The factors behind F1’s overtaking problem and why solving it won’t be easy

Formula 1 has a problem. A year and a half ago, it introduced new rules which were aimed at closing up the field and making the racing more exciting, by enabling cars to follow each other more closely and overtake more easily.

The lifespan of those new rules has been 30 races, of which 25 – 83% – have been won by Red Bull. Max Verstappen set a new record for wins in a season on his way to his second world title in 2022, and is well on the way to challenging that this year, when Red Bull’s closest opposition is significantly further away than it was last season.

Those bare facts alone suggest the new rules have not had the intended effect. And on top of the statistics, the drivers are beginning to complain about overtaking becoming harder again in 2023. Just four races into this season, discussions about that topic had already begun – first in the drivers’ briefing at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, and then in public after a largely uneventful race. They have continued ever since.

So far, discussion has tended to focus mainly on micro issues, such as whether the decisions by the FIA to shorten the zones in which the Drag Reduction System (DRS) overtaking aid can be used are right when overtaking has become more difficult. But that question rapidly leads
 on to other, wider factors.

Has overtaking become harder this year? If so, why? Have the new rules failed? And if so, what can be done about it, both in the short-term and looking further into the future? After all, Formula 1 is rapidly heading towards another change in the rules in 2026. If the current rules
 aren’t working, what confidence can anyone have that the next set
 will be any more effective?

F1 cars remain heavily dependent on DRS to make overtakes stick

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Has overtaking got harder?

All the drivers have reported that overtaking is more difficult this year
 than it was in 2022. Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz says: “I don’t know how long it’s going to last, this raceability from this new generation of cars. Because they’re getting more and more difficult to follow.”

The new rules were formulated on the basis of reducing the ‘dirty air’ produced behind cars, so a driver behind retained a larger percentage
 of his car performance. The mechanism for this was to reduce the ability of cars to ‘out-wash’
 the air around them – a key method by which the previous generation of cars generated their downforce – and to force any turbulent air upwards, away from the car behind.

Up to a point, this worked last year. Cars did retain a significantly greater proportion of their overall downforce when behind another car, so following it more closely was easier. However, one corollary of the new design was already apparent last year – because the drag of the cars was reduced, so was the slipstream effect behind them. So while it was easier to follow, it didn’t necessarily mean overtaking was much easier.

"[The tyres] still get overheated quite heavily if you follow cars. You need to decide wisely when you want to be too close to a car in front of you" Fernando Alonso

As a result, DRS was at least as important in allowing overtaking in 2022 as it had been before – despite the fact that the initial hope of the rule-makers when they began research into the new generation of cars had been that they might be able to do away with DRS altogether. DRS is still perceived as a necessary evil – an artificial tool introduced in 2011 in an attempt to counteract the difficulty of overtaking. The idea at the time was to make overtaking possible, not inevitable.

The combination of these two factors is what has led to the discussion about the length of the DRS zones this year. Governing body the FIA has been using data from 2022 to calculate the correct length of the DRS zone for each race. But, the drivers argue, that data is no longer applicable because the cars have changed.

“Is the DRS zone too short?” Verstappen says. “Are the cars not good enough to follow closely? I think it’s a bit of a combination of both.”

There are other factors at play, too, according to Fernando Alonso.

“We are very close in terms of performance,” the Aston Martin
 driver says. “If you remove the Red Bulls, sometimes from P3 to P16 in
 Q1 is within 0.6s. You finish qualifying in the order you deserve. And then in the race, how will you overtake a car in front of you that is just half a tenth quicker than you? It is your natural order. That is the main reason.

Alonso believes its unsurprising that overtaking is difficult given the closeness of the field

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“And then it could be the tyres as well. They still get overheated quite heavily if you follow cars. You need to decide wisely when you want to be too close to a car in front of you.”

In those remarks Alonso also addresses another, less talked about,
 aspect of the 2022 reset. Part of it was that Pirelli was supposed to supply tyres of a different character, which could be pushed harder throughout races – and follow other cars for extended periods of time – without suffering from the overheating that has plagued its rubber since it
 arrived in F1 in 2011.

To the surprise of very few in F1, it seems that has not happened.

PLUS: Has F1’s tyre mandate reached the end of the line?

Did the rules close up the field?

Alonso’s remarks raise the possibility of there being an inherent contradiction within the central tenets behind the new rules. What if one of them (bringing the cars closer together in performance) actually works directly against another (the aim of making overtaking easier)?

In 2019, looking at the average qualifying performance of all teams
 the gap between the fastest and slowest cars – the field spread – was
 3.295 seconds. In 2021, the last year of the old rules, it was 2.578s. 
This year, so far that number is well under 2s.

However, those numbers aren’t necessarily comparing like with like, because in every year from 2019 to 2021 there was one outlier team which had done a far worse job than everyone else – Williams in 2019, Haas in 2020 and 2021. Williams was 2.3s down on the next slowest car in 2019, and Haas 1.4s and 1.6s in the following two years.

A fairer comparison, then, might be to look at the field spread of just the nine fastest cars from the three years preceding the new rules, leaving out the slowest one, especially since Haas essentially stopped developing its car at the beginning of 2020 to concentrate on the new rules. In that case, the field spread in 2019, 2020 and 2021 was just over 1.9s – exactly the same as it was in 2022 before the improvement for 2023.

So, yes, the new rules have closed up the field a little. The paradox is
 that this has not noticeably improved the quality of the racing, nor has
 it prevented one team developing an apparently unbridgeable advantage
 at the front of the grid. 

Baku was widely criticised for producing poor races despite the long start-finish straight

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Do the rules need a rethink?

So the new rules have worked in some ways – the field is more closely packed, and cars can follow each other more closely than before. But not in others – overtaking isn’t obviously easier and one team is dominating. On top of that, the cars have other failings – because they use the underfloor aerodynamics of ground effect to generate their downforce, they need a very flat, stable ‘platform’, which means they have to be run stiff.

Verstappen says: “The cars are probably too heavy, they’re too stiff, so you can’t really run a kerb to try to find a bit of a different line.

“Everyone is driving more or less the same line nowadays because of just how the cars work, and how stiff the suspension is. And, yeah, probably with people finding more and more downforce in the cars,
 it probably becomes a bit harder
to follow as well.”

That raises the question of whether ground-effect cars are indeed the right solution for F1 going forwards. Sainz, though, believes they are.

"If we didn’t have the Red Bull that much ahead, it’s a very interesting fight with three or four teams within 0.1-0.2s and maybe we would be saying that the rules were a success" Fernando Alonso

“I would personally love to go back to a more compliant car that doesn’t mean we’re all ending up with lower back problems and all that,” he says. “And a narrower, lighter car. But ground effect still looks like for raceability as if it is the way to go.”

Alonso adds: “It’s a good question. There were higher expectations of following cars and maybe having the grid a little bit closer together but
 I think we need to give a little bit more time.

“If we didn’t have the Red Bull that much ahead, it’s a very interesting fight with three or four teams within 0.1-0.2s and maybe we would be saying that the rules were a success. Maybe this is the story in a few years’ time when we have some stability on the rules and then maybe in 2026 everything changes again!”

Alonso laughed as he said this, aware of the irony inherent in any new ruleset in F1. Often they’re introduced with the intention of shaking things up; usually the result is one team steals a march and it takes a number of years before the others begin to catch up. And so it is again. The backdrop to this debate about the present is that F1’s power-brokers have already started to discuss another new set of rules that will accompany a change in engine regulations for 2026.

Sainz still believes the current generation of cars are better for racing, despite their hard ride

Photo by: Ferrari

Active aerodynamics are part of that conversation. But not because of overtaking. The FIA has to find a way to drastically reduce the drag of the cars because the new engines will be significantly less efficient than the existing ones following the loss of the MGU-H, the part of the hybrid system that recovers energy from the turbo.

But the FIA’s starting point for the new chassis regulations is that they will be a modification of the existing ones, with ground effect still used. The question of whether the new rules have worked, and therefore whether a more extensive rethink might be a sensible idea, hasn’t yet been addressed to any significant degree. And if it is to be, time is rapidly running out.

The bigger questions

Wider questions arise from this debate. Specifically, what does F1 want to be? There is general agreement that the ideal is for the field to be closer together so more teams can win; for the show to be better by virtue of overtaking being easier – but not too easy; and for the drivers to be tested and have to push to the limit, or much closer to it, at all times.

But it is in these detail discussions that arise from those generalities where things tend
 to get foggy. On tyres, for example. In Miami, both George Russell and Esteban Ocon agreed one of the current problems was that the tyres did not degrade sufficiently. More degradation, Ocon said, meant “more fights and more fun on track”. Russell added: “It’s been easy one-stops in the last couple of races.”

In the same news conference Russell added: “We’re pushing Pirelli to deliver a good tyre, a consistent tyre and when it is difficult, you know, the drivers, myself included, we don’t like it. In an ideal world, you have a very strong tyre, which at a certain point falls off the cliff and means you have to do a few more pitstops and gives some different opportunities in the races.”

Russell’s comments make it clear that when he says “degradation”, he is talking about tyres losing performance by deterioration, not rubber that has to be driven carefully because of its propensity to overheat. Yet in F1 these two very separate phenomena are often conflated – not least by Pirelli itself.

Equally, after bemoaning the difficulty of overtaking in Baku, the drivers discussed the matter again with the FIA in their briefing in Miami. “All 20 drivers,” Russell said, “came to the conclusion we’d prefer it to be slightly too easy than slightly too difficult.”

Is it better for overtaking to be too difficult, such that slower cars are stuck behind faster ones - as with Alonso and Schumacher at Imola in 2005?

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Meanwhile, in the run up to Baku, F1’s Twitter feed promoted a video of the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix, a race won by Alonso after holding off Michael Schumacher’s much faster Ferrari for many laps, a performance that has come to be viewed as one of the greatest defensive drives in history. Another example of such a performance would be the 1981 Spanish Grand Prix, when Ferrari legend Gilles Villeneuve held off a train of four cars for close to the entire race to secure his final and arguably best victory.

PLUS: Gilles Villeneuve's 10 greatest F1 drives

If overtaking is made “slightly too easy”, these type of drives would be impossible. It could be argued that, because of DRS, they already are. Whether that is right is a question no one in authority seems to be asking.

"It has been always like this. It has
 been seven years with Hamilton and Bottas first and second. It has been in the past Vettel and Webber" Fernando Alonso

As for whether F1 can expect more processional races in the future,
 Alonso says: “Could be. But this is F1. It has been always like this. It has
 been seven years with Hamilton and Bottas first and second. It has been in the past Vettel and Webber.

“If you have the fastest car, you can start a little bit behind and you
 still maybe make some moves and overtakes. And if you’re in any other
 car, we’re all within 0.1s or whatever. So wherever you qualify you’re still more or less securing that position and there aren’t many overtakings
 after lap two or three. To not see many overtakings is the nature of Formula 1, so it should
 not be a surprise.”

Is processional racing something F1 must simply accept from time to time?

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool