How F1's aero addiction could spoil 2019 masterplan

The package of Formula 1 aerodynamic changes aimed at improving overtaking in 2019 was fast-tracked through the FIA system right on the April 30 deadline - and yet some seven weeks later the teams still do not have a definitive set of regulations.

That should happen soon, but the delay is hardly ideal. The ongoing saga underlines just how hard it is to get complex technical issues right - first time and to everyone's satisfaction - and serves as a case study for how difficult it might become over the next couple of years as Liberty steers the championship towards 2021.

The bottom line is that forcing through change has proved to be a more difficult process than perhaps F1 boss Chase Carey and FIA president Jean Todt anticipated when they began their push for more overtaking after what was widely seen as a boring Australian Grand Prix.

To recap: Todt asked FIA technical guru Nikolas Tombazis to find a way to help cars follow each other more easily. Having worked as a consultant to F1's small team of engineers before joining the FIA, Tombazis was aware of research that had been conducted for 2021, elements of which could be brought forward to 2019.

Some teams were vehemently opposed to the proposed changes, and after various meetings it was agreed that more research was required than the FIA or F1 could do on their own in the time available. Eight teams conducted CFD work to evaluate the proposals, and the consensus was that the changes could indeed have a positive impact on following, although some engineers remained sceptical.

Haste was necessary because the proposals had to be voted on by April 30, when only majority support of the F1 Commission was required. After that cut-off, unanimous backing of the teams would become a prerequisite for any technical changes. In the end, just enough teams agreed to back the FIA and F1's proposals; Red Bull, McLaren and Renault among those that opposed them.

But that rush had a price. After further exploration and debate, it turned out there were still loopholes to be closed. Which is why we have ended up in limbo.

The ongoing saga has given ammunition to those who opposed the changes in the first place, led by Red Bull's Christian Horner.

"Unfortunately because they were rushed through, and done in such haste, it's a particularly poor set of regulations that are going to need to be tidied up either by further regulations, or technical directives," said Horner. "And for what?

"What is so unnecessary is that there's no proof that it will actually deliver what it's supposed to, and the unintended consequence is enormous over the rest of the car.

"Because it's been rushed through there's an awful lot of regulations that have contradicted each other. It's going backwards and forwards, a bit of a messy process.

"Because it's been rushed through there's an awful lot of regulations that have contradicted each other" Christian Horner

"There's going to be another round of discussions. Everybody knows what the fundamental regulations will be, but there still needs to be some tidying up, which will no doubt take more votes, more discussion."

The FIA is now in the unusual position of requiring a follow-up vote to approve the final package, the latest version of which was circulated to teams last week. Discussions were due to continue at a meeting of the Technical Working Group today [June 18], and that debate will be followed by a vote of the F1 Strategy Group on July 4.

Since the April 30 cut-off has passed, all 10 teams will have to agree this time around. If they don't, as Horner suggests, the FIA will have to cover those loopholes by issuing a series of technical directives, to which the teams will be obliged to adhere.

"It is done to the extent that the rules are published," Charlie Whiting said in Canada. "What isn't done is the tidy up, so that's what we're working on. We should have a new version to send to the teams [after Montreal], which we've modified having received comments from a few teams.

"Then we'll see if everyone's happy with that. The alternative, if we don't get a new version agreed formally, is a series of technical directives, which will go some way to clarifying some of the parts that some people think are not clear."

Whiting acknowledged that adding technical directives were not the FIA's preferred option: "It's very messy, and I think everyone would much prefer to have everything in a set of regulations. In the end, I'm sure it'll be fine."

The team technical directors agree that it's just a question of details - but in this business, that's what makes the difference. Nobody wants a double diffuser scenario to pop up because someone had been cleverer than the rest at interpreting the wording.

"The principle has been sort of accepted," Renault technical director Bob Bell said in Montreal. "Grudgingly, because I'm not sure many of us feel that it was the smartest thing to be doing. But anyway, it is what it is. There are definitely details in the regulations that would have caught us all out, and would have caused difficulty on how we interpret the rules, and how we implement them fairly.

"We have to iron those out, we can't go into the uncertainty that would bring. So, it has dragged things on a bit. I think we know what we want, where we're going to get to, even if the rules haven't been formally signed up to. It's not ideal, it's not really the way we should be doing our business."

Williams technical chief Paddy Lowe, the most vocal supporter of the changes from the start, was more upbeat: "I think they'll get there pretty soon. There are just a few more details to iron out, it will all be fixed and everybody will get on with it.

"It's all been sorted out, it's just there's a technicality regarding a vote on one particular point. But I think everybody knows what rules they are working to, from what's been issued effectively in draft. It just needs ratification."

The main issue concerns the theoretical 'boxes' in which teams can place bodywork, and which so often become a talking point when somebody realises they can be exploited - as with the plague of T-wings on engine covers in 2017.

"It's all about that, but there are also things on the brake ducts," said Whiting. "The main point was applying the same rationale to the front and rear brake ducts. That was something some teams were a little unhappy about, so we've set about rectifying that."

"It's just detail," said Bell. "We have so many of these regulation boxes now, and some of them overlap, and if you adjust one of them it can have unintended consequences for another one.

"If you adjust one of the 'boxes' it can have unintended consequences for another" Bob Bell

"You can't read any of those regulations in isolation, you've got to think 'what's the impact of changing that one on this one over here?' It's just going through that process and making sure they're all self-consistent. And that's where it catches us out."

Renault was one of the teams that voted against the changes, although Bell now knows he has to go with the flow. But that doesn't mean he accepts that the changes will impact overtaking, even though Renault's own research was positive.

"Most teams did contribute to that process," he said. "And our work contributed to our understanding of the mechanism by which one car suffers in the wake of another, and it does suggest the direction that F1 wants to take is probably a reasonable one to take.

"But I don't know if we know enough, and I don't know if we know enough about the sensitivities involved to know if it will work."

Bell reckons we'll have to wait until the cars actually run on track at the start of next season before we get a clear picture of whether the changes have had a meaningful impact.

"We can look at changes in the causes for overtaking characteristics, and wind tunnel work and CFD work can give you a flavour for that," he said. "But it's very difficult to judge the effects until you actually implement them - put cars on track, and let the drivers drive them.

"It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that you could, in isolation, produce aerodynamic characteristics of these cars that allowed them in theory to run closer to one another with less effect. But if they just generally made the handling of both cars - the one in front and the one behind - bad overall, then the drivers may not want to run that close to one another. It's a complicated thing.

"There are an awful lot of variables that aren't captured in some of these studies. If you do windtunnel tests or CFD tests you end up with very well defined starting positions, with the positioning of the two cars relative to one another.

"But we may find that they are very sensitive to very slight changes in lateral positioning, or very slight changes in the atmospheric conditions - that no one will have had the time to properly study in the windtunnel.

"So we don't go into it with certainty other than in these very pristine conditions that you set up for yourself in a windtunnel test, or a CFD test. And that's why you need to make the cars and you need to go and race them, and see in real-world conditions whether it's an improvement or not. I'm not personally convinced that we've done enough work to be able to say with any certainty what effect it will have."

In true F1 style, the teams are already working on 2019 with the information they have - trying to find out just what impact the changes to front and rear wings and brake ducts will have on performance.

From now on, making it easier for drivers to follow each other is not on their agendas - it's all about making their own cars as fast possible.

"We've started the process," said Force India technical director Andrew Green. "Learning what we can and can't do, what these rules entail, and what they do to the performance of the car. What we haven't done is look at anything that happens downstream, I mean behind the rear wing. We haven't looked at what's happening to the following car. That's not in our remit at all, we're now into making the car go quick."

"We're doing it in the way we normally go about it," said Bell. "We're not designing these cars with an eye to making them better in the wake of one another, we're doing what we normally do, which is designing them to be performant in clear air. Because that's all we can do. That's part of the problem with this whole thing."

The CFD work that the teams did will be engulfed by a massively bigger effort to make the cars go fast

Bell makes a good point. The little bit of CFD work that the teams did to see if cars could follow more easily has now passed into history, and in the weeks and months to come it will be engulfed by a massively bigger effort to make them go fast within the new aero restrictions.

"The only real way to get an improvement is to somehow find a way to force the teams to design the cars to be more performant in the wake of another car," said Bell. "And maybe do that by running reverse grids, and then suddenly it become very important to be able to cut through traffic, and worry about other cars.

"Or maybe you incentivise it by allowing more CFD or windtunnel tests, but only if you do it in the wake of another car. Unless we do something like that the teams have no incentive to do it. And for all its efforts, and they're good efforts, F1 only has a handful of aerodynamicists working on it.

"The average F1 team's aerodynamics department has got 90 people, some of them are probably nearer 150, some of them might be 60. But you multiply that by 10, that's 900 people. What do you think is going to make the biggest difference - do you incentivise that 900, or do you incentivise that four or five? It's a numbers game..."

A decade ago the FIA's Overtaking Working Group came up with a promising package of changes, which ultimately didn't work - in part because at that very point the teams came up with the 'outwash' front wings that we now know are very detrimental to the following car.

Will those hundreds of aerodynamicists now pursue ideas that have similar impact, cancelling out the laudable aims of the 2019 rule changes?

"They could well do," said Green. "And that's what we're going to find out in the next nine months. But better to do it now than wait until 2021. Better to have a result next year so we can sit down and say 'actually that worked here, it didn't work there' - that gives us an even better place to go from for 2021.

"Do the experiment. There's a hell of a lot more analysis been done on the 2019 car on overtaking than was ever done on these cars. So, it's got to be better."