The weight concerns motivating F1's refuelling push

Are current Formula 1 cars too heavy and cumbersome? That's certainly the opinion of many insiders, including the drivers - as expressed via the Grand Prix Drivers' Association.

And it's weight, rather than any great contribution to strategic variety or to the show, that is the real motivating force behind talk of a return to refuelling.

But while starting on lower fuel would impact the maximum overall weight of the car/fuel package during a race compared with the current situation, it only touches on the fundamental problem of the weight of the hardware - which looks set to rise even further in 2021.

F1 has found itself in a spiral of an ever increasing weight limit as rule changes are taken into account each year, and there's an understandable reluctance - essentially on the grounds of cost - to force the teams to save weight in other areas of the car.

How F1 gets out of that spiral, given the changes coming for 2021, is one of the biggest challenges that the championship's rulemakers face in the coming months.

"There are some things we cannot turn the clock back on," F1 sporting boss Ross Brawn noted at Silverstone. "And we have got a very, very impressive engine, but it is pretty complicated and it is pretty heavy.

"The cars have got heavier and we would all like the cars to be lighter, because it is frustrating when everyone says we must have much lighter cars - if you tell me how you can do it, we would love to do it.

"But we have a car and battery system and ERS, and unless we abandon it completely we are never going to get the cars in a different regime. And safety has gone up substantially."

It's a challenge that Lewis Hamilton came to appreciate when he attended last month's 2021 rules meeting in Paris on behalf of the GPDA. When the conversation turned to adding even more weight for the new era of cars, his jaw dropped.

"You sit there and they're talking about making the car heavier, and it baffles me," the world champion explained.

"Why are you going to make the car heavier? The car is already 130kg heavier or whatever it is than when I first got to the sport, and what they don't know is we've got the best brakes you can possibly have, they're as great as they can be, and they're overheating and they're fading, so the braking zones aren't great.

"If you make the car another 30kg heavier, it's just going to get worse for the brakes and the car, and you have to do more lift and coasting, you have to do more fuel saving, all these different things, it just has a knock-on domino effect."

It's happened in stages, and there was always a logical reason, and yet somewhere along the way we lost sight of the bigger picture

Renault F1 team boss Cyril Abiteboul agrees that there has to be a keen focus on weight as the 2021 rules are honed.

"I think it's important that we contain weight," he says. "With safety, with electrification, with the complexity of the aerodynamic regulations, weight keeps on rising, and there's going to be more of that with the big wheels, and standard parts.

"So I can see only more weight being added. But I don't see an awful lot of extra power coming, because regulations will be the same on engines.

"As far as I'm concerned I'm a fan of something very simple for great racing, which is power to weight to grip - more power, less weight, less grip. I think that's what we need.

"What we know right now is that power will be the same, or marginally higher, just because of the development, weight substantially higher, and the grip, I think they want to do a bit less grip.

"That simple indicator, power to weight to grip, needs to be monitored, because if you look at the great racing that we all have nostalgia for, in the eighties and nineties, I think everyone will tend to agree that the best racing was when that indicator of lots of power, limited weight, limited grip, was actually in the right direction.

"So weight needs to be contained. Having said that, I don't see an awful lot of opportunities to get that down."

The rise of the weight limit since the introduction of the hybrid rules has been extraordinary. It has happened in stages, and there was always a logical reason, and yet somewhere along the way sight of the bigger picture was lost.

Consider that under the final season of the V8 regulations the limit was 642kg. That rose to 691kg for the first year of the new rules to account for the battery and everything else that came with the complex new power units.

It was soon apparent that the new limit was a little too tight and, amid complaints that taller drivers were facing health issues as they slimmed down at the request of their teams, it rose to a more generous 702kg for 2015.

It subsequently went up to 728kg in 2017 (to allow for wider cars and wheels), 734kg in '18 (to cancel out the halo), and most recently to 743kg for '19 (with aero changes and an allowance made for the minimum 80kg driver/seat package).

So even within the hybrid era the limit has risen by 52kg. At the same time, the race fuel allowance has gone up from 100kg to 110kg, and while the full number is not used by every team at every track, there are some races where an extra 10kg is in the tank at the start that wasn't available in 2014 - making for an overall rise in starting weight of 62kg since that season.

Heading towards 2021, there is likely to be another weight increase, triggered in large part by the move to 18inch rims and new tyres - they will be bigger and heavier than what we now have.

Other elements of the car that have gone out to tender as potential standard parts will by definition be heavier than parts made by individual teams, because of the obvious weight implications of mass production and making things to a price.

"It's all going to get heavier," says Racing Point technical director Andy Green. "And if the weight limit doesn't go up, it's going to cost us a lot of money. There's a big drive to get the weight limit down, and there's also this drive to have standard parts that are heavier.

"The drivers would be keen to get refuelling back. I think it would open the strategy, it will spice things up and will make the car much lighter at the start of the race" Romain Grosjean

"So I can see us being caught in the middle, having standard parts and also having to drive the weight down elsewhere. And that costs. The big teams can afford it, and we won't be able to."

Green agrees that F1 faces a challenging conundrum: "The reluctance to drive the weight limit up, which I fully understand, is there. So stop driving common parts to the car that drive the weight up, or tyres that drive the weight up, or wings that drive the weight up.

"The biggest thing to make the car cheaper is to raise the weight limit, but it's creeping up all the time, and people have recognised that it's not a great thing to be doing, so we need to be driving it down."

Green's numbers for the potential rise in weight of the 2021 package are scary, given the inexorable rise over the past few seasons.

"It's going to be in the region of a 40kg increase, if you're going to do a like-for-like car," he reckons. "We'll get all the standard parts like rims that add 40kg to the car. It's going to be a nightmare. I haven't even talked about the bodywork being heavier, and chances are that it will be, as that is a natural function of changing the bodywork regulations.

"So there are all these inputs that are coming in and that are driving the weight up, and the weight limit is not going to go up by the amount that would be required to cover it. We'll perhaps only get 20kg of extra weight limit.

"Some bigger teams are going to be able to plough all the resources into trimming the weight out. We're going to be left running around with a 20kg overweight car trying to spend all our resources on getting the weight out."

GPDA director Romain Grosjean agrees that the drivers want to see an end to the constant rise in the weight limit.

"It's definitely something the GPDA is fighting against," he says. "We are asking a lot of questions at the next meeting on July 23 - what can be made, what is necessary or not necessary on the new rules?

"The cars, from the first time I drove in 2009 to now are 127kg [heavier], not talking of fuel loads at the start of the race. In the low-speed you really feel it, and ideally they would be a bit shorter, and lighter.

"They're heavy, they generate a lot of downforce and they overheat the tyres very easily, when you're on the limit on your own. Imagine following another car, and then you need to push it to go for an overtaking manoeuvre. It makes it very complicated.

"So I think Jean Todt is pushing F1 for refuelling, I think the drivers would be keen to get refuelling back. I think it would open the strategy, it will spice things up and will make the car much lighter at the start of the race."

"We want to make the racing better," says McLaren's Carlos Sainz Jr.

"And we might believe that by having a less heavy car in the race might improve the racing because it means you can push with 30 or 40kg of fuel instead of 100kg, and it might help Pirelli make the tyres more robust in that heavy condition.

"It's a bit of brainstorming going on at the moment, whether refuelling will help with the racing or not."

It's this understandable concern about ever heavier cars that has led to the request for refuelling from the drivers, one that has been taken up on their behalf by FIA president Todt.

"Personally, I would like to see refuelling," he said at Silverstone. "But I am happy to see a study on the positives and negatives. Cars are probably becoming a bit too heavy. That is something we discussed.

"I am pushing for analysing what it would mean if we reintroduced refuelling because if you reintroduce refuelling then you will have lighter cars at the start of the race, and you can have smaller cars."

A smaller car would be side effect of refuelling. Cars would be built with tanks of much reduced capacity compared to now, and in simple terms there would be less carbon and therefore less weight - although it would not be a huge difference.

"I think it's important to dissociate if refuelling has had a positive effect on strategy or not. It's not obvious to me why it's going to make the strategy worse than it is now" Cyril Abiteboul

"Talking to an engineer, we can gain 15kg if the tanks are smaller," says Grosjean.

"So 15kg is better than a kick in the nuts."

Abiteboul agrees that refuelling will have some benefits, although he questions its overall impact.

"Refuelling is probably an easy way to do it," he says of the push to save weight.

"Because you'll carry less fuel at the start of the race. It doesn't change in qualifying, although you can have cars which are a bit smaller, a bit more compact, so you do remove a bit of the weight.

"Our initial assessment is you compensate for the extra weight coming from the bigger wheels. You don't save weight, but you don't increase weight, but with a bit of extra power and a bit more grip, already power to weight to grip is going in the right direction. Am I a big fan of refuelling? Maybe not. Do I see a better way of limiting weight increase? Probably no."

Abiteboul acknowledges that there are sound reasons why refuelling was dropped last time around, with a lack of strategic variety one of the main justifications cited by those with longer memories.

"We have to be very careful," he says. "Was it boring because of the refuelling, or it happened at a time when there was refuelling, and the races were boring? Then you had DRS that came later.

"You may like or not, but I think it's made overtaking a bit easier, and overall the racing a bit more fun to watch. It's not that because refuelling was removed the races got more interesting, it's simply that DRS was introduced.

"I think it's important to dissociate if refuelling has had a positive effect on strategy or not. It's not obvious to me why it's going to make the strategy worse than it is now."

Despite the obvious question marks, such as safety, the cost of shipping rigs around the world, and the impact on strategy, refuelling is set to be among the topics discussed at Wednesday's 2021 rules meeting in Geneva, where Grosjean will be among those speaking on behalf the drivers.

Will the idea gather momentum and become a serious contender for inclusion in the rules package, or will it be quietly dropped? Or will other ways be found of addressing the weight limit? We'll soon find out which way the consensus goes.