The 2023 Formula One Season

And Red Bull is the only game in town

And every other team they’re doing down

And down at Merc it’s easy to pretend

They’re going to win again

And with their car they tinker with that aim

But the result will always be the same

And now they’re tortoise to the Aston hare

They’re needing Newey flair.

 

Well for next race Ferrari could very well be the best car, and Aston a very average car. Last year Ferrari was good in Bahrein and in Jeddah RedBull was helped by its higher topspeed. This year Ferrari seems to have a higher topspeed than RedBull and only suffered 1 DNF to RedBulls 2 DNF last year in Bahrein. Aston had poor topspeed.

 

I’m sure there will be some catering money to spend if there is ever any threat..

 

Traditionally the Red Bull car wasn't the fastest, but had handling and grip advantages over the other teams. 'Til last year, where they had the speed but were out-handled by the Ferraris. This year it looks like they've got both?

 

Red Bull and top speed

 

Coincidence? :

"Dan Fallows was a long-time key member of the Red Bull aerodynamics department before being recruited by Aston Martin to become their technical director, overseeing the development of what looks like a very quick car".

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/formula-1/red-bull-fallows-aston-martin-29380044

 

No coincidence, the Aston has similar aero handling characteristics to the RBR.

As I have posted elsewhere:

Merc and Ferrari have again got it wrong as they continue to misunderstand that a fast car is not just about increasing downforce and reducing drag. It is about putting downforce on each corner when it needs it to provide the handling that the driver needs to go fast.

The aero ideas generators (Frank, thanks for that term!) at Merc and Ferrari seem to have lost their way with the new rules.

Whereas RBR and now Aston, with Dan Fallows, do get this.

 

It's really boring without Lord Sir Lewis of Hamilton winning everything. I won't be watching again until the FIA step in and fix this mess.

 

It's the nature of F1 for one team to dominate for a period - think of McLaren (1988-1991), Ferrari (2000-2004), Red Bull (2010-2013) and Mercedes (2014-2021). The Merc domination is the longest stretch in F1 constructors' championship history (the first winner was Vanwall in 1958), so it's quite in order for someone else to have a go. It's a pity that Hamilton was essentially cheated out of an 8th championship by a non-adherence to the rules, but these things happen, and nobody can say that Verstappen didn't deserve the championship that year. So, we may have a rerun of 2010-2013, or until the rest of the grid can catch up with Newey's design brilliance.

 

Do they though? A World Championship sports events reaching a climax is subjected to an intervention against it's own rules to contrive a different outcome? Perhaps in wrestling.

Maybe it wouldn't have been necessary if they had known Mercedes were going to make a rickets of the next reg car design.

 

I put it down to the incompetence of one individual (albeit a rather central one), as opposed to any nefarious purpose. Incompetence is no bar to being promoted over one's capacity, e.g. UK Prime Minister.

 

True about incompetence in general. The reason I don't put that down to one person is that the immediate appeal was dismissed and nothing that followed did anything to correct it. There was no appetite to right what was quite obviously a surreal injustice.

 

WTF is health and safety?

 

Elf & Safety surely?

 

A women I know has Elf as her surname.

 

In a ESPN show it was emphasized that Aston uses the Mercedes windtunnel to test their aero. Mercedes still thought their own aero would be competitive. How can that be ? Is it the arrogance of the technical team, Lewis also spoke about ?

 

Merc allows Aston to buy time in the Merc wind tunnel but it is heavily governed by the FIA. After Ferrari and Haas played the game with aerodynamicists swapping teams, having coffee breaks together, having their wind tunnel model on show, when Haas joined F1 to increase competitiveness of both teams, the rules were changed make it practically impossible to cheat in that area.

Merc aerodynamicists will not have seen the Aston model and vice versa. The FIA is monitoring this very closely and if it were possible to do this, somehow getting round the FIA, then at some point someone who knew would leave the team in a bad way and tell the FIA what was going on. McLaren's $100 million fine for looking at data for the Ferrari, many years ago, means that it would be stupid to even consider taking the risk.

The wind tunnel itself is just a tool and will not drive a solution in a particular direction (if this is what you meant) other than complicated areas like moving belt roughness which might make you run your car lower. The Merc solution has been to run the car with the rear as low as possible for years (very successfully) and it was expected with the change to ground effect, that this would continue to work very well. But it hasn't yet and the RBR approach of a car with a good amount of rake and some tricks to run very low at higher speeds, is currently the better approach.

And yes it is the arrogance of the aero development team.

Lewis can tell them what he feels is wrong, but he cannot fix it, and it is of course a big engineering problem to align the aero flow field with giving the drivers the car that they want.

 

Just because AM use the Merc windtunnel does not mean they share their aero data with Merc, in fact I am certain it is a pure commercial arrangement. All teams are limited on wind tunnel time so if you have one, why not use the down time to generate revenue. Toyota used to pimp theirs out for years and despite other successful teams using it, never amounted to much.

As mentioned before, Merc need to create their own aero strategy, you cannot fully understand a concept that you copy and AM are copying. However with Dan in place AM have an element of that understanding as it is a RB concept and he brings some of that knowledge with him but it still another teams concept.

The Merc aero route clearly must have some significant theoretical benefits and probably they see those benefits in the wind tunnel and in the CFD calculations. Their issues seem to be around turning that theory and test data into real life. They have had two attempts at this zero sidepod approach although that might be only part of the issue, they probably need to bury that and try something else.

PS cross posted with Ian

 

Oh NOOOO!
Does this mean that Alonso will need to play the Knight in shining armour when someone from Aston turns up unannounced at a Brackley printers to photocopy a load of diagrams?