but the F1 community didn't have much faith in the analysis.

"The target was to halve downforce, which was aligned to a laptime increase of maybe five seconds," explains Lowe, who has since moved to Mercedes. "The original intent was to dramatically improve the overtaking ability and that's why there is a wide front wing and a higher, narrower rear wing. The teams funded the OWG, chipping in about £50,000 each.

"When we came up with the rules there was always an expectation the teams would dramatically improve. In the FondTech tunnel, downforce was halved but we knew that if you spent time optimising it, some of that would be recovered."

Some extreme ideas were contemplated at this time, with the all-team Technical Working Group also getting involved with proposals.

Sam Michael was still at Williams in 2009 © LAT

"One of the things we decided was that if you are in another car's aerodynamic wake, you have actually already taken a penalty by being behind them," says Sam Michael, who was then Williams's technical director and is now sporting director at McLaren.

"We said if you are following someone in a corner you probably have 20 to 30 per cent less downforce in a high-speed turn. Therefore, the first thing to get around was people saying that if you do anything to let people overtake, it's artificial.

"Our argument in the meeting, which was accepted, was that it's already artificial because there are two cars going along and the guy in front has 20 to 30 per cent more downforce than the guy behind. In an ideal world, what we would have been able to do was to have a wake-compensating aerodynamic increase in downforce for the following car, so some sort of wake sensor or downforce sensor able to put downforce back on.

"We looked at things like suction fans for floors. If you went to proper fans, of course you could do it, but to have something that could be turned on was unfeasible.

"We looked at keeping everyone at Monza downforce, then when in the wake you would go to Monaco downforce. But that would cause you to struggle with aero balance. So there were a lot of problems with doing that in the corners, even though in the purist world that would be the right way to do it."

This kind of idea would resurface a few years later with the DRS, albeit with a more straightforward application by giving the following car less drag on the straight by opening a slot gap in the rear wing.

But for 2009, these aims were tackled by the creation of the skinny-aerodynamic regulations, designed not only to reduce downforce, but to make the cars less susceptible to turbulence when following another car.

There was a small nod to moveable aerodynamics with the rule allowing a flap on the front wing to be trimmed in and out across a range of six degrees a couple of times per lap, but as an overtaking aid this was irrelevant and it was used to modify balance before being quietly dropped for 2011 when the DRS was adopted.

That said, 'moveable' aero did become de rigueur during the rules cycle thanks to the advantages to be had from bodywork able to flex under load, before the FIA cracked down on that with more-stringent load testing.

Initially, the strange proportions of these cars, with their wide 'snowplough' front wing (which was also lowered from 150mm to 75mm from the ground and made 400mm wider) and skinny rear wing (250mm narrower and 150mm taller) were grating.

During 2008, various teams dabbled with testing the new wings, but it was not until December at Jerez that the world had sight of a vaguely representative car in the form of the BMW Sauber F1.08 updated to hybrid aero spec, the best previous glimpse having been Williams running '09-spec front and rear wings in November.

Independent of the OWG, KERS was also introduced. This created huge amounts of interest at the time (Dieter Rencken wrote a series of insightful stories on this topic during '08 and '09, the first of which appears here), but it was probably a little too early for the technology.

An attempt to postpone its introduction was blocked by BMW, which ironically struggled in '09 with its hybrid system, and after being dropped by team agreement even though it was in the rules for '10, it returned a year later.

Williams's tests gave an early hint of the 2009 cars' appearance

Just as talk today is dominated by the anticipated ungainly look of the 2014 F1 cars, so there was uproar as to what the '09 machines would look like, even though the return of slick tyres was welcomed after 11 seasons of grooved rubber. But there was method in this perceived madness.

OWG research attempted to work out the laptime advantage required to guarantee that a faster car could overtake a slower one. The figure settled on, based on windtunnel work harnessed to simulator evaluations, was two seconds under the previous rules, and the aim was to cut that at least in half.

This led to those strange proportions, with the high and narrow rear wing designed to move the turbulent air upwards, and the reduction in the permissible size of the diffuser mitigating the extent of the scrambling of the airflow emerging from the back of the car.

The wider front wing was conceived to access the calmer airflow at the extremities of this turbulence, while the slashing of the flicks, turning vanes, chimneys and other bits and pieces that had become ubiquitous by 2008 was designed to simplify the aero of the car.

"The key element of this is, first of all, a neutral section of the front wing - the middle half-metre of this device is a prescribed section," explained Whiting ahead of the 2009 season. "The incidence of that profile and its position relative to the reference plane are carefully prescribed.

"It's the most critical part. The front wing is wider and there are no turning vanes or bargeboards: the area where you can put them has been severely restricted, because there's only room for very small devices. Also, the diffuser has been made smaller and the rear wing is higher but narrower. We arrived at this package by five sessions of windtunnel work."

When the cars finally hit the track in 2009, it was clear that the teams had made significant progress in terms of clawing back the downforce. Taking McLaren as an example, the unsightly detailing work of the end-of-season version of the 2008 McLaren MP4-23 is clearly gone when you look at its successor, the 24.

But as the '09 cars started to appear, it became clear that while placement of aero parts in many areas had been outlawed, teams were extremely adept at finding new areas to exploit.

For example, many cut back the sidepods by making big changes to crash structures, exposing an area in front of them into which turning vanes could be packaged. All over the car, there were examples of this.

It would be easy to conclude that this reflects badly on the work done by the OWG. But bearing in mind this was a small group spending around half-a-million up against 10 grand prix teams spending hundreds of millions, it was still a very good effort. Arguably, it was the most thorough investigation undertaken into new rules in F1 history.

Brawn's double diffuser moved the goalposts © XPB

But as Ross Brawn, team principal of Honda in 2008 and then of the new incarnation of the team the year after, explains, perhaps the original objectives were a little conservative.

"I don't think they were terribly effective purely from the aerodynamic perspective," he says. "I didn't get a feeling that the rule changes had suddenly made the cars easier to follow through corners etc.

"There may have been a little bit of an improvement, but not significant enough to really notice in terms of the race. Obviously the DRS came in later and had a fairly major effect on that.

"The problem is that we all - and I'm just as guilty - are a bit shy in making draconian changes. But we actually do need to make a draconian change because our engineers collectively are all so innovative and clever that if you say we're going to make a 50 per cent reduction in downforce, you do something that would make that difference on one day but six months down the line becomes a 20 per cent reduction.

"I think we never really bite the bullet. What we needed was a 75 per cent reduction in downforce, which eventually would end up as 50 per cent. Then we might see some change. The rules did do a reasonable job of maintaining or pushing back laptimes, but I don't honestly believe it changed the nature of the racing. And that was one of the objectives when the rules were changed."

It is notoriously difficult to complete accurate overtaking analysis in F1, primarily because there are such a wide range of conditions that contribute to passes. But most studies usually put the number of passes per race as very similar in '08 and '09. Certainly, the characteristics of the racing were very similar, with most position changes executed on pitstop strategy in an era when refuelling was still allowed (it was banned for the second year of the new regulations in 2010).

But there is little doubt that it did make a big difference to the way teams worked. While today everyone is quick to hail the 2014 regulation changes as the biggest ever, in the build-up to '09 people were saying the same thing.

Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey described it as the biggest rules change since the stepped-bottom rules came in for 1983 and stressed just how much work had to be done to adapt.

This added up to a major change in the aerodynamic understanding of the car, particularly in terms of the way the front wing worked. The new, wider front wing meant that teams could now aim to turn the airflow around the outside of the front wheels, rather than inside. Given how significant the front wing is in the overall aerodynamic map of the car, this was a huge difference.

"You couldn't have the same flow structures and flow structure control that you used to have," explains Michael. "The radius rule [stipulating a maximum curvature of 75mm for bodywork for much of the car] came in, the diffuser height was reduced and the front wing became wider.

Front wings have changed significantly since 2009 © XPB

"That completely changed the wake that came off the front wing endplates because it used to go inside the front axle, now it goes outside. All of those things meant you started from ground zero in terms of aerodynamic understanding."

This explains why one of the major areas of development from 2009-13 has been the front wings. With the neutral centre section not open for development, teams had to focus on the outboard part of the wings.

Two-element front wings turned to three, four, five, six and seven as the ever-more complex understanding of flow control evolved. While more elements reduce the surface area able to generate downforce, having so many slot gaps creates a far more stable airflow and if you do get a stall and the airflow separates, it costs you a far smaller percentage of your downforce. This is an area where Red Bull has excelled.

While there have been major concepts created and outlawed under this rules set (the double diffuser, the f-duct and exhaust blowing will be covered in future stories on AUTOSPORT+), the fundamental architecture of the car has not changed. That is testament to the quality of the original work done.

While the rules themselves didn't create the overtaking everyone apparently craved - high-degradation Pirelli rubber and the DRS, which both arrived in 2011, did that - the OWG did produce a robust set of regulations that governed F1 for five seasons.

"To all intents and purposes, it's all in the same domain, which is impressive," says Lowe of the regulations he helped create. "It has caused that constraint of laptimes."

Needless to say, this era of the regulations was dominated by Red Bull. But it's interesting to reflect on how history might have changed had the rules not been deferred for a year.

"The change in regulations had been debated for some time and initially it was going to come in at the start of 2008," says Newey, whose cars won half of the grands prix held from 2009-13.

"I, among luckily a few other teams, managed to delay the rules for a year, which for us was important because Red Bull was still relatively young and the structures and procedures of the team weren't fully in place. It would have been quite difficult for us to have properly researched the rules ready for the start of 2008..."

NEXT WEEK: The origins of the double diffuser, the miracle of Brawn GP and why some teams got it so badly wrong in 2009.