F1
Ground effect, bigger wheels and budget caps – they're all changing in 2021. But what exactly are these upcoming rule tweaks and what do they mean for the future of Formula One?
Some sports make a virtue of setting their rules in stone, with even minor changes requiring a lot of fuss and a big chisel. Formula One, however, doesn’t work like that.
Over the F1 World Championship's 70 years, the technical regulations of motorsport’s premier racing category have been tweaked on a nearly constant basis. By its very nature, the sport must evolve as new developments in engineering and technology trickle into the system. And rarely does a season begin without minor changes.
Every so often, though, bigger change is required. The reset button is pressed and the changes to technical regs veer from evolution to revolution. Such a change is planned for 2021, the details of which are now available as teams begin the main sequence of their development programmes.
The 2021 regulation changes feature various aesthetic tweaks to make cars look more appealing, but the main thrust is to try and make the racing even better. Here's what we can expect.
Closer racing
F1’s main problem – or perhaps more accurately, its biggest challenge – is that it is always chasing two competing goals. On the one hand, it wants the swiftest cars on the planet. On the other, it craves the most exciting races. More often than not, though, the former tends to prevent the latter.
David Coulthard, a 13-time Grand Prix winner, sums it up. “I think what’s absolutely clear is that the ability of the cars to run closely is key to good racing. The conflict here is that F1 also wants to have the world’s fastest racing cars, which means having the most aerodynamically sophisticated cars, and this is completely, diametrically opposed to the desire to see closer racing.”
Overtaking in F1 shouldn't be easy, but there’s been a groundswell of opinion that, over the last few years, it’s become too difficult. A big part of the problem is "wake turbulence". The aerodynamics of a Formula One car work best with a smooth, consistent airflow over the bodywork.
This is problematic in open-wheel racing, where the front wheels tend to disrupt that airflow and create turbulence. Teams therefore spend a lot of time trying to push this turbulent air out to the sides, allowing clean air to infill.
This works very well for a car in isolation, but the concept begins to break down in a race, where following cars have to battle through a wake of dirty, disturbed air. And the closer the chasing car gets, the more severe the "wake turbulence" becomes, and the more aerodynamic performance is lost, making it very difficult to overtake. So, the aerodynamic regulations for 2021 are designed to push teams towards generating downforce in a completely different way.
Ground effect
In place of the complex front wings and bargeboards, Formula One will pursue a "ground effect" solution that will see downforce generated underneath the car. There is an element of having one's cake and eating it too about this – a desire to enable closer racing, but without impacting on speed or performance.
FIA Head of Single Seater Technical Matters, Nikolas Tombazis, explains: “There’s a diffuser going right under the car, with a Venturi-type channel running through it. The tunnels go right from the front to the back,” he says. “[With the 2021 car] typically, we will go from about a 50 percent loss of downforce for the following car at two car distances [based on a 2017 dataset] to about a 5-10 percent loss. So we have a massive reduction of the loss of downforce for the following car.”
F1 last utilised "ground effect" in the late '70s/early '80s, before the technology was banned and flat floors were introduced to curb growing danger from faster speeds. The current plan is for these Venturi tunnels to feed air back to a much higher diffuser than on current cars. Allied to other conditioning elements, such as wheel covers and hubs, the wake generated by the leading car will be narrower and higher, allowing cars behind to stay closer in ‘cleaner’ air.
“The two strong vortices we are creating take a lot of the wheel wake up and over the car behind. As a result, what the car behind sees is much cleaner flow,” says Tombazis.
The sensation of driving a "ground-effect" car is, says Coulthard, unlikely to be much different to team's current machines. “The driver won’t feel the difference between downforce being generated below the car and above it; he’ll just feel the downforce. Potentially, the effect in the slipstream may feel different, but I don’t know how big an effect that will be. Oval racing tends to be pretty good at having cars follow each other at high speed, so we can probably learn something from America. That may be one where we need to wait and see.”
Tyred and emotional
Overtaking (and the lack of) isn't the only issue drivers have been complaining about over the last few years. There is a desire through most of the grid for tyres that suffer less degradation while also providing more grip. The latter point has been on drivers’ wish lists longer than we care to remember. The former, however, has been a trend since Pirelli took over from Bridgestone in 2011. In 2021, F1 will change its tyre philosophy, but it will also change its tyre aesthetic, moving from a 13-inch to an 18-inch rim in an attempt to make cars more appealing.
“We are into a deep consultation with Pirelli about how to be in a position where [the tyres] enable people to race and don’t degrade or force people to manage so much,” explains Tombazis. “They will need a broader working range and will not be as sensitive as the current tyres.”
Pat Symonds, Chief Technical Officer for F1, adds that altering the characteristics of the tyres will be a key component in creating closer racing, although he says that requesting that Pirelli produce a super-hard “Le Mans-type tyre that will go on and on and on” is not part of the plan.
“I think we were asking completely the wrong things of Pirelli over the last two years,” he adds. “The high degradation target is not the way to go. However, we do believe that pit stops are important in F1 and we know our fans enjoy these two-second stops.”
The haves and have-nots
F1 will also embark on cost-capping plans, with teams restricted to smaller annual budgets. The technical reboot, coupled with the spending limit, should, hope the FIA, make teams more competitive.
“I do tend to agree it needed to be looked at, because although the teams are all about domination, the sport as a whole is about competition and people tuning in because of uncertainty over who might win,” says Coulthard.
“I think you’re still going to have the top teams and those that aren’t the top teams, and even with the budget cap, it probably won’t help the small teams so much because they’re [currently] below it. What tends to happen when you bring in a regulation change is that the big teams open the gap more, because they have more resources. They’ll be able to race in 2020 while developing a 2021 car, which the smaller teams can’t do. So I think we’ll get a bigger gap initially, but it’ll start to close down over time.”
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