WHAT CAN GO WRONG WITH THE NEW F1 CARS?
“THE CHANGES ARE DRIVEN BY LIBERTY’S DESIRE FOR THE FIELD TO PRODUCE ROUGHLY THE SAME LAP TIMES”
“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
