Sparks will fly

ALTHOUGH THE PANDEMIC HAS given the old Ecclestone-inspired era of F1 a year’s stay of execution for 2021 before Liberty’s full vision of the sport becomes real next year, this coming season is so much more than that. There are so many fascinating sub plots to play out in front of us even as huge structural changes are happening beneath the sweep of the radar in preparation for the brave new world.

The first part of that vision, the cost cap, comes into play this year though, and together with an aerodynamic tweak to the existing cars (the chassis of which must be retained from last year, as a cost-saving measure) defines quite a challenge for the teams, as Mercedes’ technical director James Allison recently explained. “The [2021] aero changes came relatively late in the year and have quite a significant impact on the cars’ performance. Much of our focus over the last weeks and months has been trying to understand what the effect of those changes have on the main flow fields around the car and how to try to find the performance that is lost when you adopt those regulations… At the same time we have a set of regulations that forces the budgets of the big teams down to meet that of the midfield and where we all basically have the same financial horsepower to go about prosecuting the championship… This season hasn’t even