One of the things that nearly drives me to drink in this business is whenever you see a processional race, the two scapegoats of aerodynamically-generated grip and technology are trotted out as the culprits. This thinking has become so pervasive that even some motorsport regulatory bodies have started believing it, to the detriment of their own formulae.
The goal of this article, therefore, is to take a simple case study and show there is zero basis in reality for this assumption.
Before we look in depth at our case study, though, we might want to take a moment to reflect on how we came to be in this mess in the first place. This can all be traced back to the banning of ground-effect cars in Formula 1 in the early 1980s.
What did the teams then do? They simply ran the cars closer to the ground, spent a truck
