Jon Noble: Why even F1’s cleverest minds get lost in explaining rollercoaster season

The Formula 1 2024 season has been marked as a year of confusion. Beyond McLaren seeming to be fast at all tracks, in all temperatures and on all types of surface, everyone else is bouncing around scratching their heads about what is going on.

As Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff admitted recently: “We move between exuberance and depression. Before the summer, everyone wrote off Ferrari. They come back, very strong. Before the summer, it was Mercedes who was the leading team, and clearly is not today anymore. It is so intricate to identify those performance contributors where at times even the most clever people are lost.”

Trying to unpick the story of this campaign is incredibly hard because, while there are some trends – like teams hitting floor problems that trigger bouncing or imbalance issues – that does not explain all of the wild swings.

Mercedes in particular has experienced the extremes perhaps more than most, without there actually being a logical explanation to what is happening. The floor it introduced for Spa, but was taken off the car after Friday practice, did not bring the progress hoped for. But even going back to the same underside that won in Austria, Britain and Belgium has not stopped it falling away since F1 returned to action at the Dutch GP.

Red Bull too has found itself scratching its head about just what has happened to its RB20 over the course of this season. For while it too experienced some floor issues with its Imola upgrade, that still does not explain how it went from being in a totally different league in the early races to suddenly having to dig deep from the Miami Grand Prix.

While it is all too easy to throw around theories to try to pinpoint just what has happened in the fight between teams, the reality is that if the true experts – who are the brightest engineers in the world working for the teams – don’t have a clear explanation for what is going on, then what hope do those of us have who can only scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the complexities of F1 car performance?

Red Bull remains unclear why its form has deteriorated, having been the dominant team early in the season

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

What does appear to be clear though is that this current generation of cars – especially as they seem to be getting close to their performance ceiling – are incredibly sensitive to a whole host of parameters that need to line up. As the teams get close to the limit of what is possible, the old linear relationship between more downforce equalling more performance has gone out of the window.

As Wolff said: “We were before the summer [break] pretty clear where the performance came from. And today we are less because what everyone seems to find out is that more downforce doesn't always translate into better lap time.

“Now this is not the sensational news of the century, but it is the interaction between track, temperatures, tyres, balance, aerodynamics, and driver impulse. It is so many variables that if you get all your ducks in one line, you are fast. And if there is just one factor that is out of line, you can look quickly very bad.”

"This season has been very particular in situations where you think you have brought some downforce to the track but you actually measure it and it doesn't make it faster"
Laurent Mekies

This is a story shared up and down the grid, with RB team principal Laurent Mekies saying that what appears to be an “unusual” situation for teams is one that requires deep analysis.

“It's about managing to increase your capabilities, and to bring positive data to the racetrack,” he said. “This means increasing the understanding, which means increasing the tools in the virtual environment, your correlations, and then that's how you bring more performance to the racetrack.

“Yes, it's been quite unusual... don't get me wrong. As a midfield team, we have always been more limited in our capabilities to develop through a season. But this season has been very particular in situations where you think you have brought some downforce to the track but you actually measure it and it doesn't make it faster.

RB team principal Mekies admits to being perplexed at points in the season, which has required deeper dives into data to understand why certain upgrades have not delivered the expected performance

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“That forces you to go back into your tools, to go back into your solutions. And you do find reason and explanations. It is just in a way and in a level of detail that you probably have not been looking at before.”

This new found intricacy in understanding cars at a micro level may ultimately be one of the key takeaways that teams have from this year. With a bigger premium on the accuracy of data coming out of the wind tunnel and CFD, allied to the information being fed from the factory in terms of developments and set-ups, it may be that the key to progress is which of the smartest brains can turn confusion into answers.

That ultimately makes F1 much more of a smart engineering game than it has been in the past – where the contribution of many people, not just a single genius designing the car, is the best route to success. As rivals continue scratching their heads in trying to work out what McLaren has got right this year that they have got wrong, the answers may well come from within.

As Wolff pointed out: “Obviously, in F1, we tend to pick one person and say that's the game changer. But it's not. It is many, many, many people that influence the performance, and I think to sum it all up, they [McLaren] are just doing a good job in F1. There's no such thing as miracles in F1, since the double diffuser...”

Getting to the nub of what McLaren has done right is a question all F1 teams want to understand

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images