The inside story of how F1 created its 2021 rules

It may not have delivered Brexit to the UK population, thereby removing some uncertainty from the national political scene, but October 31 2019 did deliver a set of Formula 1 regulations for 2021 that clarified, to some extent, the ever-murky F1 political scene.

The 2021 regulations themselves are now in the public domain, but the story behind them is less well known. As someone deeply involved in the gestation of them I will attempt to fill in some of these details over the next few issues of F1 Racing.

The story starts with Liberty Media's purchase of the commercial rights in September 2016. This resulted a sea change in attitude, with a much more long-term view of the development of F1 as a business than had been the case under the previous ownership.

A major part of the plan was persuading Ross Brawn to oversee a new motorsport group within Formula One Management (FOM). This group would engage a selection of experienced F1 personnel to study all aspects of the championship, with a view to putting the fans first and unleashing the greatest racing spectacle on the planet.

In turn, Ross persuaded me to set up the engineering side of things.

Of course, Liberty Media only bought the commercial rights and so any desire to change regulations had to be done with the full cooperation of the FIA, since it is only the FIA that can actually publish and police the rules.

Fortunately the F1 group maintained a very good working relationship with the FIA, and so we were able to apply resource to help it investigate new regulations in a scientific manner. This resource was something the FIA had lacked previously.

Our early discussions covered all aspects of F1, evolving to a decision that we should introduce a budget cap, which was overseen by ex-Mercedes financial director Nigel Kerr, and that alongside this we needed revised technical and sporting regulations that encouraged financial efficiency.

On the technical side our starting point was to identify what the main performance differentiators should be.

Even with a simplification of regulations and the imposition of a budget cap we wanted to avoid the situation where huge spending on minutiae would yield performance, as we were sure that any initial budget cap would only affect the top teams.

The final figure arrived at of $175million - which only applies to operational design, development and racing activities - is still probably double that spent by the midfield teams.

The performance differentiators we decided on needed to contain spending on things that add nothing to F1, while at the same time ensuring enough technical differentiation remains to ensure meritocracy yields success.

We eventually boiled it down to three key areas.

The first one where we felt technical excellence should be rewarded was the power unit. F1 has a long history of introducing new technologies to engines and since 2014 has championed the plug-in hybrid with remarkable success.

Unfortunately, it had also led to the current engine being incredibly complex (as well as heavy) and we hoped that some simplification might encourage new manufacturers into F1. When it became obvious this would not be the case we acceded to the wishes of the existing manufacturers and made some very minor cost-saving changes instead.

We felt the second performance differentiator should be suspension design. Or, to be more exact, vehicle dynamics and the way the car uses its tyres for both maximum qualifying performance and longevity during a race.

Again there was a desire to simplify things and a simple active suspension system was even considered. Ultimately it was rejected for fear it would lead teams to develop very peaky aerodynamics.

The final solution eliminates some of the more complex suspension elements, as well as putting some restrictions on geometry while still allowing this to be an area of development.

Finally, we knew that aerodynamics had to be an important performance differentiator.

Not only has this been at part of the DNA of F1 for over 50 years, but experience of the amount of effort and cost expended by teams on so-called homologated formulae to perfect 'fixed' aerodynamics proved that over-regulation here was pointless.

In addition, aerodynamic development is very visible and attractive to fans, as well as being the most cost-effective way of adding performance to a car.

However, it was also felt that one aspect of the current cars that was detracting from the spectacle was their inability to race in close proximity. We put a solution to this right at the top of our 'to-do' list.

My first task was to populate our small aerodynamic group and put in place the tools needed to do the required research.

I was very fortunate to be able to recruit Jason Somerville to lead the team and get some extremely capable guys to assist him.

We also bought Manor's 50% windtunnel model (above) from the administrators of the defunct team and so had the basic spine and running gear of our future windtunnel model at a very low cost.

We decided that the majority of our basic research would be done using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) because, without the regulatory restrictions that teams have imposed on their work, we would be able to use much greater computing power, and hence model sophistication to investigate the problem.

We engaged some outside companies to provide the computing power and some of the basic methodology and then set about investigating the metrics we would apply determining the goodness or otherwise of the wake.

This has led to some pretty extreme computing power being applied to our two-car unsteady flow simulations. During one quiet weekend when we were able to grab a lot of idle machines we ran 14 cases simultaneously which, including following cars in seven cases, was a total of 21 cars.

This led to a CFD cell count of over 2.7 billion running on 7296 computer cores. To put this in context, if we had run this on a typical dual core desktop computer, it would have taken a little over 12 and a half years to solve.

Next time we'll look at how we took this philosophy and used it to help the FIA formulate the 2021 regulations.