21 Red Bull victories in 22 Grand Prix races, nineteen of them signed by Max Verstappen. These numbers alone summarize one of the most monotonous seasons ever in terms of the battle at the top. For 2024, it seems unlikely that anyone can break the dominance of the world champions, but there is reason to believe in a growing balance. Nothing can guarantee it, but for the future, it is still reasonable to hope for performance convergence.
Physical Revolution
Expectations for the ground-effect regulations were high, accompanied by promises of on-track balance and great spectacle, something even insiders were convinced of. “The regulations will lead us to converge,” commented Mattia Binotto at the beginning of 2022. The expectation was that in the second year of the regulations, the championship could offer a fought challenge, especially after what was seen in the last races of the previous season. However, the current cycle of regulations is not like those that preceded it.
In the past, regulatory revolutions modified the dimensions and geometries of the cars, keeping the basic aerodynamic principles unchanged. The flat bottom offered few variables to designers, including the management of the rake angle, the forward tilt of the car. For the most part, the competition played out on the edge of the floor, on the front wing, and on the mid-car appendages to manage external turbulence. In 2022, however, the change was in the basic physics, exaggerating the ground-effect and focusing on the interaction between the floor and the ground.
Current cars constantly travel on the edge of aerodynamic instability, with a more complex vortex structure under the floor than in the past. Even for protecting the car from the turbulence of the front wheels, teams have to rely on different tools. The edge of the floor and the front wing have been drastically simplified, while mid-car aerodynamic appendages have been banned, forcing teams to use suspensions and bodywork to manage flows.
Ground-effect regulations have cut any continuity of thought with the past. Teams still have much to learn, which means a long way to go before reaching the maximum performance achievable with the current regulations, the moment when balance between teams will be achieved. In a context where the variables are countless, the dominance of one team over others seems almost physiological, just as does convergence in the years to come.
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The Year of Concepts
Despite being in the second year, the 2023 Formula One season saw all teams still busy discovering and understanding the ground-effect regulations. During the 2022 championship, issues had emerged that had absorbed almost all the teams’ attention. Foremost among them was porpoising, but also the reduction of weight had absorbed many resources, with all cars above the minimum weight except for the lone Alfa Romeo.
Once the initial issues were sorted out, last season, teams delved into the less intuitive aspects of ground-effect, discovering something new every month. 2023 was the year of concepts, a central theme in the first part of the championship, to be understood not only as bodywork but also as the working mode of the cars. Various Red Bull representatives, for example, emphasized that the concept behind the RB19 is based on the compromise between ground clearance and suspension stiffness, to extract the maximum aerodynamic load in fast corners without sacrificing too much straight-line speed.
The compromise between mechanics and aerodynamics is inevitable with a physics, that of the ground effect, based on the interaction between the floor and the ground. All this has introduced enormous complexities, with cars in which every aspect is closely interconnected with the other. This has caused setbacks during development for some teams, including Aston Martin, something well known to Mike Krack: “These cars are very complex. Developing doesn’t mean simply increasing the load more and more. Very often, you introduce characteristic changes to the car or create other effects.”
The Importance of the Track
Many insights have been gained by teams in the second year of the ground-effect regulations. If in 2022 some labeled the body shapes as inconsequential to performance, in 2023 they had to rethink. The development of the floor allowed to understand the potential of bodywork with certain geometries, opening the door to new solutions. Photos of the Red Bull floor taken trackside also enlightened rivals on how it is possible to design complex and three-dimensional geometries, with crests and valleys in the floor to control the energy of flows.
Another lesson learned is the need to study ground-effect cars not only in various driving conditions but also in the transitions between them. Andrew Shovlin, head of Mercedes track engineers, put it eloquently: “With the old regulations, which we understood well, there was no need to study the car in the same dynamic sense. You determined how they behaved at a certain roll angle, steering angle, or at certain ground clearances, and in doing so, you captured everything that happened. But now the flow structures under the car are much more complicated and transitory.”
It emerges how ground-effect regulations have rewritten the physics of cars, introducing or emphasizing phenomena that were previously secondary and not always predictable in the wind tunnel. “There are aspects of the car that are not replicable in the wind tunnel. It didn’t happen before, but now there’s the ground effect,” says Fred Vasseur. The regulatory revolution has not only upheaved the cars but also required an adjustment of simulation techniques. All this has heightened the difficulties in predicting the behavior of the cars and delivering to the drivers cars that match their preferences. The Red Bull-Verstappen duo is the exception, currently a unique example of a perfect man-machine harmony.
Work in Progress
2023 was a second year of general learning, with sudden jumps in performance both at the top and bottom of the standings. In winter, Red Bull took off while Aston Martin joined the front group, caught up in the summer by McLaren. In the rear, Williams suddenly went from the last to the seventh force on the field, a role snatched away at the end of the season by AlphaTauri. The shake-ups in the standings are further signs of a Formula 1 in adjustment, with regulations in their infancy that still offer enormous growth opportunities.
Teams were not the only ones learning, but organizers and suppliers also learned. Pirelli brought new reinforced front tires to combat understeer in 2022, tires that teams had to study to make them work properly. To prevent porpoising, the FIA introduced restrictions on the floor and diffuser, costing about half a second in lap times. The changes encouraged teams to run lower, another change that deceived Mercedes, for example, which had worked in the opposite direction. Finally, raising the edge of the floor made the cars more sensitive to the wind, complicating the teams’ work to seal the underbody from external turbulence. In 2023, therefore, there were several changes that further shuffled the cards.
Towards Convergence
The scope of the ground-effect regulations’ change has been enormous, nothing comparable to the recent past. It is not the pure geometric constraints that have evolved, but the basic physics of the cars, temporarily opening the gaps from one team to another. From this point of view, an extension of the convergence times was inevitable, almost doubling compared to the past. At the end of the second year, it is as if only now the teams are settling the technical foundations on which to build future projects, without further revolutions.
An objectionable gap for the FIA and Formula 1, if any, is the excessive restrictions on testing and development opportunities, at a time marked by the need to study, understand, and experiment. The mixed impression with hope, however, is that convergence is already underway and that it can be preserved even beyond 2026. The next regulations will continue to revolve around ground effect, perhaps acting on dimensions and geometries as done in the past. The prospects are for a basic physics that will remain unchanged at least until the end of the decade, a reason for hope for all fans who demand a more competitive Formula 1 than what has been seen so far.
