F1 2014: Don't fear the new world

For a species that has, for better or worse, shaped and scarred the planet, bending it to its will, and relentlessly pursued life-changing technological marvels that outstrip the imaginations even of those one generation older, human beings have a curious distrust of change.

The desire to preserve the status quo, or better still hark back to a halcyon, usually fictional, past is hardwired into homo sapiens. No matter how much we like to believe we are immune to it, all of us have at times drifted into the mob mentality and Luddite outlook.

What has this got to do with Formula 1? Everything, it seems, judging by the past couple of months of howling derision about the direction of grand prix racing.

The baying, naysaying mob has bellowed relentlessly about everything from the look of the cars to the noise of the engines and the supposed dullness of the racing.

Yes, that would be the racing that hasn't even started yet, and for which even the teams feel desperately underprepared to predict.

Some changes, such as the catastrophically short-sighted move to award double points for the season final in Abu Dhabi, are idiotic. Others, like the nose regulations - understandable in isolation but which have resulted in some monstrously ugly creations - are the result of a poor rules-writing process.

But these are snapshots of a wider shift in the sport that merits far closer scrutiny than kneejerk reactions to the worst Doomsday scenarios.

On-track, the cars are visually more spectacular than their predecessors © LAT

Already during pre-season testing, the whining about the cars being too slow has been silenced, with predictions of GP2-level pace blown out of the water, and reliability has been better than many predicted (albeit far from good).

What's more, the cars are visually more spectacular on track, as drivers struggle to keep the rear end under control and manage more aggressive power delivery with the right foot.

After five relatively stagnant years of engine freezes, restrictive aerodynamic regulations and domination by Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel, a change, almost any change, was desperately needed.

For better or worse, what we are faced with is the shape of F1 for the best part of the next decade. Things will never be the same again.

The adoption of 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 engines, which kick out almost 800bhp with maximum energy recovery systems (ERS) output, is key to the new F1.

This year's ERS is a huge stride forward from the previous-generation KERS. No longer simply a bolt-on component, it is now an integral part of what is a genuinely greener racing engine.

Last year, KERS could produce around 80bhp for 6.7s per lap. This year, thanks to an increase in electric-motor size from 60kW to 120kW, this has doubled. The amount that can be used on a single lap has been increased tenfold, from 400kJ to 4mJ, meaning that if it were used at full blast it could offer its energy boost for over 30 seconds per lap.

The energy is harvested by the MGU-K (motor generator unit-kinetic) under braking at the rear axle, in addition to the MGU-H (for heat), which is a motor attached to the rotating shaft of the turbocharger. The MGU-H energy can also be deployed outside the per-lap power-boost limit, meaning this is a key area for efficiency.

This energy is no longer deployed by a simple push of a button by the driver. It will be less of a push-to-pass and more a bank of energy to be used and managed on a second-by-second basis, with the potential for electrical energy to iron out torque curves.

Drivers will have to adapt to the massive regulation changes © LAT

Asking the driver to manage this would be the equivalent of devolving control of valve timing from the ECU to the man in the cockpit. Out of the question.

That said, most teams will give their drivers a 'maximum-attack' override available on the steering wheel for judicious use in wheel-to-wheel situations.

Harnessed to a 100kg fuel limit per race for each driver, the priority for these new engines is to maximise efficiency. In the crudest sense, F1 races in 2014 will be an economy run.

That probably produces a mental image of crawling down the motorway at 56mph parked in the slipstream of a truck, trying to make it to the next service station after driving for 40 minutes with the fuel warning light on. But F1 will be nothing of the sort.

Take whichever all-time great you rate most - Tazio Nuvolari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, whoever - and even those from a long-bygone age will understand the formula of grand prix racing 2014-style.

It remains 'get to the finish as fast as you can and make damned sure you are the first to take the chequered flag'.

How the races will pan out in the early stages of the season is difficult to predict. Some have not been able to complete race simulations during testing, so teams are all operating on limited data.

While it should be easy enough to work out a straight fuel-mileage figure, even with the added complication of using the available electrical energy, races are never that simple.

How will track and grid position dovetail with that? How do you account for safety cars? What's the fuel-saving advantage from running second behind another car, and could that give you the extra performance you need to pass the leader late in the race? Will pitstop undercuts still be de rigueur?

After a disrupted pre-season, F1 still faces numerous unknowns © XPB

These are all questions that you can have a punt at answering, but not decisively, because what teams don't know is what ideas rivals are concocting.

As Williams test team chief Rod Nelson recalls, when he was at Renault in 2003 and drivers had to qualify on their race-fuel loads, few foresaw what became the standard strategy before one team had tried it.

"We were about sixth quickest in Malaysia and they had just changed the qualifying regulations so you had your race-starting fuel on board," says Nelson.

"So we went massively light with Fernando [Alonso], and Ron Dennis was so angry because he didn't understand [how the McLarens had been beaten to pole].

"That was a surprise then. But by the third race everyone was doing the same thing."

The point is that while splitting the race into two, three or four chunks of equal distance in 2003 made sense in isolation, the laptime gain from qualifying on a lighter fuel load skewed that equation.

First stints tended to become shorter in pursuit of track position and soon a 'standard' race strategy evolved. It might take half a season for that to happen this year, and with the 100kg fuel limit (approximately 135 litres, depending on your fuel) playing a similar role in 2014, there is scope for some real surprises early on.

With the need to preserve fuel likely to maximise the difference between a car's fastest and slowest pace (based on fuel alone, this spread should only be around three seconds, but it will be bigger than that), it means that on-track battles will ebb and flow more than ever.

It will be down to teams and drivers to manage that while dealing with other cars that will often intersect with their own strategies along the way. This is tough stuff and some teams will be embarrassed early in the year.

It's not just fuel efficiency that matters when it comes to the new engines. After years of frozen-specification 2.4-litre V8s that offered pretty similar and largely unvarying levels of performance, the engine is once again a key differentiator.

While the engine design for the three suppliers - Ferrari, Renault and Mercedes - was frozen for 2014 on February 28, there will be a development battle through the season in terms of the software used to manage those powerplants.

Ferrari enters the season still trailing Mercedes © LAT

Pre-season testing emphatically suggests the Mercedes is the most-advanced engine at this stage, with Ferrari not too far behind and Renault quite a long way off.

But these are still immature projects, so there is scope for Mercedes to be caught rapidly as the season goes on.

Renault is adamant it is making significant progress and will be ready for the Australian GP, but realistically that means ready to finish, not ready to lead the way.

If it pulls off a miracle and is able to put one or more of its teams at the front, it will be a true chapeau bas moment in grand prix history.

After years of aerodynamic design being the only show in town as far as performance is concerned, this change makes things much more even in 2014.

Traditionally, grand prix racing has been about the fusion of car and engine, and this will offer a fascinating technical storyline to follow even though the regulations dictating engine architecture are very tight and the hardware is locked in for the year, save for changes approved by the FIA on the grounds of reliability, safety or cost-saving.

Major rule changes usually have a big effect on the competitive order. The big teams remain the big teams, the have-nots do not suddenly become the haves, but with Renault struggling the chances of Red Bull being in the mix for early victories look slim.

Renault is making progress with its engine and will continue to do so, meaning that there is scope for Red Bull to climb the grid as the season progresses. But the Renault-engined teams fell dramatically behind in testing, not just on pace, but in terms of work done.

Engine problems create a compound penalty. Not only is it not working well, but while you troubleshoot there is little chance to work on understanding the car itself, and the simple grind of working out how best to use the available engine power.

It could be that the Red Bull is fundamentally the best chassis and the Renault is potentially the best engine hardware-wise once it's running properly, but there has been no opportunity to show that.

Could Williams profit most from the 2014 shake-up? © LAT

The idea of Sebastian Vettel challenging for victory in Melbourne is risible, based on winter testing. Now, the real question is 'how long will he take to catch up?'

Mercedes appears to be starting the season in the best shape. Thanks to prodigious investment, admirable commitment and an early start on its engine project, its 1.6-litre V6 turbo has been comfortably the most convincing power unit pre-season.

Nico Rosberg was the first driver to manage a proper race distance in the first test at Jerez and the first to complete a full-blown qualifying simulation in the first Bahrain test.

With the car looking at least pretty good aerodynamically, this makes Mercedes comfortably the favourite for the early-season races.

While reliability is far from perfect, the car looks as good as any in terms of its chances of making the finish, and with Williams seemingly its closest challenger, the advantage of having German metal bolted into the back of your car is underlined.

Whether its early-season advantage will hold throughout is doubtful. Surely the others will close the gap. But what cannot be foreseen is by how much. So the smart money is on Mercedes.

In simple terms, this new generation of F1 car is faster on the straights but, thanks to cuts in downforce, notably the effective outlawing of exhaust-blown downforce (yes, you've heard that one before but, save for using exhaust gases to help pull air over a small monkey-seat wing, it's actually been done properly this time), the cars are slower and trickier in the corners.

To widespread surprise, the laptimes of the cars are not dramatically different overall, and it's likely that the difference between 2013 pole position times and this year's marks won't be that significant. It's even possible that at some tracks the cars will be faster.

So what does this mean for the drivers?

Well, watching trackside during pre-season testing it's clear that the rear end of the car is less emphatically planted. With significantly more torque available, wheelspin is more of a challenge to control, as Kimi Raikkonen discovered on the final day of the first Bahrain test when he lost it on the power and nosed his Ferrari into the wall.

And he wasn't the only one to have moments.

Raikkonen gets sideways during testing at Jerez © LAT

Things will get more refined as teams understand their cars and, more importantly, engines improve.

This year, engine mapping will have a bigger impact on car balance than ever before, while the new beefed-up ERS has such a profound effect on the behaviour of the rear brakes that braking-by-wire has been brought in.

This can make thousands of adjustments to the braking pressure to ameliorate the impact of harvesting and ensure the brake balance remains consistent.

Without this system, it would not just be difficult to drive the cars, it would be categorically impossible. As pre-season testing showed, some have mastered this technology better than others and it's likely to remain a talking point for many months.

In a race situation, drivers are going to have to deal with all of these things on a lap-by-lap basis while still driving the car to its maximum potential.

And tyre management will still be important, even though the 2014 Pirellis are more durable. Thermal degradation will be significant, but during Bahrain testing there were concerns over maintaining temperature in the front tyres.

So which drivers does this favour? To put it simply, the best ones. By best, this means not just the fastest, but those who can balance the demands of fuel saving, tyre management and racecraft all within the context of going as quickly as possible.

Even when in full-blown fuel-saving mode, driving style can extract a better laptime, so this arguably favours the more cerebral drivers.

And these are usually the best all-round drivers anyway, so don't fall into the trap of thinking that winning races in 2014 will be all down to boffins on the pitwall controlling the men in the cockpit. As always, it will be a true team effort.

Love or loathe this new F1, one thing is beyond doubt: the best drivers and best teams with the best personnel and best ideas will prevail.

No matter how the emphasis shifts towards fuel efficiency and complicated electronic systems, this is the fundamental characteristic that defines F1.

Let's give it a chance. After all, whatever happens it's going to be very different to the past few seasons.

This week's AUTOSPORT magazine is the definitive 2014 Formula 1 season guide, featuring everything you need to know about the new technical rules and every driver and team on the grid