Eight times when F1 teams got new rules very wrong

When a new era of Formula 1 rolls into view, it comes with the hope that a clean slate of the technical regulations will inspire a fierce, multi-team and driver battle for both championship titles that goes down to the wire. While it’s the reverse that’s more often the case, in that one team steals an early march to let its rivals play catch-up over the following years, at least the 2022 rules reset has been specifically established to generate a more competitive field. 

Unlike in 2017 when Formula 1 set about to make the fastest-ever grand prix cars, this time around the intent since day dot has been to inspire machines that are close in lap time and to also totally reconfigure the way in which they generate downforce to boost the amount of overtaking. 

However, the desired multi-team dogfight for the season that lies in wait relies on a couple of factors. Firstly, can Ferrari and/or Red Bull plus any other candidate truly take the fight to Mercedes, which has been the pre-eminent force since 2014. Secondly, will Mercedes stay put at the sharp end of the grid? 

While the 2022 season marks arguably the greatest-ever technical shake-up since the dawn of grand prix racing, history reveals that previous major rule changes have a habit of toppling the leading teams. Here are eight times when the big hitters got it wrong.  

Louis Chiron, Alfa Romeo Tipo-B P3 leads Rudolf Caracciola, Mercedes-Benz W25, Achille Varzi, Alfa Romeo Tipo-B P3, Rene Dreyfus, Bugatti T59, Hans Stuck, Auto Union A-type and Tazio Nuvolari, Bugatti T59 at the start

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1934 Alfa Romeo

A clean sweep of the three European Championship grands prix in 1932 proved that state-owned Alfa Romeo was operating at its peak. And, with little else to prove as the Great Depression remained, the manufacturer retired from racing for 1933. The cutting-edge works Tipo Bs weren’t initially offered to customer team Scuderia Ferrari, but Luigi Fagioli and Louis Chiron still bagged Enzo Ferrari a brace at the tail end of the grand epreuve campaign. Tazio Nuvolari, meanwhile, was left unconvinced and switched allegiance to Maserati.

Some of the larger entries were creeping towards a tonne, leading to the 1934 introduction of the 750kg dry weight limit. The idea was to deter larger capacity engines and reduce speeds.

Bugatti was already in decline to leave a spending war between nations. But there was a lot more German reichsmark than Italian lira. Alfa, having found another 250cc from its twin-supercharged straight-eight, won in Monaco and at Montlhery, until the stretched two-year-old chassis was eventually blown away by the more potent Silver Arrows after the Mercedes W25 had navigated its early teething problems.

Come 1935, Mercedes flexed its muscles to win five of the seven championship races. Alfa, the former pre-eminent force, could only nick the spoils on its rival’s home turf at the Nurburgring thanks to one of Nuvolari’s greatest drives.

José Froilán González, Ferrari 553, leads Karl Kling, Mercedes W196

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1954 Ferrari

An Alberto Ascari-led Ferrari 500 attack crushed the opposition during the 1952 and 1953 world championship seasons, run to Formula 2 regulations. Of the eight 1953 races, it only ceded the Italian GP finale to Maserati.

For the following season, as per the fresh F1 regulations, the Prancing Horse’s four-banger was upped by 500cc to meet the new 2.5-litre naturally aspirated limit. But amid a pay dispute (and perhaps more promise from Lancia’s D50 design), the talismanic Ascari had gone, and Ferrari faced stiff domestic competition.

In the early part of the campaign, the more powerful Maserati 250F was baptised and enjoyed a flourish thanks to Juan Manuel Fangio’s turn of speed on home soil in the Argentina opener before again bagging the spoils in Belgium. Then deep-pocketed Mercedes rocked up with the W196 and its state-of-the-art, direct-injection M196 engine that blew the field away.

Ferrari, meanwhile, swapped between the lightly breathed-on 625 and 553. Neither was a mongrel. Jose Froilan Gonzalez expertly guided the former to win at Silverstone, before Mike Hawthorn steered the 553 to success in the campaign-closer at Pedralbes, Spain. But that was only after the brilliant new Lancia D50s of Ascari and veteran Luigi Villoresi had retired along with two further race leaders. In the face of such potent competition, the Scuderia’s evolutionary approach hadn’t cut it.

Mechanics work on the Climax engine in Jack Brabham's Cooper T58

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1961 Cooper

Cooper set the blueprint for the modern F1 car when Jack Brabham guided his T51 to championship glory in 1959. From then on, to win, the engine needed to sit behind the driver. The Australian would double his title count the following year while the Italians gave the front-engine layout a last hurrah.

But Cooper’s run of form stopped in its tracks as the 1.5-litre engine cap came into play for 1961. It might have been an early adopter of mid-mounted power, but Cooper’s lowline concept was being replicated by rivals and with better results. What Cooper didn’t then need was for engine supplier Climax to misfire as it conformed to the new rules, which the British teams naively felt they could stop coming in.

The T55, and the creations of fellow British ‘garagistas’ Lotus and BRM, were stymied by having to make do with four cylinders that couldn’t match the power and torque of Ferrari’s V6. When Brabham led Bruce McLaren for a 1-2 on the T55’s non-championship debut at Aintree, it proved to be a false dawn.

Brabham’s title defence had already faltered come the belated arrival of the Climax V8 and the T58 for the German GP at the Nurburgring. Second in qualifying looked promising, but a habit of overheating left Cooper to fall from first to a distant fourth in the teams’ table.

Jackie Stewart, BRM P83

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1966 BRM

In an era remembered as ‘the Return to Power’, engine capacity doubled to 3000cc. Ambitiously, having snubbed a V12, BRM also doubled its cylinder count to 16 for the P83 challenger of 1966.

Given that its 1.5-litre V8 had won the title in 1962 before landing second in the points three years running, BRM’s reasonable aim was to stack a pair of the tried and tested motors on top of each other and reap the powerful rewards. The costly trade-off was a late arrival, excess weight, a thirst for fuel, and extreme fragility from the eight camshafts and four ignition systems.

Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill retired from the three world championship races they entered with the car as BRM rued another 16-cylinder experiment. The team based in the Midlands market town of Bourne never again threatened for a title.

Arguably, the fall from grace for reigning champion Lotus was more severe as it slipped behind BRM to fifth in the points (BRM’s bacon being saved to a degree by the fine two-litre version of the ageing P261). But this was inspired by running the same unwieldy H16 powerplant. And Jim Clark did snare the engine’s sole points-paying win at Watkins Glen in the Lotus 43 while, in the background, Colin Chapman was signing a deal with Ford to bag the game-changing Cosworth DFV…

Ayrton Senna peers into his new Williams FW16, which was proving a handful to set-up

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1994 Williams

Although Williams completed its run to three consecutive teams’ titles in 1994, that relied on a phoenix-like resurrection and the fall of initial pacesetter Benetton. It all came after the ban of driver aids, with the outlawing of active suspension wounding the FW16 gravely.

Its FW15C predecessor had been tailored to work with active ride, which was fundamental to stabilising the car to make the aerodynamics tick. In 1993, Williams enjoyed statistically its quickest-ever season, with a 1.7% advantage over the second-best team according to the fastest laps set during each race weekend.

But, when the active suspension pioneer was asked to forget the past two years of learning, the passive FW16 proved immensely troublesome early on. It was barely the pacesetter, with a 0.092% advantage, helped by Ayrton Senna’s three mighty poles early in 1994. The issue was the car’s tiny operating window, with its sensitivity to rideheight changes a particular headache as the rear unsettled over bumps in slow corners.

“The 1994 car was not a good car at all at the start of the year,” chief designer Adrian Newey reflected. “It was very difficult to drive. We developed the aerodynamics using active suspension and we developed them [to work] in a very small window.”

Shorter sidepods arrived in France to remedy the stalling airflow, while an FW16B was ushered in for the German GP – race nine of 16. That, combined with diffuser rule changes and Michael Schumacher not being able to score in four races, ended Benetton’s charge in what remains the most heated F1 season.

Jacques Villeneuve, Williams Mecachrome FW20 enters the pits with a broken rear wing

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1998 Williams

FIA president Max Mosley had rising corner speeds in the crosshairs when he tasked the F1 Technical Working Group with devising the 1998 regulations. Grooved tyres arrived and were to be fitted to 20cm narrower cars. This presented an almost clean sheet of paper to designers, and that was a worry for Williams.

While the team had lost a disenchanted Adrian Newey to McLaren for 1997, Jacques Villeneuve still led team-mate Heinz-Harald Frentzen to a 1-2 in the drivers’ table (after Michael Schumacher’s exclusion) aboard an FW19 that was very much penned by the Brit. The narrow FW20 was not, yet still ill-advisedly attempted to shrink Newey’s ideas to fit the new dimensions.

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This coincided with Renault pulling its factory engine supply to leave the red Winfield-branded Williamses to run year-old, second-string Mecachrome-badged V10s that didn’t enjoy regular and lavish updates. Uninspiring pace and a declining reliability record resulted in a 1.364% pace deficit to Bridgestone-shod McLaren, which had leapfrogged Goodyear runners Williams and Ferrari, and was Williams’s worst gap since 1989.

With just three podiums from 16 races, and having failed to score a win for the first time in 10 seasons, Williams fell to third in the teams’ chart, while Villeneuve’s title defence dropped him to fifth before he departed for BAR.

Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari F60 arrives back on the back of a truck

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2009 Ferrari

Slick tyres returned, electrical engine boosting debuted with KERS, front wings grew wider, rear wings taller, and the fiddly aerodynamic appendages that had come to litter the cars were done away with. But, as a new chapter began, Ferrari’s title successes ended to create a trophy drought that lingers on.

When the FIA adjudged the innovative double-diffuser – brought by Brawn, Williams and Toyota from the off – to be legal, the F60 challenger from Maranello was dealt a near-fatal blow. The Ferrari designers had to massively play catch-up to develop their own, only to accept that the unwieldy gearbox refused to allow the aero concept to be effective.

Unable to properly configure the car, Ferrari scrapped the F60’s development altogether by the midpoint. While McLaren had also slipped back considerably in the beginning, it and Red Bull could at least eventually make the airflow work as they recovered to find form in the later races.

Ferrari suffered further when Felipe Massa was sidelined by his Hungarian GP qualifying head injury, and contemporary reports suggested that Kimi Raikkonen’s lack of energy was proving infectious. The Finn did win at Spa in a ‘B-spec’ car that had been on a diet and gained improved front geometry. Even then, the success was attributed to the potency of Magneti Marelli’s KERS system.

In Ferrari’s worst season since 1993, a title defence ended with fourth in the teams’ table and, under the old scoring system, it was some 102 points adrift of the victorious Brawn.

Christian Horner, Team Principal, Red Bull Racing, talks to Dietrich Mateschitz

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2014 Red Bull

There were clues that Red Bull might not enjoy the dominance that had earned it a full house of drivers’ and constructors’ trophies between 2010 and 2013. For one, its final effort at a 2.4-litre V8 machine in the RB9 had been developed late into the year to help Sebastian Vettel to a last crown. Plus, Red Bull was about to wave goodbye to the blown floors it had unlocked so successfully.

Then, the dawn of the 1600cc V6 turbo hybrids exposed a relationship between chassis engineers in Milton Keynes and the Renault engine department that was far more diffuse than a true works team operating under one roof. Making matters worse, Mercedes had been testing a single-cylinder set-up for four years already. And Red Bull would pass FIA crash tests two months later than its rivals.

These were bad signs. But few would have predicted a four-day pre-season test at Jerez as abysmal as that of January 2014.

Autosport ran headlines declaring ‘crisis’, ‘disarray’ and ‘disaster’ after the RB10 completed just 21 laps over four days. Not only was that the fewest of any team, but the squad also propped up the timing screens as a litany of problems were revealed. Overheating, vibrations, faults with the turbo, and software and mapping issues were chief among them.

Three wins for Toro Rosso graduate Daniel Ricciardo salvaged some credibility, as did second in the teams’ championship while Ferrari could only muster fourth behind Williams. But finishing almost 300 points behind Mercedes reflected the chasm that had opened as Red Bull tumbled from its perch.

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10 stops on track, passed by Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari F14 T

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