The major steps needed to break Formula 1's glass ceiling

Formula 1's glass ceiling is a uniquely modern problem.

That the three big teams have the largest budgets, the fastest cars and a monopoly on success is well-known, and grand prix racing has always been about the few haves grinding the many 
have-nots into oblivion.

But in the past few years the impregnability of the big three has been shored up by a force field surrounding them. This protective barrier militates against what might be called 'social mobility' in F1.

In recent years, Racing Point and Renault have hit the glass ceiling and bounced off it - albeit for different reasons. McLaren is the latest to claw its way to the head of the midfield pack and, like Renault at the end of 2018, has set its sights on striking out into the wilderness in 2020 and inching closer to the big three. It's an ambitious and perilous quest, one that has proved fruitless so far for Renault.

In times of rules stability, it's true things close up. The mid-pack has edged closer to the pace since the latest high-downforce regulations were misguidedly imposed in 2017. That season, the best midfield team was almost 2.2% down, which dropped to just under 2.0% in 2018 then 1.6% this year.

But the gap between the back of the top three and the midfield has closed only from 1.2% to just under 1%. That amounts to nine-tenths around a 90-second lap. That's what has made the midfield - or 'Class B' - battle a discrete entity. And even if another few tenths of a percent are shaved off next year, the 2021 rule changes will likely spread the field once more.

The reasons for this clearly defined split are multi-fold, but for a 21st century F1 car the first place you must look is aerodynamics. This is the most potent differentiator of car pace, and it's not a one-dimensional question of overall load. The best teams are those able to manipulate and control the airflow across a wide range of conditions.

That's why F1's latest pretender, McLaren, is investing heavily in a new in-house windtunnel as part of its bid to return to the big time, even though it won't be online until 2021 at the earliest - by which time its use will be further restricted.

Grand prix cars are the sum of the underlying science, but it's not simply a case of applying the laws of physics in a steady state because that would be too easy.

In the real world, cars are permanently shifting in yaw, pitch and ride height. The tyres flex as they clatter over the kerbs, as do the aero components. Track and ambient temperatures change. Turbulence from other cars can, in some cases, be detected in a minor way more than 10 seconds after another car has passed by.

That's just a few of the multitude of interacting factors that change how a car moving through the air behaves. CFD, windtunnel, dynamic rigs and driver-in-loop technologies are nothing more than simulators of reality with all the limitations that entails, and understanding how to mitigate and work within the limitations of them is critical.

One example is the windtunnel tyres, imperfect 60% replicas of their real-world cousins that don't deflect and respond to the airflow in the same way. This is something several small teams point to as an area where the giants are simply better equipped to compensate.

Even F1's behemoths cannot make physics bend to their will, but their understanding of how to hold these complex cars in the tight operating window - and the factors that can knock it out of that - is greater than the rest.

If you know more about, say, the impact of steering angle and car attitude on the aero map, and can control the centre of pressure to give optimum balance characteristics across a range of transient states, you can make huge gains.

The simplicity of that sentence sells short the tremendous complexity of the challenge.

It's obvious the top three teams have the biggest budgets and the best facilities. But they also benefit from compound gains.

No grand prix car is created from a truly clean sheet of paper; they are underpinned by years of investment, experiments, tests and experience that means each design stands on the shoulders of its predecessors.

Something you learned through a costly research programme five years ago and is a given for a big team might lie in the part of the developmental map that's still labelled 'here be dragons' for others.

It's an iterative process and there's no way to shortcut that. The days when you could make a giant leap with some clever innovation are long gone.

On top of that, the big three teams are all works operations - Mercedes and Ferrari fully integrated and Red Bull is working hand-in-glove with Honda. Setting aside the mysteries and controversies of Ferrari's 2019 power unit advantage, the other three manufacturers in F1 are performing in a similar ballpark, and integration with chassis and packaging has become, proportionally, a bigger performance gain.

This is an area where Renault is underachieving and working hard to get more from next year and beyond.

The budget cap, set at $175 million (with various exemptions such as driver costs) 
will help to mitigate this problem in the long term, but it won't eliminate the advantage the biggest teams have built over many years just like that.

Cash doesn't guarantee you success, but it is a pre-requisite in F1 - more so than ever. Grand prix racing will have to mind the gap for a few years yet...