The end of straight dilemma that highlights F1’s biggest ground effect headache

The kind of dominance that Red Bull unleashed in Formula 1 last year is nothing new – as there have been plenty of times in history when one squad has stood head and shoulders above the rest. But what has perhaps been a bit different this time around is the fact that Red Bull produced such supreme form in the second year of a rules set.

It is not untypical for one team to stand clear above its rivals when new regulations come into force – as it is obvious one squad will get things right from the off, before others cotton on and catch up. Red Bull did that in 2022 once it got excessive weight off its car and, based on the inevitable law of convergence, it was widely anticipated that everyone would close them down last year.

They didn’t, and in fact, it went the other way as the world champion managed to step it up a gear and be even more in front.

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The situation appears to be more a case though of not what Red Bull got right, but what the others got wrong – as the story up and down the grid was of things not clicking where they should have. As Mercedes technical director James Allison told us at the end of last year about why the gap between Red Bull and the rest had gone the wrong way in 2023, he said: “Well, I think you could probably point at the rest of us and say, come on, sort yourselves out.”

Had just one team got it wrong again last year, then you could point to the situation being isolated to a single organisation. But with almost everyone not quite clicking for different reasons – as was highlighted by the fact that Red Bull never had a consistent main threat as Aston Martin, Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren all had their days in the sun – it seems there are wider issues at play. And bang in the centre of it appears to be the fact that F1’s current generation of cars are so complex – and infinitely more difficult to understand how to get right than perhaps any previous car in history.

Even Red Bull, hand on heart, would probably be unable to explain just why its car is so good.

Fernando Alonso, whose Aston Martin team started 2023 so strongly before getting a bit lost mid-season as it tried to bring added performance to it, talked recently about the unique challenges of current generations cars.

Photo by: Erik Junius

Alonso experienced first-hand an F1 car which drifted from strong to weak through set-up headaches in 2023

“[The cars are] definitely more difficult to set up, more difficult to understand. Even more difficult to give the feedback to the team,” he said. “Sometimes we drive these cars and we feel everything is going OK. You stop and you see the standings and maybe you are P14. And sometimes the opposite. You drive a very difficult car: the balance is completely out of the way and then you stop and you are top three. There is a very sensitive way of setting up the cars.

“I don’t think that is only the aerodynamics. I think that is also the suspension being so stiff and so low. You miss a little bit what the car is giving you in terms of feedback - what is the real balance of the car, what is the tyre interaction against the aerodynamic interaction, against the suspension and the mechanical grip? All these three parameters are a little bit confused sometimes in your hands and in your body. I think it’s a very complex generation of cars.”

Alonso’s comments about the interaction between suspension and aerodynamics fits in with Allison’s own viewpoint, who has talked about there being a critical shift in the elements needed to deliver right now.

"There is this sort of treasure of downforce to be had near the ground, and you can find lots of it there, but you also have to survive the end of the straight" James Allison

“The thing that's different is that in the old days, the mechanical ride of the car and the aerodynamic performance of the car were, while not independent of each other, you could go off looking for downforce and aerodynamic behaviour that you thought would bring you lap time. There was then more ability in the mechanical package to take some of the rough edges off what the aerodynamics were doing because the car moved more. But these things [the current cars] don't move at all. Or comparatively, they don't move much.

“It means that the ability of the roll bars and the springs and the dampers to help you out is less. Which means, correspondingly, that when you're designing the car, the aerodynamicists, or the people who are making the compromise decision between the aerodynamic behaviour and the mechanical behaviour, have to pay a bit more heed to the needs of the car mechanically than they did in the past. Whereas you could just sort of say, look, ‘aero's king’ in the old days, and the suspension guys will make it work, there is more of an intimate relationship now than there was.”

That requirement for the suspension/aerodynamics to work in total unison – triggered by ground effect cars needing to be run low and stiff – has left teams constantly battling to understand how best to approach things with cars that are always in a state of compromise. Having a car produce a decent chunk of downforce at high speed when aerodynamic forces are pushing it low to the road is no good if, when the car peels back up, it delivers no grip in the slow stuff.

There is perhaps no better illustration of just why teams are constantly scratching their heads about the difficulty of how to approach things than the fact that, at the root of it all, is that the cars ultimately deliver their very best downforce – so are in their element – at the very point of the circuit where it’s not needed: the end of straights.

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Allison has laid out what all F1 teams are searching for in car design but nailing it down is a much tougher task

In a fascinating explanation talking about the implications of suspension stiffness and ride height, Allison opened up on some key challenges teams had to overcome.

“There's a sort of fundamental difficulty in these rules, which is that the car will generate more and more and more downforce the lower and lower it goes,” he said. “It is not without limit, because you sort of don't want it to just magnet itself onto the ground at the end of the straight, because at the end of the straight, you're generally not going around a corner. And if that's where your best downforce is, it's just generating drag for you. In order to cope with the load that that creates at the end of the straight, you're going to have to have stiff springs or higher ride heights. But if you've got higher ride heights, then that means that you're not going to be where the downforce is - so that means stiff springs.

“There is this sort of treasure of downforce to be had near the ground, and you can find lots of it there, but you also have to survive the end of the straight. And so there is a sort of a little bit of a limit to it, that this end of straight downforce consumes ride height, that then punishes you in the low-speed corners. There comes a point where you can't support the end of straight loads without hurting yourself in the slow speed so much that it's no longer faster to have that end of straight downforce.

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“Everyone is trying to get things that, at the end of the straight, don't have quite as much load, but right next door to it has lots of load because the fast corners are right next door to the end of the straight.

“But then you also somehow want to hang on to an adequate amount in the slow speed stuff, despite the fact that the car just wants to dump all its downforce away as it raises off the ground. That's the challenge. And I'm not saying anything that every person in this pitlane isn't wrestling.”

From the outside it sounds ridiculously complicated but, for geniuses like Allison, it’s a problem that can be solved.

It will be the closeness of the battle in F1 2024 though which will tell us exactly how much those in charge of car design have got on top of the problem, or if it’s going to be another year of head-scratching that leaves one team clear out front.

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

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