FORMULA ONE - 2019

I am convinced Ferrari is up to something with the fuel supply. They had a sudden boost in performance without any change in engine spec, then lost it just as quickly after they came under scrutiny and now they had 11 lbs more fuel on board than they said they had. Why on earth would you get this number wrong when weight is so important to performance? I'm sure other teams are figuring this out. Congratulation to Lewis, truly one of the all time greats

loosecannon said:

I am convinced Ferrari is up to something with the fuel supply. They had a sudden boost in performance without any change in engine spec, then lost it just as quickly after they came under scrutiny and now they had 11 lbs more fuel on board than they said they had. Why on earth would you get this number wrong when weight is so important to performance? I'm sure other teams are figuring this out. Congratulation to Lewis, truly one of the all time greats

I watched the race but didn't notice any comparisons in top speed during the broadcast. Obviously Lewis decimated all, but how was the top speed difference between Ferrari, Merc, and Redbull?

I agree that something was up with Ferrari's fuel flow and its been shut down by the technical directive.

Yeah, they got caught. I didn't see any major difference in straight line speed between Ferrari and Red Bull. Hard to say with Mercedes - if there was a difference, it wasn't significant.

If that race had been just a couple of laps longer, we might have seen a fun fight for the last step of the podium. Bottas was coming in fast...but the length of the race is decided before the start, so that's just a strategy whoopsie.

Ok, the season is over and here are my ideas on how to "fix" Formula 1:

-Like MotoGP, allow a team to declare themselves as a satellite team and thus allowed to burn more fuel during a race and use more engines during the season. They get these concessions until they get three 3rd place or two 2nd place or one 1st place finishes. Obviously the top 3 teams cannot declare themselves as a satellite team but they can supply satellite teams with experimental engines to test out in the races.

-Reduce number of mechanics allowed to work on car during pit stop to 4

-Each team has to run all 3 compounds of tire during the race

-Spec front wing. Single plane, low downforce. The current wings are $250,000 each and have a lot of little bits that are easily dislodged or used to cut competitors tires. The spec wing would be narrower, beefier and with contoured edges that are less likely to cut a tire. The low downforce will prevent teams from having high downforce rear wings because the balance would be all wrong.

-Have a limit on fuel used during the race but let teams decide how they use it. They can run any engine/electric configuration they want. Mandate the use of renewable energy fuels like ethanol.  Allow more fuel to be used if engine uses a production car block.

-Make the cars narrower and shorter (but keep the really wide tires) so they have physically more room to race each other on the tracks-especially Monaco and Singapore 

I think these changes would improve racing, lower costs and add excitement. I am not a fan of 1.9 second pitstops that happen so quickly that I can't see what happened without a slo-mo replay. I also don't like the aero dependence of the cars and would like them to go back to 1990 levels of downforce and car appearance. I really hate how all the teams must have a 1.6 litre V6-let the teams build what they want.

I think the satellite team concept is ripe for abuse, but if it already works in MotoGP that's a plus.

I really like the concept of limiting the number of guys over the wall. Making it more like the Australian Supercar or FIA GT3 stops (two guns, four guys) would make the pit stops a lot more fun to watch. You'd also see a greater variation in times and the pit stop would become more important.

Forcing cars to run two incorrect tire compounds is already goofy. It's an artificial handicap to generate strategy calls but it muddies the racing. Plus it penalizes those who can make tires last and do a one-stop.

The 2021 regs already simplify the front wings and put a much greater emphasis on underbody downforce - which should help with following close. Looks like the wings are still tire slicers, though.

If we're making up rule sets - take the Le Mans rules and allow for more horsepower (aka Porsche 919 Evo). Fewer guys over the walls, the ability to self-start, enclosed wheels (no more tire slicing!), enclosed cockpits, fuel flow limits but no mandated powerplant, etc. Sure, they won't fit Monaco but nothing other than pedal cars fit Monaco.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

My point of using all 3 compounds is that there is no need to nurse your tires-go out and race hard because there's no point to preserve them

What you're really doing is forcing a two-stop race, though. Tire preservation is a part of any kind of racing, even qualifying laps have to be managed for the tires to last one whole lap. This actually rewards good drivers and you can end up with cars/drivers that are way out of "position" because they can make tires last. It's actually one of Hamilton's strong points, and it's how we ended up with Kimi winning races for Lotus a few years back. Forcing teams to use one good compound and two bad compounds isn't how you get there.

If you want tires that can be driven without any concern about lifespan, you make them into rocks :)

I know I've complained about the short stops, but in reality, I don't see changing the number of people working on the car at once changing anything useful.  After a LOT of practice (which there will be, for sure), the teams will all converge on the same time doing the tire changes anyway- so a 2 second stop or a 6 second stop, or even a 10 second stop for 5 bolts per tire and two guns- it will all be the same for everyone.  All it really does is change the pit delta where you need to find a gap.

The "penalty" for a mistake will generally be the same- 1-3 seconds of track time- as the most common error in the tire change will be the exact same- engaging or disengaging the wheel nut.  The relative impact may appear different- 3 out of 2 seconds is huge, whereas 3 out of 10 isn't- but the actual track loss will be the same.

If anything, reducing the people over the wall reduces the complexity, and thus cost.  

Trying to get the drivers to go all out is a good one, but even races where you expect that to happen, someone will try to manage their tires.  And if the delta goes up by 3-5 seconds for a tire change, the odds of teams trying harder to reduce pit stops will go up a lot.  '21 will have an epic change in tires and suspension design, so I'm going to just wait and see what happens.

The aero thing is more about how close you can follow someone else than anything else.  And I'm pretty optimistic with the change to tunnel based downforce, as Indycar has consistently shown that cars can follow close.

As fro the bits that come off- in addition to reducing the number of fiddly bits on the cars, the new regulations also require a shift in the CF, which will make them more durable and less likely to shed tiny parts.

The idea that OEM's will use "stock blocks" for race cars is a good one, but I never, ever see that happening.  It kind of happens for GT cars and endurance racing, but that's not F1- it's a very different envelope that the engine has to fit into and weigh- and every engine has some kind of equalizer to it- which can change from race to race.

  And even if the rules open up, we have always seen that there will be one dominant engine for a while, until all the engine makers copy that layout.  Once the V10 showed up, it took very few seasons for the V12 to give two cylinders to the V8 engines.  If you don't believe that will happen anymore, then look at every team that is trying to copy Newey's high rake concept.  Which I still don't understand, given the fastest car out there doesn't follow that.

In reply to loosecannon :

I like all these suggestions! Really, anything to be more like Moto GP since Moto GP is awesome and F1 is sometimes boring!

I dunno, if you've got two or guys four running around from wheel to wheel you've dramatically increased the potential for screwups over a single guy with one job to do in a 1.5s window. There are multiple places for it all to go wrong, and I think we'd have a bigger delta between a good and bad pitstop. We can look to Le Mans or even NASCAR to see if that's right.

In reply to alfadriver :

The reduction is mechanics is to save money and slow down the pitstops so a fan can actually see what's going on.  The spec wing is to reduce downforce and the money spent on downforce and the money spent on replacing wings. Sure, teams will try to make the downforce back but if the floors are flat, bargeboards are banned and the front wing will only give xxx pounds of downforce, no matter what you do with it, there will be little reason to spend millions in a wind tunnel. Better to spend that money on getting more power and using less fuel.

In reply to loosecannon :

I'm not really sure if the slower pit stops will be accepted or not.

But I'm pretty sure that the cars being much slower due to that much lower downforce will not be that accepted.  We do have significantly simpler wings coming, but the tunnels will keep the cornering speeds high and the cars as fast or faster than now.  Or at least close.  A drop back to 80's era downforce will slow the cars down to 80's lap times.  And remembering how much screaming there is every time the cars got slower, well....  The best thing will be to have mostly spec parts- that will keep costs down the most.

edit- IIRC, the 2021 rules have a LOT of spec parts- some built by one supplier, some built by a handful of suppliers, and some that each team make themselves- but to an equal specification.  So there's a lot of cost cutting coming.  And thanks to Haas, there's a totally new economic model for a competitive team.

Keith Tanner said:

I dunno, if you've got two or guys four running around from wheel to wheel you've dramatically increased the potential for screwups over a single guy with one job to do in a 1.5s window. There are multiple places for it all to go wrong, and I think we'd have a bigger delta between a good and bad pitstop. We can look to Le Mans or even NASCAR to see if that's right.

If you look at the actual source of 90% of the errors, the sources will still be 4- each wheel nut.  Actually, I can't really think of other errors in recent years other than wheel nut issues.  The motions will be practices so often that the odds of an error will be minimized- and you can see that in all forms of racing how much training keeps the stops fast.  

But while I've also complained about the fast pit stops in the past, I'm honestly not that interested in seeing races be decided by a tire changer trip over his air hoses.  Or whatever errors we can come up with when there's two guys with guns running around the car.  It's supposed to be a car race.

At my indoor kart track, I recently started playing full length videos of old Formula 1 races and the cars were a lot slower but I promise you, the races were more exciting. Cars could follow closer and danced around because the grip came from tires, not downforce.  People would quickly forget about lap times if the cars were following nose to tail

Personally I think they should bring back refueling, if for no other reason than that F1 looks really stupid arguing that it's too dangerous to allow it when essentially every other top-level series has it.  NASCAR, IndyCar, LeMans, etc.

Passing isn't the problem in F1, we have lots of passing these days.  What we don't have is lots of passing for the lead, because generally most races have 1 team who substantially outperforms the others (often but not always Mercedes).

So how do you fix that?  IMHO (and it's not a popular opinion), you leave the damn rules alone for a while.  Changing stuff benefits the teams that can afford to throw a ton of resources at evaluating many different avenues of approach to find the new maximum performance compromises.  If you leave them alone then the teams converge on the broad strokes and each newly-discovered improvement gets lesser and lesser, so the lap time benefit of each dollar spent on R&D goes down.

Otherwise:

- The rules for pit stops aren't broken, don't mess with them.

- If you want the drivers to go all out, you need to go back to the kinds of tires we had in the Ferrari/Schumacher era.  Today's tires behave the way they do because the FIA asked Pirelli to make tires that degrade.  Degradation means the tires won't do a full stint at maximum pace, thereby introducing a strategic/tactical element where they need to decide when best to use that pace.  There were races where Michael Schumacher did 25 qualifying laps in a row, which just isn't possible today.

- Personally I'm not really a fan of the "you only get 3/4/whatever engines per season" rule.  Presumably it reduces costs (although I haven't seen an accounting of how much), but it has had a couple of major side effects.  First is that it placed a huge premium on reliability, which has meant that a lot fewer cars fall out of the race due to engine failure.  This hurts the midfield teams because it reduces the chances of them scoring podiums when the top teams have an unlucky weekend.  The second effect is the one where a popular driver gets a 10 or 20 grid spot penalty because of an engine failure, thus ruining his race weekend 2 weeks before they even get to practice session 1.  (and no, you can't get rid of those grid spot penalties if you want there to be any teeth in the engine limit rule at all).

- I agree with alfadriver about slowing cars down by reducing downforce.  We saw that a couple years ago when they got tired of seeing "lap record, Michael Schumacher in the Ferrari F2004" at every race (well, every race at a facility that we had in 2004) -- there was a conscious decision to bring down lap times by adding downforce back into the rules, so we could start setting new lap records.

- Renewable fuels is pointless.  The 747s flying the team cargo to a single event uses way more fuel than all the cars put together all season.

- Opening up the engine formula, while superficially appealing, is the kind of rules change that will require MASSIVE amounts of cash to explore.  It's the opposite of leaving the rules alone.  A few years ago I would have argued for relaxing the "freeze" and "homologation" rules to allow the other manufacturers the chance to catch up with Mercedes, but that seems to have happened naturally.  Ferrari is making more power, and the Honda and Renault engines seem to be pretty reasonable.  I think this now falls into the "not broken, don't change it" category (so, of course, it's set to change again in 2021... sigh.)

- IME, preference for car aesthetics is really about what era of F1 you personally first started watching the races.

In reply to codrus :

So while it does sound good to leave the rules alone, there are some technical problems with the current rules- all of the teams recognize that the current aero rules results in a wake so large that it's hard on many levels for cars to slowly close on other cars.  Remember in Sochi, cars had to maintain a 2 second gap or the tire deg would be so high they could not keep close.  That's the whole point with the tunnel based downforce- it's far more robust to turbulence and it does not generate nearly as much.   More than once this season, between the leading teams, on of the cars closed in on someone in front of them, and then could not do anything once they got there- the speed difference was not enough to take a chance and close up tight risking the tires.

By now, it should be pretty obvious that i'm rather optimistic about the 2021 rules- the FIA and the teams did a lot of common research to get to the same point that we are all looking for.  The one place where they decided not to compromise is the powertrain, which will end up keeping new engine makers out of the series.  But in the end, 3 engines is better than 2- which is what we had for most of the 70s.   And I think the aero rules will up the amount of passing quite a bit.

loosecannon said:

In reply to alfadriver :

The reduction is mechanics is to save money and slow down the pitstops so a fan can actually see what's going on.  The spec wing is to reduce downforce and the money spent on downforce and the money spent on replacing wings. Sure, teams will try to make the downforce back but if the floors are flat, bargeboards are banned and the front wing will only give xxx pounds of downforce, no matter what you do with it, there will be little reason to spend millions in a wind tunnel. Better to spend that money on getting more power and using less fuel.

Reduction in costs because fewer pit crew over the wall assumes, the only reason that mechanic is there is to hold the new left rear tyre until it's put on. I suspect, all those guys have plenty of other jobs over the weekend that don't go away just because they aren't changing a tire. 

As for the wind tunnel? Yes, they will still spend as much as they are allowed looking for fractions of a percent. 

So some late season news- https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a30136724/aston-martin-lawrence-stroll-takeover-bid/

Lawrence Stroll may buy Aston Martin (who went public a year ago, and has seen it's value decline a lot).  Which would 1) rename Racing Point to Aston Martin, and 2) remove Aston Martin from both Red Bull and Toro Rosso (or whatever they will be called).   2 is good for Honda, since it has no relationship with AML.

In reply to alfadriver :

Also don't forget Mercedes own a share (I want to say 14%) of Aston Martin and Racing Point use Mercedes engines.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson :

I did not know that.  Interesting.  I do know that AML is building a new factory to make SUV's- found that out this morning talking to one of my colleagues who worked with AML after I did.  We were wondering how their stock got so low...

But it would mean an AML team with a Mercedes power train without any controversy.  

(and I shudder to think that Mercedes engines will be the basis of future AML products... )

alfadriver said:

In reply to Adrian_Thompson :(and I shudder to think that Mercedes engines will be the basis of future AML products... )

Sorry to burst your bubble, they already are.  All the current V8 engines are Mercedes AMG, they phased out the old Jag based V8.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson :

I'm kind of Ok with that- as I was not on the V8 team.  (Jag V8 has more Ford in it than Jag, FWIW- just that they got the bigger displacement for reasons)

The long term question becomes- if this happens, then how does AML evolve?  I don't see them using F1 like Ferrari can, whereas the WEC car can have *some* input to their production cars- so the whole business arrangement has to work out for the whole company.  (It's also interesting to read their ownership history- not many small makers like that are left on their own)

I actually have concerns over Aston.  They have absolutely no business being in F1 at their size.  In 2018, when they were doing a lot better than 2019 it should be noted, their total revenue was only $1B and their operating income was less than $150 million.  That is not the size of company that should be getting deeply involved in F1.  Ferrari for comparison are about three and a half times their size and (despite their BS not really public offering) they still have FCA's checkbook to prop them up if needed.

Adrian_Thompson said:

I actually have concerns over Aston.  They have absolutely no business being in F1 at their size.  In 2018, when they were doing a lot better than 2019 it should be noted, their total revenue was only $1B and their operating income was less than $150 million.  That is not the size of company that should be getting deeply involved in F1.  Ferrari for comparison are about three and a half times their size and (despite their BS not really public offering) they still have FCA's checkbook to prop them up if needed.

But, given Stroll's investment in Racing Point, I wonder how much of the cash will be used from Aston Martin vs. Stroll just buying the name and trying to increase Aston Martin sales by slapping the name and livery on the car.  If the deal goes through and they go full Aston Martin a BRG F1 car would be awesome to see.

-Rob

In terms of the Cost savings, the one thing that I feel could cut costs is the crisscrossing of the Atlantic.  I understand that certain countries are warmer at certain times of the year and some venues have long term contracts and times, however, when you look at the races here in the Americas we see Montreal  in June, Austin in October, Mexico and Brazil work.  We also see Singapore to Russia to Japan.  That is a lot of ocean crossing.  By reducing those distances or moving to a more circular plan of race organization travel costs could go way down.

As for the Racing Point/Aston Martin tie up.  I think Lawrence is biting off more than he can chew there.  He needs to work on getting RP up the grid and more competitive over a full season than buying a small Auto Manufacturer to get the name.  Heck, in reality Racing Point is the SECOND North American Formula 1 team now, because Lawrence runs it from Montreal Canada.