In the dynamic world of F1, you stand still and you fall behind

Two races in the Formula 1 season and we know one thing: It will be a great season in which Mercedes and Red Bull are fighting for victories.

It is also clear that McLaren, Ferrari and Williams have both made progress, but are not on the hunt for victories. And we know Scuderia AlphaTauri and Alfa Romeo are both about where they were last year and Haas is not going to have a good year but is focusing on 2022 when it will build a new car and have two drivers with more experience. That leaves two teams that have made no progress: Alpine and Aston Martin (formerly known as Racing Point).

Formula 1 is a dynamic world where things are constantly changing. If you stand still for a few weeks, you will fall behind. That happened at Alpine. Although they don’t admit it out loud, there was a problem with the wind tunnel and it had to be shut down for a few weeks. That hurts.

The team works tirelessly to make up for the losses, but even with riders of the caliber Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon (and the latter beat the former at Imola) it is difficult to fill such gaps.

And then we have Aston Martin. And that’s an interesting story because while Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel, who likely have a weaker line-up than Stroll and Sergio Perez last year, lost a lot of their performance. There’s not a lot of sympathy in the F1 world because a lock was ripped out of its joint last year when Racing Point copied the Mercedes in 2019. This was allowed and it was wise, but some people didn’t find it very athletic.

The interesting thing is that Mercedes and Aston Martin have both lost performance with the new aerodynamic rules. The engineers who understand things like this say it’s because the new rules affect the rakes of the car, which means the difference in the front and rear ride heights of a car.

High-rake cars have more of a difference, so the rear end appears to be jacked up. The changes were made for safety reasons after the tire failures at last year’s British GP at Silverstone, where Lewis Hamilton won the race on three wheels. There were fears that Pirelli’s tires had reached the limit of their downforce. With Pirelli intending to continue using the same tire constructions for 2021, the FIA ​​concluded that downforce needs to be reduced.

The changes seemed to have favored the high-rake cars like the Red Bulls and Alpha Tauris. At the same time, these changes put Mercedes and Aston Martin at a disadvantage. At Imola, Aston Martin team principal Otston Szafnauer urged the FIA ​​to make a rule change mid-season to remove the apparent imbalance.

Andrew Shovlin, technical director on the side of the track at Mercedes, recently remarked: “Whether it’s high rake or low rake, there is nothing we can do about it now. We can’t suddenly say we’re going to lift the back of our car and work with it because that would write off the season. We’d lose so much. It’s just not practical. “

This gives you an idea of ​​how delicate these cars are, and even if they look pretty solid when jumping over curbs, a millimeter of difference here and there makes a world of difference. Unfortunately, aerodynamics is a ghost that can’t be pushed back into the bottle. So you have to live with it. And there’s the added problem of the budget cap, which means teams can’t just get out of trouble because they need their budget and they also need to build new cars for 2022.

“It will be the same for all teams to balance the resources for the car and the engine in 2021 and that for the year 2022,” said Toto Wolff. “It is clear that you cannot afford not to appear in 2021. But the regulations from 2022 will also remain in force for a few years. Once you start with a deficit, it is very difficult to catch up.

“So it will take a while for performance to converge. In that regard, these are difficult decisions that we regularly evaluate. The regulatory changes introduced last year probably only had to compensate for more deficits. So when we parked the cars on the.” It was pretty clear to Strasse, but it is what it is, and now we just have to do the job to the best of our ability. “

At Aston Martin, team boss Otmar Szafnauer is pragmatic enough to know how to play the F1 game, but team owner Lawrence Stroll is used to doing business in other ways. Still, Szafnauer could hardly tell his team owner not to stir the pot too vigorously. References to legal action are just stupid.

“I think the right thing is to have the talks with the FIA ​​and find out what exactly happened and why, and then see if something can be done to make it fairer,” he said. “I think this is the right thing to do. We as a team have to work hard to get everything we can back, but at the same time we should have these talks with the FIA ​​to see if something can be done to make it a little bit fairer. “

At Imola, Aston Martin team principal Otston Szafnauer urged the FIA ​​to make a rule change mid-season to remove the apparent imbalance.

Mark ThompsonGetty Images

Wolff understands the game. Last weekend he was in Rome for the Formula E race with Mercedes and spent a long time talking to FIA President Jean Todt behind closed doors.

“I think the nuances of this go to one point: Was there a decision that went against a certain concept of the car or wasn’t there? I think that has to be seen. “

The FIA ​​can make changes immediately for safety reasons, but there is no safety issue that is evident here. All parties to the Concorde Agreement undertake to use a dispute settlement procedure of the International Chamber of Commerce if they cannot agree on sporting matters such as rule changes. No team can take legal action over rules, and anyone who says they can is either talking rubbish or knows they are talking rubbish.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said he was surprised by what Szafnauer said.

“I’m a little surprised to hear that,” he said. “I heard rumblings, but I didn’t hear it like you just wrote it. First, we had a sample of a race that Mercedes won with a low-tilt car, with possibly the same, if not better, tire deterioration than in Bahrain. If you ignore all of that, there is a process of getting regulations in place and they have been passed unanimously by the various regulations that Aston Martin or Racing Point should have voted for before being passed by the FIA ​​Commission and World Motor Sport were council and they were all voted unanimously.

“When there was a front wing change a few years ago, it really hurt us. We voted against it, but you just have to accept it, so it seems a little naive to think that all of a sudden the rules will just change.” After sampling a single race after fully tracing the process. I am struggling to take care of it. “

Some suggest that Stroll is actually a hunting horse for Mercedes, as he and Wolff are close together, but close relationships between team bosses seldom endure long in the highly competitive F1 world.

On Sunday in Imola we saw how strong the Red Bull Honda is. The race was fun thanks to the difficult and changing conditions, but it was clear that Max Verstappen would be in a very solid position if he wasn’t making mistakes.

And of course Mercedes would like that not to be the case.

Playing politics is part of the game.

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