F1's prescriptive 2021 rules will only cause design convergence

On track, the United States Grand Prix was all about Lewis Hamilton securing his sixth world championship. But what happened off-track was also significant, with the 2021 regulations rubber-stamped by the FIA's World Motor Sport Council and presented to the world last Thursday.

I suppose it's good to see that Formula 1 can meet its deadlines. With FOM and the FIA working closely over the last year or so, they have finally released the detailed technical, sporting and financial regulations for 2021 to hit the end-of-October deadline.

That's a big contrast to our in-or-out MPs in the United Kingdom who still can't make up their minds about Brexit. So, well done F1 for finally getting it done.

Financial regulations

The financial regulations are an important part of the rules. They consist of 41 pages, all in an attempt to control each team's yearly spend. As Ross Brawn said, it is necessary to protect the teams from themselves. That's a bold statement and will surely have given the egos of some of the team principals a kick up the backside.

I have never been in a team where the budget didn't matter and at $175million - with the drivers, the top three earning personnel, the commercial department etc not included - it's not what I would consider a hand-to-mouth budget. I would imagine that it will have zero effect outside the top three teams that are the biggest current spenders.

It is a first attempt, so I suppose everything has to start somewhere. But the thing I question is the control on simulation tools running time. The teams need a windtunnel, a comprehensive CFD department and rig testing tools. And the engine manufacturers need transient engine and gearbox test dynos - these are all very expensive to put in place. They are even more expensive when they are not in operation.

The outlay in excess of £20m for a new windtunnel - such as the one McLaren is building - is crazy when you can't use it to its maximum capability. The teams will use it for the running hours they are allowed, but by not being able to take that extra bit of time to optimise something before they manufacture it is, on many occasions, a false economy.

Sporting regulations

The financial regulations blend into the sporting regulations, which runs to 84 pages. One of the first things that stood out to me was about track limits. The sporting regulations state that the white line is the track limit and that the kerb forms no part of the circuit.

At Austin's Turn 19 last weekend, the drivers were not penalised when they went outside of the white line. But in Turn 9 at the same track, if you wanted to you could effectively drive around on the grass and not get penalised.

Looking quickly through the technical regulations, I would compare them to painting by numbers

It would be a lot easier for all of us, and especially the commentators, if at least this simple track limits regulation was consistent. Even more importantly, the planned future regulation must be defined correctly rather that a random stab at controlling track limits abuse differently from track to track and even corner to corner.

One of the objectives for 2021 is to compress the event from what is now called a four-day weekend into a three-day weekend. This is not a bad idea, but the teams really need to buy into this philosophy as currently there will be team members at the circuit a week before the event.

They will be preparing the garages and setting up motorhomes, so this also needs some control. The mass of mechanics and engineers for the European races will show up Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, finish the car build and scutineer the cars on Thursday afternoon.

To do all that on a Friday and also have a couple of practice sessions will lead to a fairly stressful day for everyone and, if anything goes wrong, a lot less time to put it right.

On top of that potential cost saving, FOM wants to put on more and more demonstration days. For these, the teams need to take a completely different set of mechanics and an extra car. These are very well supported events but they do cost the teams extra money.

I'm pretty sure there will be pressure for FOM to pay for these extra events but no matter what pocket the money comes out of it ends up not going into someone else's pocket - namely the teams by way of a reduced prize money.

Technical regulations

This document is a very comprehensive set of regulations consisting of a hefty 138 pages. Preparing this was not something that was done overnight and trying to weed through it and understand the rules enough to have some vision of what you can create will take months.

In the early '90s, you could take the technical regulations home with you, read and decipher them over a weekend and start drawing a car on the Monday morning. Not anymore.

Now, it will take a team of people specialising in each area of the car to have any hope of being in a position to get their heads around them and potentially pick out any grey areas that don't stand out at first glance.

I suppose this is good and will mean there is no room for another trump card like the double diffuser of 2009, but it is very prescriptive and will definitely reduce the opportunity for individual flare.

Looking quickly through them I would compare them to painting by numbers. They are basically laid out with the location of everything as X, Y and Z coordinates and as long as you are capable of optimising the finer detail the descriptive part of what you are able to do then every component and its location is well and truly defined.

It's all about drawing out a concept to the dimensions defined in the regulations and then tiding up the detail. I suppose this is what F1 and the FIA set out to achieve and they are hoping that it closes up the grid and induces closer racing. But I'm not sure it will achieve either.

The cars will have less overall downforce, at least for 2021, but with the ground effect underfloor concept they will definitely hang onto more of it in traffic. But, overall, the following car will still lose a reasonable percentage.

F1 says that currently cars are at 55% of their downforce (which I think is a bit exaggerated) when following one car length behind another, with that increasing to 86% with the new rules. But that seems optimistic.

Whatever the number works out to be, when the teams optimise the aerodynamic performance of the cars it will still be a loss and if that is so, why should a car with similar aerodynamic performance, capable of doing a similar lap time in clean airflow to the car in front, be able to overtake? Only time will tell.

I wonder how many teams will be contracting lawyers to read the rules word for word to find the loopholes in the wording

F1 put together three different visual concepts to show that there is still the potential to create something that has a team's own individual stamp. I have always liked nice looking cars and these three concepts look pretty good.

But I'm afraid that is not what will happen when the teams start to optimise the opportunities that are left for them to play around with. It's easy to show some different concepts but the teams will soon converge on the optimum design and with so few areas of opportunity it really won't be long before that convergence takes place.

The balance between the car performance and the tyre performance is still the biggest question mark. We also need to remember that the mass of the complete car has also gone up from 743kg to 768kg. This is an increase of roughly 3%, which is a significant increase to the longitudinal and lateral braking and cornering loads that the tyres must resist. When you consider that the cars will probably start the season with 25-30% less downforce, the cornering forces will be reduced significantly.

With the larger-diameter rims and reduced sidewall tyres this will be a whole new learning curve for both the tyre manufacturer and the teams, and the thing that really makes the tyre work is how much downforce you can have loading the tyres up to give you the braking and cornering grip. All of these are unknowns until the first tests of 2021 take place and I'm pretty sure that at those first tests there will be a few surprised people in the pitlane.

So to sum up, do I like what I have seen? Yes, the artistic impressions are visually exciting but the devil is in the detail and it will be the teams that find those areas of development that might just alter what we see.

Will the small teams close the gap to the big teams? I see no reason why this should happen other than a small team hitting a lucky streak. The big teams still have more funds, more people, better facilities and with the driver budgets not being part of the cost cap the best and most expensive drivers.

I'm mainly disappointed in the increase in the minimum weight, which is partly driven by the switch to 18-inch wheels. It should have at worst been left alone to allow the teams to make decisions on how they could achieve that lower weight limit.

Perhaps it would have meant the teams wouldn't have fitted all those sensors that allow them to optimise car performance from the back of the garage.

With the regulations now consisting of a total of 263 pages, first of all I'm very happy that I am not directly involved anymore! Secondly, I wonder how many teams will be contracting lawyers to read them word for word to find the loopholes in the wording to allow the engineers to bring something new or novel to the table.

The US GP

A big congratulations to Lewis Hamilton on winning his sixth drivers' title. Three in a row demands real focus on the job in hand and as he often says he takes it one race at a time, which always sounds a bit coy but in reality it is correct.

If you started to look at accumulating points just for championship success too early, it would be very easy to trip up. I agree with him it is best to simply go for the win every race weekend and if you get enough of them then the championships will come your way.

It was a good race in Austin. The track is very demanding with its fast, flowing section where aerodynamic stability really comes into play and then some of the slower corners required good braking and traction - so a good mix of everything. The bumps just add another dimension, but no matter what you throw at it, Mercedes as usual handles it best.

The split in strategy was an example of that. Valtteri Bottas pitted early on lap 14 of 56 to cover off Max Verstappen, which led him into having to do a two-stop strategy. But he immediately bought into that and put in some quick laps.

Ferrari needs to prove to the other teams in Brazil that the technical directive issued by the FIA at Austin had no influence on its performance

Hamilton pitted on lap 24, which left him with a 32-lap stint to reach the chequered flag. Bottas pitted for a second time on lap 35 and found himself just over nine seconds behind Hamilton. It would have been easy to let his head drop, as we have seen him do in the past. But no, this time he was the one that got the hammer down very quickly, eating into Hamilton's lead and passing him on his second attempt with four laps to go to take the win.

Bottas will have learned a lot from this race and basically did a Hamilton on Hamilton. That never-say-die attitude is what he will need to show more regularly if he is to take the season-long battle to Hamilton and stop him winning his seventh world title next year.

In the race, Ferrari was the disappointment of the day. For some reason, it really lacked pace and then Vettel had a suspension failure, with the lower right-rear wishbone forward leg failing.

It is the suspension member that reacts to the suspension forces put into the system by the pushrod. It is in tension from that load - plus under braking it also reacts to the braking forces so the tension load is increased. With the bumps and that extra inside kerb at the apex of Turn 8 it cried enough.

But none of that relates to Ferrari's lack of speed. Yes, it was very close to pole but Sunday was probably the most disappointing race of the season. Ferrari just seemed to lack grip, even on the medium tyres at the start of the race its cars often locked-up and were just not able to carry the cornering speed. When Charles Leclerc changed to the hards, it was more about damage limitation and survival to the finish.

Brazil will be a big weekend for Ferrari. It needs to prove to the other teams that the technical directive issued by the FIA over the Austin weekend regarding fuel-flow measurement has had no influence on its performance.

The only way of really doing that is to go out and dominate the race weekend, but that won't be easy. Now that Mercedes and Hamilton have nothing to lose, it's all about getting more wins.

Mercedes started the season with eight race wins in a row, so will want more to bookend the season by winning the last three.

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