Why F1's artificial racing tools are to blame for Imola race snoozefest

Yes, the coda was excellent.

Lando Norris flinging his McLaren, Max Verstappen wrestling his Red Bull – all around a brilliantly brutal track. But if bad tonic makes up 90% of your G&T, it’s going to leave an overly bitter taste. And that was Formula 1’s 2024 Imola Grand Prix.

PLUS: Imola Grand Prix Driver Ratings

Imola’s meandering main straight meant Norris’s position on the front row left him vulnerable to the polesitter chopping across, with Verstappen angling his RB20 to do exactly that. Norris launched better, but Red Bull’s mid- to-late-2023 efforts on improving its starting procedure meant Verstappen had enough momentum to stay enough ahead and any prospect of a 2021-style Tamburello tussle was lost.

And with it, once it became clear Verstappen had Red Bull’s typical degradation advantage on the softer medium tyres after his practice struggles had raised hopes, any chance of a properly decent race was gone too.

Imola needs all the help it can get in this department. Especially with the hosts of a new race – in this case Thailand’s government regarding a proposed street event in Bangkok – actually in attendance last weekend. The narrow track, with all its history, hasn’t had a reputation for thrilling overtaking fests since its early chicanes were added.

But, as any overly complex Gen3 Formula E race will show you, this isn’t the sole requirement for a good motor race. A decent amount of passing across the field even with just a tense, close thriller up front can be brilliant.

Verstappen and Norris provided late tension, but it ultimately came to nothing

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The early stages of last Sunday’s event took away any hope of this. In the first third of the race, there was just a single overtake: Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll nailing Alpine driver Esteban Ocon for 12th. Exhilarating stuff…

PLUS: Did Aston Martin's Imola F1 updates really fail?

Imola DRS trains are a feature of every event here in the current era. This makes overtaking very hard when all the cars are running tyres of roughly the same age. It was therefore baffling to discover that the DRS zone for this year’s event was 100m shorter than the last race here in 2022.

As McLaren’s Oscar Piastri put it after spending 20 laps in DRS range of Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz, but never getting close enough to pull a pass: “I don’t know what the rest of the race was like, but it was pretty boring for me.”

Pirelli’s decision to bring compounds a step softer compared to 2022 was to try and increase strategic variance. But when this backfired it led to cars with much younger tyres later on being able to overcome the shorter DRS zone

What’s interesting is that this race ended up with more overtaking than two years ago. According to Autosport’s Forix database, the 2024 Imola race featured 29 passes versus 13 in 2022.

And this is down to the piece’s other villain. The main body of F1’s cocktail offering: the tyres. They’re on every car and, as has long been the case, the ultimate difference between winning and losing in this formula.

Pirelli’s decision to bring compounds a step softer compared to 2022 was to try and increase strategic variance. But when this backfired – the long pitlane playing a massive part, let’s not forget – it led to cars with much younger tyres later on being able to overcome the shorter DRS zone.

As Aston team boss Mike Krack explained over Stroll’s Suzuka moan about straightline speed: “Tyre conditions [mean] the acceleration out of the corners is different.” Critically different to many of the passes F1 did get to see last Sunday – Yuki Tsunoda’s Tamburello chicane pass on Logan Sargeant surely the pick, closely followed by Nico Hulkenberg on the Williams a few seconds later.

Stroll made a number of moves late in the race

Photo by: Mark Sutton

But the softer tyre move just boosted Red Bull overall. All through this rules era, it has been able to bring a degradation advantage to bear.

McLaren and Ferrari, in particular, are much improved in this area, but the remaining deficit was exposed when they all ran the mediums on full tanks at the start. Verstappen just edged away to the tune of 0.3s a lap.

It’s tantalising to think what might’ve been if the C3 mediums and C2 hards had been at play. That’s given Verstappen and Red Bull had things wrong on the C3 hards much later on, while McLaren and Norris got them so right. Indeed, the McLaren driver was left ruing how his front wing choices added oversteer through his first stint, preventing him pushing on the fragile C4 rubber.

The counter to this would be that knowing the C3 would become the critical start tyre with such a selection, then Red Bull would’ve dedicated more time to understanding it in FP2.

Christian Horner even admitted that “with hindsight we maybe would’ve been better running a hard long on Friday just because we opted to take two new hard tyres into the race and it would’ve been better to get the information on the tyre”. Plus, Verstappen would have just adjusted accordingly to the sensitivities required to get the best out of the tyres last weekend.

But his squad would still have had its early set-up issues to work around. This was what added the real intrigue across the Imola weekend, where qualifying was also a fascinating spectacle – pan-team tows and all.

The bid for different Imola strategies failed to make things more interesting. Again, the ending went some way to saving this, but potentially F1 could’ve had a race-long battle at the front had Red Bull’s degradation advantage been reduced.

Norris' tyre management brought him back into the fold

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Of late, it just looks a lot more vulnerable than at the start of the season. As Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has highlighted: “They are not in the comfort zone of last year anymore.”

PLUS: The steering wheel switches that helped Norris battle with Verstappen

And now Red Bull heads to Monaco – full of the kerb-riding requirement the RB20 still doesn’t like. Then afterwards comes Canada, where even with the mighty RB19 Verstappen ‘only’ won by nine seconds due to the intricacies of the tyre dark arts on the faster but still kerb-heavy Montreal layout.

If it’s beaten in these – a prospect made harder for the rest considering Verstappen’s brilliance such as he displayed with his faultless driving on cold, worn rubber last Sunday – we may have to revisit the depressing, predictable narrative 2024 kicked off with. Cheers to that.

Will Imola provide Red Bull's last win for a while?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images