ASTON MARTIN FLOORED
Aston Martin claims Formula 1’s latest technical tweaks have cost it competitiveness – and that it’s the innocent victim of a regulatory stitch-up aimed at pegging back Mercedes. But is any of this actually true? It depends on who you ask…
Have the new 2021 floor rules unfairly affected Aston Martin?
Who would have thought a simple trim would cause so much outrage? At the stroke of a pen, it seems, the established order of Formula 1 has been – if not quite turned on its head – given a vigorous shake. It’s always hard to predict the outcome of regulatory changes beyond broad principles. The stated aim of the tweaks – a diagonal cut in the floor area and limits on other aerodynamic devices at the rear of the cars – was for safety, to reduce downforce loadings and not put further stress on a generation of Pirelli tyres already struggling to cope. But uncertainty lingered over what the specific effects might be when theory was translated into practice, especially since two teams employ a very different car philosophy to everybody else.
“Taking a hacksaw to a car is generally quite an unscientific approach and it’s not going to be even across the teams,” Mercedes chief designer John Owen told GP Racing late last year. “It’s a bit of a lottery.”
The question was whether the trim would affect teams with ‘low-rake’ cars (Mercedes and Aston Martin) more or less than those running ‘high-rake’ cars (everybody else). On-track performance from the opening few races has fed a narrative that Mercedes and Aston Martin have been disproportionately affected – to the extent that bosses of both teams have suggested ulterior motives were at play in shaping the new rules. Aston team principal Otmar Szafnauer has hinted at a legal challenge if the FIA doesn’t submit to a forensic examination of whether it followed the right processes – and then do something to make the situation “more equitable”.
“I think we get to that point [legal action] after the discussions,” he says. “I think the right thing to do is to see what can be done.” The tautological nature of that sentence scarcely diminishes the scope of the threat.
WHAT’S RAKE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Just over a decade ago, Red Bull hit upon a means of generating more downforce by running its cars at an aggressive nose-down angle. The effect on the airflow under the car is like putting your thumb over the end of a hosepipe: the flow accelerates into the space beyond the obstruction. On a high-rake car this flow is accelerating into a greater volume of available space behind the leading edge of the floor, creating a more powerful lowpressure area as the diffuser ducts the accelerated air out. The result is high peak downforce, which is why other teams rushed to copy the idea – but it’s also very difficult to tune and achieve consistency, especially in slow corners where the aero loads reduce proportionally. In these circumstances lower suspension loadings cause the rear end to rise beyond the diffuser’s ability to ‘seal’ the floor and manage the flow.
The low-rake philosophy pursued by Mercedes – and latterly Aston Martin after it controversially ‘cloned’ the 2019 Merc – relies on having more floor, since floor area acts as a multiplier for underbody air pressure. This is why Mercedes traditionally runs a longer wheelbase than any of its rivals – up to 8cm more than Red Bull in recent years. Mercedes’ lower-riding rear end requires more underbody surface area to achieve peak downforce but is less prone to ‘breaking the seal’ of the diffuser in slow corners, because there’s less vertical deflection of the rear end.
Understanding the effect of the recent changes has been complicated by the staggered nature of their announcement. The cut from the outer floor, along a diagonal line drawn from a point 180cm behind the front axle line to 10cm inboard from the front of the rear tyre, was ratified by the FIA’S World
Motorsport Council in May last year. So too was the outlawing of the many vanes and slots in the floor which teams use to help seal the underfloor.
At that point F1’s stakeholders were scrambling to mitigate the longterm effects of the pandemic, which included the postponement of a wider regulatory change planned for this year. This also entailed deferring the introduction of 18-inch wheels, and using the present generation of tyres for another year – prompting Pirelli to flag up potential safety concerns if teams unlocked more downforce. In the months that followed other measures were proposed and rubber-stamped, including restrictions on development and on vanes around the diffuser and brake ducts.
Simulating one change in isolation is relatively straightforward, but when several are implemented at once it becomes challenging to isolate cause and effect. Opinions differed as to which philosophy might suffer more – low rake, on account of having a reduced floor area, or high rake, because the removal of the slots and flow conditioners would make the airflow more prone to stalling. Teams’ options were limited since the cost-control measures obliged them to carry over the bulk of their 2020 cars’ hard points.
On the face of it, the performance of Mercedes and Aston Martin over the
opening races of this season seems to suggest the low-rake cars have been disproportionately affected. Both Mercedes drivers have complained of rear-end instability and poor tyre warm-up characteristics, while Aston Martin – a race winner in 2020 – has struggled to get both cars through to the top 10 in qualifying.
HOW BIG IS THE EFFECT – IF ANY?
As is always the way in F1, the supposedly injured parties have been the most vocal. After the opening round of the season in Bahrain, Aston Martin’s Otmar Szafnauer spoke of a “rude awakening” in qualifying, “when we realised, after analysing the data, that the low-rake cars were hampered significantly more by the regulation change”. A pillar of his complaint was the assertion that the changes have cost low-rake teams a second per lap.
This was an incendiary claim, and one lent credence by some of the data. After all this was a circuit where, last year, Sergio Pérez was only denied a podium by a power unit failure. In terms of laptime, only three teams increased their average deficit to the pole position time in qualifying: Mercedes, Aston Martin, and Haas – the latter of which has done no development at all and is fielding less experienced drivers.
It’s easy, though, to selectively interpret data to support a given argument, especially when the pool of information is limited to two grands prix as this section of GP Racing closed for press. While Red Bull had the upper hand in qualifying in Bahrain, especially in Turns 5-6-7 and 9-10 which transition from fast to slow, Mercedes overturned that advantage via strategy in the race. Lewis Hamilton put his W12 on pole at Imola and could have won but for a critical moment of wheelspin at the start. View the 2021 season thus far through a less partisan prism and you could easily conclude that this is simply a case of fine margins, perhaps even a continuance of the latter stages of 2020 when Red Bull showed it had developed its way out of several blind alleys and made the RB16 a genuine contender.
Other variables are in play, some of which are intangible. To what extent is Mercedes’ tyre warm-up issue related to the banning of its dual-axis steering system? In Q3 at Imola Valtteri Bottas lost 0.4s in the first sector because of rear tyre warm-up problems, resulting in a poor grid position. In the race his inability to get the medium slicks working left him open to attack from George Russell.
There have been shifts elsewhere in the competitive order; perhaps Mercedes and Aston Martin, along with Alpine, haven’t adapted to the new regime as effectively as some of their rivals. Aston proved last year that ‘cloning’ a winning car wasn’t the short-cut to success many imagined it would be. There was a protracted learning process before it exploited the car’s potential. Perhaps that lack of experience with the low-rake philosophy has played a role this season, especially since Aston has taken Mercedes’ 2020 rear suspension, introducing another variable. And if you were to be harsh, you could argue that if Aston had a top-drawer driver who was less finicky about car characteristics than Sebastian Vettel, the results might have been rather better…
Neither is it cut-and-dried that performance disparities between car concepts will be consistent across the season. Through linear-radius corners
AS IS ALWAYS THE WAY IN F1, THE SUPPOSEDLY INJURED PARTIES HAVE BEEN THE MOST VOCAL
evidence suggests the two philosophies are evenly matched; it’s through complexes where the car needs to shed speed while turning that the lowrake cars come unglued at the rear. The balance is going to shift depending on the characteristics of individual circuits. Engineers at other teams with no skin in the political game have also stepped back from endorsing the predominant narrative, particularly in terms of quantifying lost laptime.
“Obviously we’re pretty much tied into the rake we ran last year,” says Williams’ head of vehicle performance Dave Robson. “So we didn’t really look to see what the floor mods would do to a lower-rake car because it doesn’t really change anything for us. So I don’t know. If people really, definitely know – then good on them. But I’m not sure quite how they would.
“It’s not clear that just because Mercedes and Aston Martin appear to be struggling more relative to the field, you could immediately point the finger at the rake based on just a couple of events. That’s a big step to make. It might turn out to be right but it’s not immediately obvious. I thought the Ferrari was fairly lowrake in Bahrain, and clearly they’ve made a big improvement…”
One thing engineers across the grid agree on is how critical the deformation characteristics of the rear tyres are to airflow around that area of the car. The better-resourced teams are likely to understand this quicker and develop their way out of any shortcomings. For this reason, nobody is expecting Mercedes to struggle for long.
“I THOUGHT THE FERRARI WAS FAIRLY LOW-RAKE IN BAHRAIN, AND CLEARLY THEY’VE MADE A BIG IMPROVEMENT…”
DAVE ROBSON
IS THERE A CASE TO ANSWER?
Another important question is whether, as Szafnauer claims, Aston Martin has been stitched up by changes targeted at pegging back Mercedes rather than purely for safety reasons.
“I understand the topic,” says Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff.
“Because how the rules have fallen into place last year, one can always question what the motivation was, and I think there is certainly the right to review and look at things and discuss them with the FIA, to find out what actually happened.
“That’s why I respect Aston Martin’s enquiry into the whole thing, and maybe things were targeted at us, and they [Aston] are collateral damage.”
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” says Szafnauer. “But it was pointed out last year by the low-rake runners that this would have a bigger effect than on the high-rake runners. And we were correct. At the time the regulations were being made this was pointed out.”
Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto remembers differently. “There is a governance in place and if you need to change aero rules, you need to go through that governance,” he says.
“As Ferrari, we believe what was said about the safety reasons was the proper choice – but more than that, this choice was discussed at the time with all technical directors and the Technical Advisory Committee. We all conferred on that regulation. No one was raising at the time any concerns.”
Red Bull’s Christian Horner, a veteran of seeing rules changed to peg his team back, says the measures were voted through unanimously. Szafnauer says they weren’t. While it stretches the bounds of credibility to think F1 teams might have been blindsided by changes to which they were party, perhaps the only way to settle the argument is to review the process.
“Since April [2020] there was a bunch of decisions, regulatory changes, tyres were introduced and obviously lots of discussion,” says Wolff. “I think the nuances of that have come to a point where we can ask: was there any decision made against a particular concept of car or wasn’t there? And I think that needs to be looked at.”