Late upgrades could decide F1 title battle, as teams keep focus on 2024

F1

Key F1 car upgrades have reshuffled the pack more than once this year, and it could happen again, with development work continuing deep into the season, as Chris Medland finds

Kemmel Straight 2024 Belgian GP Spa Francorchamps

Will additional upgrades shake up the F1 order yet again?

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Chris Medland

There’s something almost a little bit confusing about Formula 1 this year. Specifically the way teams have been able to develop their cars and produce major gains.

Under a cost cap and with fairly prescriptive regulations, there was a stage ahead of the 2022 regulations being introduced where there were fears that developments would quickly become focused on small gains. Clearly fears was the wrong word, given how such fine details can now have such a significant impact on the pecking order.

Mercedes is one such team that has evolved its car — a new front wing in Monaco catching the eye — rather than introduced a radically-different specification and found performance, unlocking greater potential in the existing parts. Toto Wolff’s team had already pointed to McLaren’s turnaround mid-season in 2023, repeated this year, as proof to the rest of the grid of what could be possible.

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So as the grid remains so competitive and four different teams find themselves in the fight for victory on a regular occurrence, it seems the upgrade race isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Some plan to continue development into mid-October, when the paddock heads across the Atlantic for four races on North and South America, followed by the final two in the Middle East.

“Well, we’ll be reviewing the situation, see where we are by the break, but we’ve got plans for updates that run into that second bit of the season,” trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said.

“Just where you position that resource split, we’ll see how the championship’s going and what we can achieve. But certainly everyone’s going to be updating until we get into that final block of flyaways, I think.”

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And that’s a different approach than in recent years. 2022 to 2023 saw regulation changes around the floor, while last year teams already had a focus on the major challenge of 2026. Knowing that the current car would be the basis for two seasons — freeing up resource as early as possible for the new generation — work stopped earlier in 2023 as attention switched to this year’s car.

For Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache, a new car for 2025 still requires significant attention, but the stability in regulations and ever-closer title picture could force some updates to be produced in time to test out on track this year.

“For sure the fact that the regulation stays the same and is quite mature now in terms of overall concept of the car could affect this aspect [of upgrades],” Wache explains. “However, you still have the car to build for next year. And your capacity and the budget cap is limited to what you can do.

“I’m sure if we find something and we want to double check how it’s going on the track, and if the fight in the championship is very tight, for sure you will bring the update. [The competitive picture] is pushing you more, but you still have some limitations.”

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The cost cap is one of the most significant limitations, as it doesn’t allow unlimited resource to be thrown at any issues that arise from development problems. The current regulations are complex and few teams are able to consistently bring new parts that deliver as expected. So for updates introduced earlier in the year that might need extra work, less can be spent on manufacturing later in the season.

For some teams, that leads to tough decisions with Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu viewing it as three separate projects that have to be tackled within the latter part of this year.

“Next year’s regulations are virtually the same as this year, so what we learn from this year will carry onto next year,” Komatsu says. “Yes and no [upgrades could come later in the year than usual], this is a really tricky one.

“We have to look at ’24, ’25 and ’26, so actually three almost in parallel. So it is very tricky. We made a decision to do a couple of more upgrades later in the season, but we are very, very soon switching to 2025.”

It’s a view shared by Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson, who acknowledges the importance of getting the entire organisation focusing on the 2026 regulations at the earliest possible moment. He believes there will be odd days the 2025 car goes back into the wind tunnel when the opportunity arises, but that it will be far earlier that next year’s project is completely written off in terms of further development.

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But in a strange twist, the struggles Williams faced earlier this year — having to focus resource on repairing damaged chassis and manufacturing spare parts — has actually meant the team will be introducing larger updates later in the season than is usual.

“Yeah that’s been an interesting one, because for a lot of reasons this year’s car and next year’s car you can largely think of as just one project,” Robson explains. “The work on it will finish quite early next year and then it’ll be a case of racing it but not doing too much with it.

“That has, partly by serendipity I suppose, allowed us to consider these big updates that will come, and bring them quite late in the year knowing that they will effectively at least inspire, or become the baseline, for next year’s car.

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“That already starts to offload some of the work. We’ve brought some of that FW47 work forwards — so our 2025 car — which will allow us to concentrate on the 2026 car as soon as possible.

“But equally we got ourselves into that position also by starting this year a bit behind the curve in terms of not having spare parts, plus some accidents, which caused that loss of components early on, and the mass-saving programme we’ve had to go on. So all of that has also delayed the big upgrade introduction.

“But to some extent that’s kind of worked out quite well because it’s had longer in the wind tunnel than it would normally have had, and we can shuffle things and consider that baseline for next year’s car.

“So it’s kind of worked out alright, but obviously we’ve had to put up with this [spell], particularly in the last six or eight weeks when it’s just been race after race and we haven’t really done much with the car, which is frustrating when everyone else has done. So hopefully we’ll more than catch up, but it is a little bit later than we would have liked.”

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The desire to switch to 2026 as early as possible has a clear knock-on impact, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how to design and develop a car, and different teams look set to prioritise updates this year and their 2025 chassis to differing degrees.

Given how much the pecking order has fluctuated even through the more traditional periods of developments this season, there’s every chance of a further reshuffling of the pack deep into the final races.

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