Formula One managing director Ross Brawn has admitted that some extremely critical comments from the drivers regarding the raceability of Formula 1 cars represented a key aspect in the sport’s decision to make its radical new redesign for the 2022 championship.
Formula 1 is ready to start a new era this season following a radical change of the aerodynamic rules and regulations with the aim of giving drivers more chances for overtaking and therefore increased the show on track. The plan was made shortly after Liberty Media’s takeover of Formula 1 five years ago. Former Ferrari boss Ross Brawn was named managing director motorsports and given the task to create a group which identified the best ways of improving the on-circuit spectacle.
What followed was a consultation process with the drivers, many of whom had competed in numerous other series, and a clear impression regarding the situation of Formula One cars. It was then understood that a car two lengths behind a competitor would “lose half of its aerodynamic downforce”, according to Ross Brawn, a stat that has been cut to just 10 to 15 per cent with the new cars.
Asked in an interview with The New York Times at the end of last season whether he was surprised at the figures, Ross Brawn explained: “Quite frankly no. It’s not only the way the airflow goes around the car, it’s the criticality of the design of the car. If you look at the modern Formula 1 car, just behind the front wheels, around the front wing, it has an awful lot of complex aerodynamic shapes. They’re designed to work in free air. As soon as they get disturbed airflow from a car in front, they just stop functioning, so I wasn’t altogether surprised when I saw how much the performance dropped off.”
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The findings were exacerbated further by the comments from the Formula 1 drivers.
“In interviewing drivers about this issue when we first started, we spoke to a lot of drivers who’d raced other formulae or sports cars or other forms of racing car and they all said Formula 1 cars are dreadful. We spoke to drivers who were racing sports cars or had come up through Formula 2, and they all said the same. They said that once they hit Formula 1, they were driving a car where they couldn’t get near to the car in front without feeling that loss of performance, something they hadn’t experienced in other formulae. So we knew there was a challenge there, an issue there that we needed to fix.” – the former Ferrari boss concluded.
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