MPH: Will Red Bull bend to F1's aero rules?

Mark Hughes

October 4th 2024

McLaren and Mercedes have managed to exploit the grey area of elasticity in F1's aero rules, much to Red Bull's chagrin – if it can't beat them, it faces the risky option of joining them

McLaren – and to a lesser degree Mercedes – have mastered the latest flexibility 'tricks'. Will Red Bull go down the same path?

Getty Images

Mark Hughes

Aero-elasticity has become the in-phrase of F1 in the last few races as arguments have raged about McLaren’s mini-DRS rear wing and the apparent flexibility of the front wings of both McLaren and Mercedes.

All F1 cars of the last few decades have had a tendency towards slow-speed understeer and high-speed oversteer. That’s just built in to how the aero centre of pressure and the weight distribution work over different speed ranges and steering angles. Getting a happy compromise window in between for each circuit on each day has been the key to a good balance for years. But that low speed/high speed balance conflict has become much more acute with this generation of ground-effect cars, because the cars are no longer running with rake. Previously, before the ’22 regs came into being, the rake would ensure the car was running its whole front wing at an angle to the ground, inducing it to work harder. Then as the car’s rake flattened out with speed (as the rear downforce compressed the high static rear ride height) the front wing would no longer be running as aggressive an angle to the ground. Thereby helping the car to have decent front downforce at low speed but not too much on the nose at high speed.

Now, as the ground-effect cars demand to be run super-low for maximum underbody downforce, they are running a much flatter rake angle. So any attempt at getting the front wing to flatten out at speed becomes much more difficult. Even worse than that, as they come closer to the ground at high speed, they begin creating ground-effect downforce. At just the moment you really do not want that. So ideally, you need a front wing which can be set quite aggressively for low speed but with flaps which conveniently flatten as you gain speed and thereby lose some of their effectiveness. Hence the aero-elasticity race to create such wings but which pass the regulation static load tests.

Max Verstappen Red Bull 2024 Azerbaijan GP Baku 222 — Finding a the right set-up balance is harder than ever in the new ground-effect era

Red Bull

Red Bull has in the past been the master of aero-elasticity and many times has had a limit placed upon its ingenuity. Most notably in 2021 with the rear wing deflection apparent from footage. Rival teams threatened to protest if the FIA did not act. The FIA informed Red Bull it would not reject any such protests, so it had better ensure it was stiffer in subsequent events. Which it did.

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But Red Bull is now seeing McLaren and Mercedes exhibiting far more front wing flex than on its own car – which, as outlined above, is particularly valuable with this generation of car. It has outlined to the FIA why it doesn’t consider such wings to be legal. The FIA clearly disagrees, as no further technical directives or regulation changes have been issued.

So that leaves the obvious question of, ‘Why doesn’t Red Bull simply do its own version of these flexi front wings?’. Well, maybe it will do so. But there is a risk in this. The regulations state that wings which are engineered with ‘the intention’ of such flex may be considered outside of the regulations. Presumably McLaren and Mercedes have satisfied the governing body that any flex at loads beyond the static test was not intended, but simply the way the physics have played out. By contrast, Red Bull has spent a lot of time explaining to the FIA why it considers their rivals’ wings illegal. So if it made its own, there’s a risk the FIA could rule that – based on Red Bull’s previous explanations – it clearly ‘intended’ this flex.

But there’s a world championship on the line… Watch this space.