In an effort to make racing more unpredictable, American mass media company Liberty Media is taking into consideration the possibility of limiting the type of tyres the teams can run during the free practice, according to Williams technical chief Paddy Lowe.
The 2018 US Grand Prix witnessed heavy rains during the practice runs which limited the amount of track time for drivers. As a result, the top three winners were all on different tyre strategies and ultimately Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen won the race. The US GP was voted as the best race of the 2018 season.
Observing the correlation between limited track time and the resulting race, Formula 1 sporting chief Ross Brawn believes less data results in a more entertaining race. So, he is using the concept in the deliberations for the 2021 rule changes. Ross Brawn suggested limiting the teams from sampling all the compounds available for a weekend, according to Lowe.
“The cars are completely reliable and they’re completely optimised in terms of set-up, deployment around tyres or whatever,” said Lowe – “That means that the results you get are massively more predictable to the point. The major variable is the driver and mistakes he might make. But even there, drivers nowadays are completely fit, so they don’t even get tired like they used to, and they are well trained, coached. They don’t make many mistakes. We need to throw stuff in, that stops the optimisation. Ross has talked about this, that you can’t test any tyres on Friday, you have just a base tyre that’s just to let you work with the car and learn the circuit. A few things like that. Then everything is thrown in as a lucky dip for you for the race. I think it’s great.” – he explained.
Thanks to the 30 years of F1 experience, teams have made a lot of progress in analysing data and using it to their advantage. And this has made F1 very predictable, Lowe added. Explaining the difference in how things have changed over time, Lowe said that 30 years ago “we came to the race with two engineers, now we have 30 – and another 30 back at the factory”. He said: “If you want to make it more valuable, you’ve got to prevent the optimization and allow for effectively more disturbance, more noise, which will come from external factors, that we couldn’t optimise around. It will be good. Because the other alternative [is] you get rid of the engineers by cost cap or reduce the operational staff level here [at the track]. I am not trying to just make a lot of engineers redundant, they can do other things. I think Ross has realised [that optimisation is causing predictable races], that’s his own observation, and he has a project around that.”
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