The asymptotic theory that should give F1 fans hope for a closer 2024 season

Mercedes technical director James Allison is always one of the more fascinating and fun people to interview in the Formula 1 paddock. The first reason is that, as a journalist, you have to be totally sure you don’t trip up with your questions and fumble your words in asking something stupid. That is because Allison is one of the sharpest there is at picking up every nuance you utter. So, if you have made a blunder, he will be on to it and he will make you squirm with a huge smile on his face. He confesses it’s all part of the fun of making interviews a bit less boring!

Survive that challenge though, by asking the right questions, and Allison is always hugely insightful and tremendously eloquent in his explanations and theories about where things stand with his team and F1 as a whole.

His vocabulary is also so extensive that there are occasions when you have to reach for the dictionary afterwards just to be sure of exactly what he was talking about. This week has been no exception, as Allison – who has just signed a contract extension – offered some early thoughts on the season ahead as Mercedes plots to get itself back to the front of the grid.

As a veteran of F1, Allison has been around long enough to know that performance is totally relative. A team can have the best winter it has ever had – finding a miraculous two seconds in the wind tunnel for example – but that would count for absolutely nothing if every other competitor had found 2.5s gains. That is why, despite some degree of confidence over the positive signs Mercedes is getting from it simulator model, Allison is not taking anything for granted about where his squad will stack up when it all shakes out in Bahrain.

But what perhaps stood out from a chat with him was his suggestion that he reckons the dominant Red Bull team may not be able to make the kind of leap forward with its RB20 that some have been fearing.

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

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While McLaren CEO Zak Brown said earlier this week that he feared Red Bull could unleash an “unpleasant surprise”, having begun development of its 2024 car much earlier than everyone else, Allison has hinted at there being a glass ceiling to its potential. That is based on his theory that, with the ground effect regulations being all about the dynamics of running a car as close to the ground as you dare – which is a hard physical limit - that there was no longer the kind of unlimited potential of years gone by where adding more downforce brought an automatic improvement in lap time.

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Speaking about the mood of the team and thoughts for 2024, Allison said: “There is just a little bit that nestles in the back of our heads, which is that the rules themselves have a much more sort of clear upper bound to them in the amount of lap time these cars are capable of producing than the older generation of cars, which the more love you gave them and the more labour you put into them, the faster they got, seemingly without end.

Until it is known what secrets Red Bull have up their sleeves after switching off development of their RB19 early, we won’t know yet if this is a theory that opens the door to a truly spectacular 2024

“I think if you look at last year, you see from the start of the season to the end of the season, although Red Bull's dominance was near complete and they didn't look vulnerable even to the last race of the year, if you look at the bigger picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing. All the cars in Q1 would sort of squash down within one second of each other, and that's not coincidence. It's a trend that has happened from 2022, continued in 2023 and I think will continue to show itself in 2024 because the gains are getting more and more asymptotic. I think therefore that in addition to us I hope having worked well, my guess is it's going to be relatively busier near the top of the grid this time around than last.”

For those that don’t know (and I confess I didn’t), the official definition of asymptotic relates to a line or figure that becomes increasingly exact as a variable approaches a limit, usually infinity. In effect, and much easier to understand in F1 terms, it is the law of diminishing returns.

In this case, it would be that Red Bull got a head start because it got closer to the ultimate potential of a current generation car, and it now faces a headache in being able to eke out more progress. That means those behind, which didn’t get close to the peak performance, have plenty more scope to find – which has been evidenced by the grid closing up rather than getting further apart. A quick look at qualifying times last year, especially in reference to Allison’s comment regarding Q1, show he is absolutely right.

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Allison suspects the F1 pack will converge with a stable ruleset in the ground effect era

Looking at the comparisons in the table below for the first races and last races of the previous three seasons, it is patently clear the gap at the front is being chipped away. The cut-off time to get through to Q2 compared to the top car is now so much smaller than the past, which suggests the leaders aren’t making the same level of progress with their cars.

Q1 time spread

Over the ground effect era, the margin of comfort for the top driver has shrunk from having a 1.255s margin to get out of Q1 in Bahrain 2022, to just 0.440s by the final race in Abu Dhabi last season.

If Allison is right, then that asymptotic line that charts Red Bull’s progress against the maximum that can be got from these rules has truly flattened out. But, until it is known what secrets Red Bull has up its sleeves after switching off development of their RB19 early, we won’t know yet if this is a theory that opens the door to a truly spectacular 2024, or another campaign of one-sided domination.

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

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