F1 | Tombazis admits: “We needed to limit the out wash, but the FIA was alone”
The Greek engineer explains that the International Federation wanted to change the rules to improve the slipstream effect, but without adequate support from the teams, it was impossible to modify the regulations during a normative cycle. Nikolas is convinced things will be better from 2026, but judging by the photos of the Cadillac, it’s fair to have doubts.
The ground effect F1 cars are stepping off the stage to make way for the more agile machines. Now that these regulations are retiring, drivers have begun to recount how much they suffered from back pain due to the violent jolts of ‘porpoising’ or the effect of ‘bouncing’, the rebound caused by the plank when it scraped on the asphalt.
Nikolas Tombazis, however, approached the topic of the cars introduced in 2022 from a different angle, highlighting the weakness of the FIA, as a legislator, in changing the rules mid-cycle without reasons dictated by safety concerns.
The International Federation’s technical staff would have intervened before the conclusion of the regulatory cycle to limit cars from racing in “dirty air,” which caused them to lose significant downforce when following another car closely.
While the FIA’s Single-Seater Technical Director can be satisfied with the work done on the Budget Cap, which has led all teams to unquestionable financial sustainability, the Greek engineer cannot be equally pleased with the results achieved at an aerodynamic level.
“The regulation initiated in 2022 had an objective to enable cars to race closer. And positive results were seen until 2023, then the tune changed because there were, not exactly loopholes, but there were certainly some areas of the regulation that were a bit too interpretable. And this allowed the teams to adopt solutions that created a negative side effect.”
The teams realized it was possible to increase the performance of the cars by boosting the ‘out wash’ effect of the front wing, cleaning up the wake of the front wheel, which reduced the losses that could contaminate the flow destined for the Venturi tunnels. However, this generated turbulence that negatively impacted the car following behind.
“The main area of research was the shape of the front wing endplate. Originally, the endplate was designed to be a device with a strong ‘in wash’ effect. Gradually, however, the developments that transformed the design of how the wing profiles met the endplate led to a change in concept because the rules were not strict enough, and we saw an increasingly marked ‘out wash’ effect appear.”
It is interesting to understand what the in-progress change was:
“The 2021 single-seaters, when ten meters behind another car, lost 50% of their front downforce. With the rules introduced in 2022, we managed to contain the loss to about 20%, achieving a positive result, but after 2023 there was a deterioration that brought us back to a 35% reduction in downforce.”
The result was that overtaking became increasingly difficult, even with DRS open. Naturally, team aerodynamicists did not only work on the front wing endplates:
“The other area where teams developed heavily was the front corners and, in particular, the internal components of the front wheel. And I would also say the floor edge details fell into that category. These were the main areas of deterioration of the slipstream effect compared to the intent of the regulation.”
It is therefore legitimate to ask why the FIA did not intervene by proposing changes to the technical regulations for 2024 or 2025. And Nikolas Tombazis offers an interesting explanation that is not so much technical as it is political:
“These aerodynamic aspects I mentioned were not a recent surprise. It was like this two years ago as well. Why don’t we have the regulation? Well, we tried, but we didn’t have enough support from the teams.”
“Governance is required to modify technical regulations during a regulatory cycle, and therefore the support of a majority of the teams was needed to bring about certain changes. But only we tried to do something.”
Nikolas Tombazis believes that dirty air will be a less significant element with the cars arriving in 2026: “As far as slipstream management is concerned, we certainly believe it will improve, but we will talk about it in two years and I hope I can tell you that we will all be smiling because things will have gone better.”
We wish him well, but judging by an image showing a model of the front wing that went into the Cadillac wind tunnel, it won’t be that simple: the photograph, in fact, showed us that flow deflectors were experimented with on the outer sidewalk of the endplate, which serve the function of seeking the ‘out wash’ effect. And here we go again, even before we start…
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