The crucial tech changes F1 teams must adapt to in 2023

Last year represented a seismic change for Formula 1 and its approach to car design. The return of a ground-effects formula and all its trimmings was conceived to make the on-track product better for fans, at the expense of restricting overall freedom for the aerodynamicist to exploit.

After a close-run 2021 season, however, 2022 was largely one-way traffic in the championship stakes as Red Bull understood the new rules best. The RB18 gave Max Verstappen the ammunition to sweep to the title largely unchallenged, prompting questions as to why the FIA and F1 had bothered to change things up. But now that the engineers have a year’s worth of experience with the new rules, convergence will surely start to close the field.

That’s not to say that the rules are exactly the same. Last season threw up a few curveballs as a consequence of the new regulations, particularly porpoising and bouncing in the early part of the season as the greater levels of underbody downforce upset the rest of the car. In the interests of safety, the FIA has therefore mandated tweaks to the floor geometry to stop teams running their cars quite so close to the ground.

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In other developments, the FIA reacted to Zhou Guanyu’s nasty crash at Silverstone and added a series of further strength tests to ensure that the roll hoop provides further protection. The formula, to all intents and purposes, remains the same; since F1 now has a year’s experience with the new rules, the 2023 tweaks have been designed to cover off any problems that cropped up throughout last season.

Here’s a look at the key changes for the upcoming campaign.

Raised floors

2023 F1 cars will have redesigned floors to meet the FIA's new oscillation metric

Photo by: Matthew Fiveash

For 2023, all floor edges and fences have been raised by 15mm. The FIA sought to make changes to the floors on safety grounds, particularly because the drivers were concerned about porpoising and bouncing causing long-term damage to their health. Lifting the edges of the floor will reduce the effectiveness of the venturi tunnels underneath, and the reduced suction should limit the cars’ oscillation.

The FIA initially proposed that the floor height would be increased by 25mm, but pushback from a handful of teams led to the compromise of 15mm. The diffuser throat height will also be raised. The difficulty for many of the teams will be in operating their underbody tunnels at a different height, particularly those that ran their cars low to the ground. There will also be more stringent tests to ensure that no teams are benefiting from flexing floors to produce more downforce, and the 250N load test on the floor’s edge must produce no more than 5mm of flex – down from 8mm last season.

To adhere to the modified rules, the floors will require a complete redesign. The knock-on effect could influence the competitive order; it’s not dissimilar to how the changes in floor design for 2021 helped Red Bull beat Mercedes

At the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix, an aerodynamic oscillation metric (AOM) was introduced to ensure that no team was running with excessive car bouncing. Spa was also where a trick used last season was outlawed; in splitting up the skidblock and allowing parts of it to retract, some of the cars can be run lower without scraping off too much of the skidblock surface.

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The AOM will continue to be used in 2023, and will be measured through an FIA-standard accelerometer to ensure that none of the cars transgress the limit. Although surpassing the AOM can result in disqualification, each team can play three ‘jokers’ per season to cover off any random spikes above the established metric.

To adhere to the modified rules, the floors will hence require a complete redesign for 2023. The knock-on effect on performance could influence the competitive order; it’s not dissimilar to how the changes in floor design for the 2021 season shook things up over the off-season and helped Red Bull beat Mercedes. Over 2022, the teams that had started the season running their floors closer to the ground realised that, by raising the cars, the aerodynamic platform was slightly more stable anyway – so the modifications ultimately shouldn’t make too much difference.

Further safety and technical tweaks

Zhou's crash prompted the FIA to redefine roll hoop designs

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

After Zhou’s incident at Silverstone, in which his Alfa Romeo was flipped over during his crash into Abbey, the FIA has seen fit to redefine how the roll hoop will be designed and tested to ensure that it is more likely to stay affixed to the chassis in a repeat of that crash.

The changes have also been implemented to ensure that the roll hoop does not dig into the ground, with a rounded roll hoop now mandatory. Alfa Romeo has used a ‘blade’ roll hoop structure in recent years, but will likely have to opt for something more conventional. The new test includes a 49kN load in a forward direction and a 73.5kN downward load to ensure that there is no repeat of the Silverstone breakage.

Larger mirrors will be introduced to improve rearward visibility, and some teams have already tested these in practice sessions. These will be extended from 150mm x 50mm to 200mm x 60mm. Drivers have complained for years that they can never see out of the mirrors, and so the extended width should offer more peripheral vision.

The 2023 cars should also be lighter than their 2022 counterparts, with the minimum weight of the car dropping to 796kg from 798kg last season. It’s nice to see a drop in weight given that the usual trend over recent years has been for it to increase, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that 3kg was tacked on ahead of last season because many of the teams were well over the weight limit.

After controversy over fuel cooling last season, which almost caught out Max Verstappen at the Spanish GP, the regulations have been clarified for 2023. Fuel can be cooled to 10C below ambient temperature, or to a limit of 10C if the ambient temperature is below 20 degrees. This must be the case as soon as the car is running after it leaves the garage.

Banned wings

Aston Martin introduced novel rear wing in Hungary, but it was swiftly banned at the end of the season

Photo by: Giorgio Piola

As is ever the case in F1, the new rules produced loopholes. Although Ross Brawn and his team were keen to cover off any potential side-steps presented by the 2022 overhaul that could jeopardise the closer racing promised, they couldn’t possibly anticipate everything.

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There were two distinct designs that were outlawed following the 2022 season: Mercedes’ front wing, and Aston Martin’s rear wing. In the former case, Mercedes had introduced a front wing at Miami where its attachment points to the endplates were swept forward, leaving a gap between the rear part of the endplate and the wing elements. This was introduced to recover some degree of airflow outwash that had been lost with the introduction of the new rules.

Aston Martin took a clever approach to introducing a more traditional rear wing, exploiting the regulations that required a curved transition from the wing elements to the endplate to extend it beyond the mainplane. The rationale behind looping the elements directly into the endplate for 2022 was to minimise the size and strength of the tip vortices produced by the exposed upper edge of the endplate, a key contributor to the ‘dirty air’ problem.

"What was nice is the fact that we came up with something novel and new. It was a very difficult interpretation of the rules that added performance to our car" Tom McCullough

For the teams, however, the limitations in endplate design reduced the effectiveness of the rear wing since airflow could spill off the upper surface. Aston Martin hence introduced its revised rear wing to corral the air into passing over the top of the mainplane.

“I think what was nice is the fact that we came up with something novel and new,” reckons Aston performance chief Tom McCullough. “It was a very difficult interpretation of the rules that added performance to our car. It was a part that people couldn’t just copy quickly because of how complicated it was to get around several different regulations.”

Even with the tight regulatory framework of F1, teams can still innovate, but the FIA reserves the right to ban those innovations if they could potentially create a larger performance loss for a following car.

Red Bull’s trapped wind

Will windtunnel reductions hamper Red Bull's title defence?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

A $7million fine and a 10% cut in aerodynamic testing time was Red Bull’s punishment for violating 2021’s cost cap rules. This was a punishment arguably too harsh for the team’s liking, and not harsh enough for its rivals, but will it actually affect the team?

In the new-for-2022 sliding scale for aero testing, the FIA had determined a base level to work from. This is assigned to the team that finishes seventh in the constructors’ championship; teams below that get more testing time and resources and teams above it get less – in 5% increments. Red Bull, prior to its punishment, would have received 70% of that time. The 10% reduction is then applied as a compound reduction to the new total, so Red Bull now gets 63% of the base total. Within an aerodynamic testing period, which spans approximately two months, Red Bull has about 10 hours’ less time with wind speeds of about 15m/s.

The cut in windtunnel testing time came in for Red Bull’s next aerodynamic testing period (ATP), and lasts for 12 months. So the effect on the 2023 Red Bull, assuming the majority of the development work is already done, won’t be anything like it would be on the 2024 car, although the windtunnel and CFD restrictions might hurt in-season development slightly simply due to the timing of the 12-month penalty span.

Perhaps the circa £8m ultimate spend – including overspend and penalty – along with the reduced testing time was worth it in the short term; this is equally something that the FIA must monitor to determine whether the punishment did indeed fit the crime.

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If Red Bull is stripped of its wings and spends the next few years hobbling around in the lower midfield, then it will have been too heavy-handed, but the suspicion is that it will be a minor inconvenience at most. The aero team will have to cut its cloth accordingly, and no doubt it will. But there’s a chance that the FIA might have to review cost cap penalties again, if it turns out that transgressions could be worth more than their consequences…

Will the impact on Red Bull be enough to dissuade further cost cap breaches?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images