The imitation game

ONE OF THE KEY WORDS BANDIED

around at the dawn of Formula 1’s second ground-effect era was “revolution”. Appropriate enough at the time as the stakeholders chased a dream of an action-packed future in which a new emphasis on underbody aerodynamics would banish processional racing. Less so now as design orthodoxy naturally coalesces around the most successful solution: Red Bull’s record-breaking RB19.

It’s understandable given the major inputs into such decisions: the sheer margin of Red Bull’s dominance in 2023; the existence of a cost cap which naturally restricts experimentation; and the fact that the next rules reset is two seasons away.

In 2008 Honda had three different design teams spitballing ideas in separate windtunnels for the incoming ’09 ruleset and the result was dominance (even if Honda didn’t get to enjoy it after panic-selling the team for £1 as the global financial crisis gripped). But we’re not in Kansas anymore. Increasingly, pragmatism trumps originality in contemporary F1. In what’s now a rigidly cost-controlled environment, thanks to the budget cap, a team that has gone down a dead-end development path cannot simply spend their way out of it.

This has led to a more gradual convergence than would have been the case in the free-spending era around what Red Bull has proved to be a winning formula. It’s also meant teams which have pivoted mid-season in key aerodynamic areas – and that is most of them, from Mercedes through to Haas – have found adopting, say, the ‘downwash’ sidepod configuration doesn’t immediately unlock laptime.

In fact, both of the teams mentioned above – Mercedes in Monaco last year, Haas in Austin – found that applying what the media habitually describes as ‘upgrades’ didn’t yield an instant uptick in performance. While this appeared to come as a surprise to the American team, Mercedes’ reflection upon it is suitably nuanced.

“The change to the sidepod fronts were, ‘let’s just not have that as a thing to worry about for the future,’” explaine