What can go wrong with the new F1 cars?

“There’s opportunity and of course there’s jeopardy.” Mercedes chief technical officer James Allison neatly and, as usual, very genially, sums up the problem facing Formula 1 teams every time the championship decides that its regulations need overhauling. And that has happened a fair bit in recent years.

From the downforce-slashing aerodynamics revamp of 2009, to the turbo-hybrid switch five years later and then the move back to bigger, downforce-laden and faster cars for 2017, F1 reinventing its racing product is a regular thing.

For 2022, the changes combine to make the latest F1 the most substantially different from what had come before for a generation. With ground-effect back via underfloor Venturi tunnels and forming the central thrust of the changes for this year, the written-out new rules are approximately twice the size of the set that was used up until the end of 2021 – extended a year by the impact of the pandemic – and they’re pretty much all-new.

The changes are principally driven by Liberty Media’s desire for the entire field to produce roughly the same lap times. It wants to massively expand the success pool that since 2014 has generally boiled down to Mercedes, Red Bull and (intermittently) Ferrari. F1’s owner also wants the new rules to mean overtaking is easier and more common, eliminating dull race affairs with little or no on-track action and passes only possible in the pitlane.

This all means that the 2022 rules revolution is going to be one of aerodynamic innovation. But there is an added challenge in that the engines introduced for the start of the campaign (including running in the second test) will be frozen until the end of 2025, putting a premium on manufacturers producing their most powerful and reliable products from the off this year. So, there is plenty that can go wrong and, as has been demonstrated throughout grand prix racing’s history, potential disaster is lurking for any team.

Aston Martin became the first team to complete laps with its 2022 car at a filming day at Silverstone

Photo by: Aston Martin Racing

The challenge of the cost cap 

“When everything is as new as this, then everywhere you look in that regulation set – twice as thick as the old one – there is opportunity,” says Allison. “And we try to pick our way through the potential minefield and picking up all the little boxes of treasure that may be set in among the landmines to end up with a car that we hope will see us pitching at the front of the grid.”

While all the focus will be on the cars looking wildly different compared to the 2017-21 era, which is likely to go down as having resulted in the fastest cars in F1 history, the teams have been grappling with an additional challenge, one that is very much tackled behind closed doors. It’s also an entirely new element to consider during a major rules reset: F1’s budget cap.

For 2022, this will sit at $140million, down from $145m last year, and the teams have had to juggle reorganising their workforce (mainly an issue for the bigger squads) with allocating sufficient funds to fully explore the new rules and competing last season.

The changes are principally driven by Liberty Media’s desire for the entire field to produce roughly the same lap times

The year-old financial rules sit alongside F1’s modest form of performance balancing, with the leading teams having a reduction in windtunnel and CFD usage (on a sliding scale, with Mercedes at 90% of what was allowed before 2021) and the worst performing teams from the end of last year getting more – up to 112.5% versus the 2020 levels for Haas.

“That has been the biggest challenge of the past 18 or 24 months,” Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies says of adapting to the budget cap’s restrictions. “You [also] need to keep a budget to develop during the year, because you will learn more and more, and therefore you will need ways to adjust. This has been the biggest challenge.”

The new aero formula is naturally expected to go beyond the big cosmetic change of a chassis overhaul. Mekies expects the challengers being revealed this week and in the coming days to be “more difficult” for the drivers to race because of the way they will handle in different corner types. The balance and feel of the machines in high and low-speed turns is set to be different, which will favour adaptable drivers, as well as those who can give precise and accurate feedback. It’s little wonder that, as he looked forward to his new life at Mercedes, George Russell said, “Whoever develops the fastest, whoever develops the best and to build those foundations for the coming years – that is a side I am really excited for from an engineering perspective”.

The challenge will be similar for the drivers in teams that nail the regulation switch as it will be for the drivers at the squads that don’t – the performance ceilings of those latter teams will simply be lower.

The Red Bull Racing RB18 at the team launch

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

The lessons of F1 history

Two of the last three instances of F1 altering its design rules perfectly demonstrate how well and how badly things can go.

In 2009, Brawn GP rose from the ashes of the unsuccessful Honda works squad to dominate that season, winning both championships after forging ahead with an aero concept that had been worked on for all of the previous year and included the famous ‘magic bullet’ double diffuser (which Williams and Toyota also sported). The same team, by then Mercedes, rose to even more dominance in 2014 with the best initial approach to the V6 hybrid engines (also years in the making) that altered F1 significantly, even if the overall look of the cars barely changed at that point.

Thirteen years ago, previous frontrunners Ferrari and McLaren went from splitting the titles to finishing third and fourth in the constructors’ table, as their respective pushes to succeed in 2008 went from short-term gain to long-term pain (although not as painful as it was for BMW Sauber, which abandoned a title push with Robert Kubica to concentrate on its 2009 project, which was also a failure).

In 2014, Red Bull was the highest-profile casualty of Renault’s slow and messy start to the new engine era, when it fell from four consecutive title doubles to finishing nearly 300 points behind Mercedes in that year’s standings. Opportunity and jeopardy indeed.

Brawn and its double diffuser made a huge success of the 2009 F1 rules reset

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Relearning the art of ground-effect

The main opportunity every team is working towards for 2022 is, as Allison puts it, to “use our combined wit and skill, and all the effort that we make collectively to try to find a configuration of car that will be better than anyone else’s approach to it”.

Although expectations of another innovation with the impact of the double diffuser have been played down, many paddock insiders expect at least one team to steal a march on the rest this season. As a result, it may be 2023 before Liberty’s success-spread desire can be realised. “They are very ticklish problems and not at all easy to solve via technical regulations,” Allison says of the aims behind F1’s latest rules reset.

But whichever team or teams do get it the most right from the start this year, the race will be on for the rest to either adapt their designs during 2022, or make changes to get on the right path from next season so they can close any initial deficit.

“In terms of how close the [cars] will be, which was one of the key objectives at the beginning, I’m not sure about that,” muses Mekies. “Maybe not at the very beginning, which is a bit linked to how much differentiation we have in the cars. But probably quite rapidly, it will converge.”

"Maybe not at the very beginning but probably quite quickly, the teams will converge" Laurent Mekies

The main jeopardy facing the teams with the new rules concerns getting everything right with the underfloor aero. The floors and tunnels will need to be well sealed, with the airflow staying attached where required and then detaching at the optimum time. But at this stage of the year each competitor will believe their work to this point has potential, although it is understood that several have run into problems passing the various crash tests, and rumours abound of at least one squad running well behind on its pre-season development schedule.

How the long hours in design offices translate onto the track once the first test begins in two weeks’ time is as usual a pivotal part of the campaign. Once that three-day event is completed, there will only be one more test – ahead of the first race in Bahrain – to go. In 2014, the teams had three four-day tests to get prepared.

“I don’t think you are screwed,” says Mekies of the reduced testing this time around. “You put the car on the ground, you start to check if you measure what you were hoping to measure. And if not, you try to fix that – as you have done the last 40 or 50 years. And it doesn’t matter if the car is new, we had a different shape in the past, so we are supposed to be able, even more now than 20 years ago, to simulate [designs]. To understand the flow, to understand how it’s working.

“So, first you try to get on the track what you think you should have. Then [figure out] where does that put you compared to the opposition. [Afterwards] it will just be the push on your development.”

The two weeks between the two tests this year offer the teams the chance to implement early fixes or improvements ahead of the season starting. In previous years, the later test would be where the definitive packages for the frontrunning teams were introduced, but the nature of the all-new machines and the impact of the budget cap may well mean alternate approaches are needed, with the cars running at Barcelona simply fettled and tweaked ahead of the opening race.

Ferrari's Laurent Mekies expects a quick rate of convergence even if some teams get it right or wrong in 2022

Photo by: Ferrari

Development limitations

The budget cap continues to be a prominent problem for all the teams once the year gets under way, closely linked to what testing reveals their respective places in the pecking order to be.

In 2019 – the last directly comparable season because of how the pandemic impacted teams’ spending in the subsequent two campaigns – aero upgrades and developments were regular features. For some teams these came in big, sporadic updates, or a series of smaller new parts were added. The bigger teams combined both approaches. But with the new constraints on spending now in force on a regular campaign for the first time, the competitors will adapt their upgrade plans accordingly. As was seen in 2021, particularly after the pile-ups at the start of the Hungarian Grand Prix, the cost of crashes will also be keenly felt.

“Once you have defined that envelope [company structure within the cost cap], then that’s what you have for aero development, that’s what you have for mechanical development,” explains Mekies. “Then it goes to each department. Aero will say, ‘OK, with that I will be able to do whatever – two developments or three developments.’ And then you reschedule all your plans to feed that. How much of a challenge it is depends on your level of competitiveness to the others.

“It sounds difficult from our perspective to have a high number of updates with the constraints that we have [in 2022]. You will have to decide. Your developments that give you X package and that is what you are going to see. If you have a big issue at the beginning of the year and nothing is correlating and so on, you may invest some of your package-two or package-three money to say, ‘Well you need to fix it anyway now.’ So, you take your parts, you put them in the bin, and that’s the way you will deal with it.”

But, as was the case in each of the most recent rule overhauls – including in 2017, when Ferrari closed the gap to Mercedes but could not overhaul the dominant squad – those that start behind will struggle to reach the front.

“I would imagine, given that the cars are so new and so different, that one or two cars on the grid will have got it really badly wrong,” says Allison, “and that they will have a terribly painful year.

“I would imagine that all of us to some degree will have left things on the table that we just didn’t anticipate. And we will look at other cars and think, ‘Oh, why didn’t we think of that?’ Then we’ll be scrambling around to try to get that idea onto our car as fast as possible, so that we can claw our way, from whatever position we land in that first race, forwards.

“Or, if we’re lucky enough to be in front, to keep the attacking wolves behind us. It’s going to be quite a rush and definitely something that’s going to keep us all from having too much sleep for the whole of the season.”

The 2022 Formula 1 car at the launch event on the Silverstone grid at last year's British GP

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Could Mercedes Or Red Bull stumble?

As the established frontrunners, closely aligned in performance terms last year thanks to the changes to the rear floor rules ahead of 2021, Mercedes and Red Bull hold the targets the rest are aiming for, even though the 2022 rules offer a completely fresh starting point.

As the title contenders last year, they could not afford to totally abandon development, and focused on improving the W12 and RB16B respectively – although not to the same degree as in 2019 thanks to the challenge of the car design carryover requirement that last season uniquely posed. They therefore were exposed to the same risk as Ferrari and McLaren in 2008, and it will soon become clear if one or both devoted too many resources to 2021 at the cost of performance this year.

"One or two cars will have got it really badly wrong" James Allison

But even if they have got things wrong, several paddock sources suggest Mercedes and Red Bull will retain certain advantages. This comes down to the experience and skill of winning. Using Mercedes in the early years of the turbo-hybrid era as an example, the team often fumbled when under pressure from other squads if its typical advantage was lost on certain tracks or conditions. Now – and Red Bull has this too – it knows how to operate at championship-calibre level. That’s something the rest currently lack, and they know it.

“I would not underestimate for one second their capability to produce a great 2022 car,” concludes Mekies.

All eyes will be on Red Bull and Mercedes to see if they can keep their places at the front of the F1 pack

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images