MPH: F1's new dark arts – why teams can't work out their own cars

F1

The F1 performance advantage in the modern ground effect era changes from week to week – but no team can truly work out why, writes Mark Hughes

George Russell Mercedes 2024 Azerbaijan GP Baku

Russell blamed fluctuating performance issues on Pirelli tyres in Baku

Mercedes

Mark Hughes

Right now the only consistently quick car in F1, fast track or slow, hot or cold, is the McLaren. The form of the cars from Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes is notably schizophrenic. Sometimes even within the same race weekend. The Red Bull doesn’t like a big spread of corner speeds, the Ferrari isn’t at its best on long fast corners, the Mercedes is not at its best on hot tracks etc.

George Russell got a bit frustrated with it all at Baku after observing that his pace in the first stint wasn’t even in the top 10 but in the second stint was faster than anyone’s – for no apparent reason he could see. His default was that it must therefore be differences in the performance of each set of tyres.

“It’s pretty infuriating that it changes this much,” he said. “It’s not just the Mercedes, it’s every team and every driver. One session, you’re fast, the next you’re not. And there’s only one thing that changes. It’s black magic. I think even the people who make the tyres don’t understand the tyres. I think we all need probably serious conversations again about what’s going on, because we’ve got 2,000 people working their butts off to deliver the fastest car.”

George Russell Mercedes 2024 Singapore GP Marina Bay

Russell’s tyre complaints continued for the second race in a row at Singapore

Mercedes

He got to have his ‘serious talk’ with Pirelli’s Mario Isola in between Baku and Singapore. Although very diplomatic, Isola wasn’t having it. “Obviously, there are many elements that are affecting the tyre behaviour, from the set-up of the car, track evolution, the care with which the tyre is introduced in the first laps, that obviously are affecting the level of degradation. But the tyres were working well, we had some teams able to extract a good performance from the tyres… When it comes to a championship where every millisecond counts for the final result, the tension is obviously very high and even a small difference in performance can play a role in the final outcome.”

Russell remained adamant in Singapore, complaining over the radio in Q3 that the car felt completely different on the second run compared to the first, again blaming the tyres.

From the archive

Is it fair? The tyres are extremely sensitive to temperature, that much is true. The tyre’s temperature in turn is very sensitive to the car’s balance and like all tyres behaves in a non-linear way. One side of a threshold and it can be hopeless, the other side, great. When it’s near that threshold, a bit of cloud cover or just your placement in traffic on the preparation lap and therefore how well you are able to bring them in for qualifying can make the tyres and car behave totally differently.

Fernando Alonso, for one, does not believe the inconsistency stems from the tyres. “We tend to believe the tyres are all the same so we put the reason behind those ups and downs for us at Aston down to the car. To our car. 2mm of ride height here, two metres later braking there. These kind of things trigger a perfect storm to lose a lot of downforce. We trust the tyres are all the same.

“These cars aren’t easy to drive but I think the problem is to extract 100%. So if you drive at 90% sometimes you’re faster because you don’t put the aero platform in inconvenient angles or ride heights or you’re not pushing the limits. Everything falls apart when you’re at the limit and so sometimes driving at 90% is faster.

Fernando Alonso 2024 Singapore GP Marina Bay

Alonso points out F1’s new counter-intuitive nature – he believes greater performance can be extracted by not pushing the car to the limit

Aston Martin

“It’s extremely difficult. We see it in the races sometimes, Baku was a very good example. I was P15 in Q1 with Lando’s problem. I could have easily been 16th and out of Q1. Seven minutes later I put on another set of tyres; I was P5 in Q2. I improved 1.1sec, I was driving the same, braking at the same points. It was the same preparation in the out-lap but I was able to improve 1.1sec and some others did the opposite. They were very fast in Q1, very slow in Q2. And sometimes we don’t find explanations of when we’re fast. When we’re slow and why. If you go into the details and unlimited number of sensors we have in the car. We can spot small differences when the car is slow, you put the car in different altitudes, car is maybe just not happy. That’s why sometimes in the races, we all drive 90%.”

From the archive

Lewis Hamilton’s take is similar. “The car is much more on a knife edge. In the braking zone the rear is out of the window, then mid-corner it will be in the window, then on the exit it’s out of the window again. I think it’s that the aero characteristics are shifting every week. From having a bigger wing to a smaller beam wing. From having a bigger beam wing to having front wings that are flexing to having rear wings that are flexing, it’s such a competitive and challenging time for the aerodynamicists to have the installations correlate each weekend. It’s been one of the most challenging times for the engineers I’ve ever seen. At Spa we had no understanding of why we were quickest – and we still don’t. We just hope it comes back to us at some stage.”

He doesn’t let Pirelli completely off the hook, though. “There are small differences between tyre sets and it’s something I think Pirelli are working on,” he says. But the implication is that it’s fundamentally an aerodynamic trait of this generation of car now that they’ve been so highly developed. Like a dog that’s been over-bred, inherent problems begin to appear.

Except they don’t at McLaren. Which tells us something, even if we’re not sure yet what that is.

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