2022 Formula One Spanish Grand Prix

An overtake is exciting when a driver has to work for it. DRS does not cancel excitement by default (best example is Vettel's overtake on Bottas at this very track in 2017, that was a move that had us in the edge of the seat, with DRS involved).

Problem is, with the current set of rules, DRS has become very OP, and its effect needs to be dulled somehow. Either by changing how the system works, like setting a number of activations and turn it into a P2P, reducing length of the zones, or regulating the opening (hardest thing to do).

The best would be for F1 to keep refining the regulations to improve the pure racing, and edge closer to the point that the system can be ditched completely. I would begin by removing as much adjustments from the cockpit as possible, the cars are still too perfect and need more natural variation in their perfomance through a stint to create changing conditions that encourage racing and see gaps going back and forth, so races are not settled way before time. Unfortunately, FIA does not seem keen on removing tools to make life harder and more exciting.

Back to the racing battle that sparked this discussion: Verstappen, even with no DRS, had a +10 km/h advantage over Russell at the end of the straight, the Merc would not reach even 300! Max could have had an overtaking shot having such an advantage over a 1 km straight, but he was all over the place at the final sector and could never get out to the main straight with a clean run and close to his prey, he was always 5-6 tenths behind, when he needed to be at less than 0.4s. And I ask myself...why? Was it because Max was driving over his head, not coping with the loss of the device? Or do these cars still have massive problems with tyre overheating when chasing a rival, that at this track it gets magnified somehow? Food for thought.

pai said:

An overtake is exciting when a driver has to work for it. DRS does not cancel excitement by default (best example is Vettel's overtake on Bottas at this very track in 2017, that was a move that had us in the edge of the seat, with DRS involved).

Problem is, with the current set of rules, DRS has become very OP, and its effect needs to be dulled somehow. Either by changing how the system works, like setting a number of activations and turn it into a P2P, reducing length of the zones, or regulating the opening (hardest thing to do).

The best would be for F1 to keep refining the regulations to improve the pure racing, and edge closer to the point that the system can be ditched completely. I would begin by removing as much adjustments from the cockpit as possible, the cars are still too perfect and need more natural variation in their perfomance through a stint to create changing conditions that encourage racing and see gaps going back and forth, so races are not settled way before time. Unfortunately, FIA does not seem keen on removing tools to make life harder and more exciting.

Back to the racing battle that sparked this discussion: Verstappen, even with no DRS, had a +10 km/h advantage over Russell at the end of the straight, the Merc would not reach even 300! Max could have had an overtaking shot having such an advantage over a 1 km straight, but he was all over the place at the final sector and could never get out to the main straight with a clean run and close to his prey, he was always 5-6 tenths behind, when he needed to be at less than 0.4s. And I ask myself...why? Was it because Max was driving over his head, not coping with the loss of the device? Or do these cars still have massive problems with tyre overheating when chasing a rival, that at this track it gets magnified somehow? Food for thought.

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I agree with your first and second paragraph, but your third paragraph seems not really thought through - at least not in written form, no offence intended.

It's not so easy to "refine regulations to improve pure racing". How do you want to make that happen?
Even if you would prohibit every on-board adjustment (which btw is standard even in low level classes such as GT3), it would not take away the fact that you need a huge performance gap for a possible overtake (probably >1,5s a lap, depending on the track). You barely have these performance gaps, unlike some of the top-car-drivers is at the back of the grid due to some reason + has better tyres. Do you really want these rare cases to be the only overtakes in a race?

Only if the advantage of slipstream would come close to the disadvantage of lost downforce in corners a push-to-pass system could be ditched. And this is only happening with cars that have next to no downforce and/or very low power, so slipstream actually has big enough of an effect.
I guess both these cases are not really an option for F1.

"Making cars harder to drive" is also an argument you hear quite often. But how do you want to achieve that? Obviously teams always try to build cars that are as easy to drive as possible, so the drivers can be consistent. No matter which regulations you would come up with, the teams would always manage to build a car around them that behaves (comparatively) good, because that's the most important aspect if you want to score consistent points.

Look, the problem with F1 is simple.

The front wing is still too big and the cars are still way too reliant on downforce generation. Hence the huge length they have, which is a really for the sole purppose of increasing the surface of the underbody.

Cars have no problems following each other in indycar.

They also had no problems following each other in the early 80s, when they generated huge downforce from the underbody alone, to the point that they didn't even need the front wing.

Going ground effects was a solution i advocated for years and years, but in typical FIA fashion, the move was half hearted. They should have gone full into it, reduced the front wing to something vistigial, and imposed a maximum length for the underbody.

This would make the cars shorter and much more racier overnight, but it would make team principals and chief aero staff cry, so they are tip toing around it.

I never realized the silly wheelbase was due to keeping the underbody as long as possible. Guess I haven't given the class much thought.........

Copef1 said:

Shumacher was a Knight? This is laughable. The guy who made a mistake and threw his car into the wall, then drove the broken car back on track and smashed into Damon Hill so he wouldn't beat Shumacher to the title is a Knight? The same guy who purposely drove his car into the side of Jacques Villeneuve to try and stop him from winning the title is a Knight? The driver who parked his car in the middle of LaRascasse at Monaco to stop anyone from taking pole position away from him is a Knight? I'm sorry about what happened to Michael, but lets not pretend he wasn't a Diva too.

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Yeah, you know that Knight do make mistakes from time to time. You for sure know that Lewis did some dirty drives and much worse than finishing in a crash fighting for a championship.
And for sure that he is not a Saint, but I never said that.
And the Villeneuve maneuver is not on him, the Damon Hill one is and the Monaco “mistake” are. But even if you see all of them as controversial, he did not have so many contacts or crashes with others in his career as Lewis had. And they are at least more understandable to had happened in comparison.
Schumacher received the same or sometimes a worst treatment than that, like Coulthard in 98 Spa, and Buenos Aires 98 and was not even seen close to what media said about Schumacher attempt of murder in 97 and 94.
There is a bias for British teams and drivers, the media push a lot on fans or F1 followers. Many did open their eyes and started seeing it clearly with the favoritism on Lewis, even when Bottas was so mistreated as teammate. Even never pointing out how Mercedes impeded him to win even if he had 30s lead. But Ferraris orders with Schumacher-Barrichello were the worst thing to happen to F1.
That's something that I call not to defend Schumacher but to be fair.

LMGiorni said:

Yeah, you know that Knight do make mistakes from time to time. You for sure know that Lewis did some dirty drives and much worse than finishing in a crash fighting for a championship.
And for sure that he is not a Saint, but I never said that.
And the Villeneuve maneuver is not on him, the Damon Hill one is and the Monaco “mistake” are. But even if you see all of them as controversial, he did not have so many contacts or crashes with others in his career as Lewis had. And they are at least more understandable to had happened in comparison.
Schumacher received the same or sometimes a worst treatment than that, like Coulthard in 98 Spa, and Buenos Aires 98 and was not even seen close to what media said about Schumacher attempt of murder in 97 and 94.
There is a bias for British teams and drivers, the media push a lot on fans or F1 followers. Many did open their eyes and started seeing it clearly with the favoritism on Lewis, even when Bottas was so mistreated as teammate. Even never pointing out how Mercedes impeded him to win even if he had 30s lead. But Ferraris orders with Schumacher-Barrichello were the worst thing to happen to F1.
That's something that I call not to defend Schumacher but to be fair.

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can the british media still remember the bad merry christmas joke.. you are right Schumacher and Alonso and in the end Verstappen also suffered from it. I'm just glad it's now about Leclerc and Max.. as soon as Russel drives a winning car it will start again

I am also very curious how the big F1 cars will drive through Monaco

Celestiale said:

Following another car is just to big of a disadvantage to make the racing work without it

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Bingo. Barcelona was mostly about tire deg.
Unless running in clear air, tires got cooked.
Based on whiner of the day's save the engine message,
Merc seemingly employed an aggressive mode to make speed yesterday,
which was not enough to help George when following cars of similar performance and tire age.
Max and Ham in faster cars on fresher tires could romp thru the field,
running mostly in clear air and minimizing time running close behind other cars,
which RB sorted after Max was initially unable to nail a pass on George.
Checo knew he needed to get thru quickly for his tire strategy to work.

Merc's orchestrated DNF noise near the end
suggests that they have engine "reliability" upgrades queued...

blekenbleu said:

Bingo. Barcelona was mostly about tire deg.
Unless running in clear air, tires got cooked.
Based on whiner of the day's save the engine message,
Merc seemingly employed an aggressive mode to make speed yesterday,
which was not enough to help George when following cars of similar performance and tire age.
Max and Ham in faster cars on fresher tires could romp thru the field,
running mostly in clear air and minimizing time running close behind other cars,
which RB sorted after Max was initially unable to nail a pass on George.
Checo knew he needed to get thru quickly for his tire strategy to work.

Merc's orchestrated DNF noise near the end
suggests that they have engine "reliability" upgrades queued...

Click to expand...

I think Verstappen's three stopper pits made the difference. The tires wore out faster than anyone thought Max couldn't possibly get hold of Russell with his Drs problem. Must say that Russell defended excellently

Celestiale said:

I agree with your first and second paragraph, but your third paragraph seems not really thought through - at least not in written form, no offence intended.

It's not so easy to "refine regulations to improve pure racing". How do you want to make that happen?
Even if you would prohibit every on-board adjustment (which btw is standard even in low level classes such as GT3), it would not take away the fact that you need a huge performance gap for a possible overtake (probably >1,5s a lap, depending on the track). You barely have these performance gaps, unlike some of the top-car-drivers is at the back of the grid due to some reason + has better tyres. Do you really want these rare cases to be the only overtakes in a race?

Only if the advantage of slipstream would come close to the disadvantage of lost downforce in corners a push-to-pass system could be ditched. And this is only happening with cars that have next to no downforce and/or very low power, so slipstream actually has big enough of an effect.
I guess both these cases are not really an option for F1.

"Making cars harder to drive" is also an argument you hear quite often. But how do you want to achieve that? Obviously teams always try to build cars that are as easy to drive as possible, so the drivers can be consistent. No matter which regulations you would come up with, the teams would always manage to build a car around them that behaves (comparatively) good, because that's the most important aspect if you want to score consistent points.

Click to expand...

I never said that refining regulations was easy. My problem is that the efforts I'm seeing are not enough IMHO. And probably the reason why is the economics iceberg that is not easily seen by the fans, like how many contracts with 3rd party providers are active and how big of an economical impact it would have on the teams to simply wipe out everything on the steering wheel. To name something.

F1 cars had troubles with dirty air since wings were installed on cars. But with tyres not being ultra sensitive and bulky bodywork that could punch a big hole in the air, an overtake could be done with not much drama. As years went on, aero was optimized to the point that the air seals at the exit of the car in a much more effective way, negating lots of slipstream, and tyre development has gone to the peaky side of things, with very narrow windows of operation. Moving into a showbiz rubber has only made matters worse.

An F1 car by design is a very nimble, capable machine, and probably rather easy to drive, yes. But that is exacerbated by having several adjustments on board that allow you to keep the car inside its sweetspot throughout the race. You have a dynamic brake bias system that can change how much the distribution moves between initial braking and apex, an electronic diff with several ramps that can be tweaked to change response on every single phase of corners, and can have several pre-programmed mappings so they can change how it works per corner, and add a modifier of it based on what kind of session you are in, and the situation of the car (fuel load, type of tyre compound, amount of wear, etc.). All of this makes that, besides a change in laptimes, you and I as fans lose a lot of the spectacle of watching a driver struggling with a sensitive machine that changes its balance, as that stays put via the adjustments. It also reduces how much a car's perfomance varies throughout the race, which makes gaps between cars go back and forth at different points of the race, because how you setup a car before going to the grid is not just the way of extracting the most speed out of your machine: it becomes an integral part of the strategy. This would also alter how an F1 is designed, because I highly doubt that suspension and aero would stay exactly the same if the driver cannot freely adjust everything on board to keep the car inside a tiny perfomance window; instead, that window must be widened, otherwise the high perfomance machine becomes useless.

My belief is that, while you have the dirty air with no slipstream problem, you need to make things unpredictable and changing, to create opportunities for battle and close racing by making car's perfomances vary throughout a Grand Prix. The "nature" of wearing rubber and consuming fuel gives you that. The ability of constantly tweak the machine in minute details takes that away. This is why the Pirelli tyres were introduced to the circus, but it can now be seen than that alone was not enough. DRS was implemented as a way to circumvent this. It was a needed solution, but the FIA, instead of getting down to work on a true solution, decided to rest on their laurels and not do a thing. It wasn't until Liberty Media came onboard and put Ross Brawn in charge of finding a better solution, that some sort of step forward was made.

That being said, I wonder if something like a Handford Device could be integrated into the cars in a way that it increases the slipstream by forcing the rear wing to create vacuum, like CART did in Superspeedways. It would need several tweaks because the mileage of cars would suffer, speeds would go down, overall downforce would go down (partially due to the effect of the device, partially also because cars would have to be setup with lower downforce or they would be snails on straights), but I think it's an interesting solution that has not yet been explored.

Richard Wilks said:

Look, the problem with F1 is simple.

The front wing is still too big and the cars are still way too reliant on downforce generation. Hence the huge length they have, which is a really for the sole purppose of increasing the surface of the underbody.

Cars have no problems following each other in indycar.

They also had no problems following each other in the early 80s, when they generated huge downforce from the underbody alone, to the point that they didn't even need the front wing.

Going ground effects was a solution i advocated for years and years, but in typical FIA fashion, the move was half hearted. They should have gone full into it, reduced the front wing to something vistigial, and imposed a maximum length for the underbody.

This would make the cars shorter and much more racier overnight, but it would make team principals and chief aero staff cry, so they are tip toing around it.

Click to expand...

I don't know how much there is in terms of safety regarding the regulations, but something that bothered me with the car's lengths until last year, is that you could see clearly from above that there were LOTS of free room, sidepods and engine bay not being even remotely close to the edges of the floor. Meaning that the packaging had evolved enough for mandating a maximum length and forcing teams to repackage everything in something tighter that is both better looking, reduces downforce, and is bulkier, creating bigger slipstream and better racing. A simple solution that ticks several boxes in one swipe.

This year the cars are shorter, like 20cm, but still are like 40cm longer than early 90s cars. And there is still room to make them shorter, because design departments of the teams are amazing at packaging stuff.

And yes, front wings are still overly complex. I would have mandated a maximum two horizontal planes per side of the nosecone, restrict surfaces to a determined area value, and deal with it. Front wing is still too decisive in managing airflow. It must play its part, but its current role is too big.

too .... much .... reading ....

Wow, I suspected Russell would be better than Hamilton, but jeez, this is getting embarrassing for Sir Lewis. George is dominating with a 28 point advantage, 5 out of 6 better race results, and has outperformed Hamilton 20 vs 10 sessions. The emperor has no clothes!

Shame we could not see another great battle with Ferrari up front. Congrats to Mercedes for clearly moving a big step forward. With George, Max, Charles in much more closely matched machinery than what we saw the last 8 years, we may actually have a season to remember. My only other wish is to get McLaren to join the fun as Lando truly deserves to be up there also.

zwiss said:

Looks like Kevin still had a lot of room on the outside
Racing incident. Let's accept it

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Complete bullocs.
Neither you or me can see that on that picture.
Thats the reason any intelligent person would suggest that the telemetry data should be analysed.
Just as I say in my post above.

Richard Wilks said:

Look, the problem with F1 is simple.

The front wing is still too big and the cars are still way too reliant on downforce generation. Hence the huge length they have, which is a really for the sole purppose of increasing the surface of the underbody.

Cars have no problems following each other in indycar.

They also had no problems following each other in the early 80s, when they generated huge downforce from the underbody alone, to the point that they didn't even need the front wing.

Going ground effects was a solution i advocated for years and years, but in typical FIA fashion, the move was half hearted. They should have gone full into it, reduced the front wing to something vistigial, and imposed a maximum length for the underbody.

This would make the cars shorter and much more racier overnight, but it would make team principals and chief aero staff cry, so they are tip toing around it.

Click to expand...

I thought much of the added length was to accommodate the Hybrid plumbing & components.

davehenrie said:

I thought much of the added length was to accommodate the Hybrid plumbing & components.

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Cars have been 5 metres long since 2010.

Killing DRS = Killing F1.

Will be the most stupid sluggish boring dominating no action dead sport. Some of you haven't followed F1 since the 90's and for 30 years like me and this is why you don't know the consequence of cancelling DRS.

azaralamouri said:

Killing DRS = Killing F1.

Will be the most stupid sluggish boring dominating no action dead sport. Some of you haven't followed F1 since the 90's and for 30 years like me and this is why you don't know the consequence of cancelling DRS.

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Indycar in the 90s didnt need any DRS, nor did a lot of other single seater formulas, to have action on track. The DRS is a lazy band aid that should have never existed.

davehenrie said:

I thought much of the added length was to accommodate the Hybrid plumbing & components.

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I've seen those explanations all the time, even from reputed F1 websites, and i can tell with utmost certainty that that is just hogwash that the teams say to not have their precious aero spoiled with length rules. How do i know this? The ferrari 640 of 1990 was way shorter, had a long 3.5 liter V12 plus a 200 liter fuel tank and a longitudinal gearbox.

LMP1 cars had more complexity than that, and they have a maximum length by the rules that is a meter less than the current F1 cars.

BP said:

Well at least it's not "completely" lol...come on, it was lap 1 and the new and improved race directors found it as a simple racing incident...it was understeer, nothing more.

Now he's P4...excellent recovery!

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You have to take into account he had the second best race car on the day, or equal second, so the 15 odd cars ahead were pretty 'easy meat' and they all provided nice DRS for him, something the front-runners didn't have the luxury of.