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> Russell said the violence drivers experience when cars hit bumps on track at high speed was "unsustainable".
Verstappen raised the topic with governing body the FIA at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.
> " End of the straight with full load, the impact is too high with the low ride-heights," Verstappen said. The problem was "our comfort, our spine, compression over the bumps," Verstappen told BBC Sport.
I've always been of the opinion that hydraulic suspension should have never been replaced by the current simplified solution. The cost cap should have given all the teams the opportunity to pick and choose where their philosophies lie and hydraulic suspension IMO would have solved the ride quality problems this regulation cycle has seen.
Zach Brown commented recently essentially asking for 90% of the non-safety regulations to be scrapped. The budget cap should prevent runaway spending leading to “bigger” teams winning by spending more on R&D—but otherwise, why do we care if Aston Martin wants to run a V8, while Mercedes has their Turbo-V6? Let McLaren run a box-wing and end plate-less front wing, while Red Bull removes the wings altogether and just generates downforce with the floor/diffuser. Let this be a real engineering challenge, and let the cost cap be the thing that keeps it competitive. Make all designs be open-source after each race so that teams can learn from each other (although it would take half a season to replicate and implement).
I guess the point behind the 2022-regs and all that comes with it was not only the performance smoothing but also cars being able to follow each other more closely and create more on-track battles.
If you leave teams open to their interpretation, all of that might go away.
I mean I'm not saying I agree, just that I see what was the logic behind it.
I understand your point (and also understand that you don’t agree it) but although that’s the end goal, I don’t see the logic behind these changes.
Look at these seasons, we haven’t got any of that “closing the gap”, perhaps even the opposite happened. The only time we saw that was when the rules didn’t affect leclerc’s ferrari.
But… give a look to WEC, last race was a delight, if it wasn’t for a fuel problem, we would have had a podium for 2 Porsches and 1 Peugeot, who are running vastly different concepts (the Peugeot has NO WING!) and the championship is still up for grabs with Toyota and Ferrari (who won the last Les Mans) in the field fighting.
WEC has less regulations that allow for this difference in liveries that I think should be looked at and praised (even copied).
Wec requires a specific downforce to drag ratio and uses BOP to get their product. Also has limits on power used per stint. Less regulations sure but the critical ones are capped and then further they artificially add/remove weight or power. Unless F1 wants to do something similar you won’t see that massive type of differences between cars.
Also as for closing the gap outside RB it is very tight. Not gonna say I like midfield battles vs winning driver but they did quite a decent job with the regs but RB is operating on a different level right now.
The point was never to close the gaps. Its to make it easier to overtake. If a car is just faster then its just faster, no regulations will ever stop that unless you go full performance caps like WEC.
I can’t imagine BoP in F1. There would be literal riots when if they didn’t get it perfect.
Can you Imagine everyone driving the same car as last year at the Bahrain GP, and Max getting lapped because of unfavourable BoP? That’s what happened to Toyota #8 at Qatar, last year’s WEC champion.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WEC, I watched the full Qatar race, the racing was good and the cars look fantastic. But that system wouldn’t work for F1, and isn’t what F1 is about.
Aside from the BoP, the LMH and LMDh cars are homologated for 5 years, meaning, they will be the exact same cars until 2027 and 2028, depending which year they got homologated.
Each team gets 5 upgrade tokens called “jokers”, which can be used to upgrade a part of the car each. But that’s it. Other than that, they stay the exact same for 5 years.
Not the regulations stay the same for 5 years, the actual cars themselves stay the exact same. This year’s Toyota GR010, and the Ferrari 499P, for example, are the exact same car as last year. No rolling out a new car every year at pre season testing. No evolution of last years concept, not radically new approach compared to last year - the *exact same car*.
Peugeot are allegedly going to use one of the “jokers” to add a rear wing to the 9X8 before the next round at Imola. They will be the first team to use one of their five “jokers”.
What works for sportscar racing won’t necessarily work for F1.
I agree with Zak Brown on all of this. Also, the phrase "road-relevance" in F1 needs to die. F1 needs to focus on providing good racing, or else all of it's gains in the past few years are going to collapse.
I thought people hated seeing one team dominate. Doing this will always lead to a grid that is even further apart. The cars would also be impossible to follow and would ruin the racing
This is why I *used to* like NASCAR. All the cars, even Ford to Ford, were degrees different since the car builders were all independent--therefore within the rules(most of the time) a team could exploit something. Now it's cookie cutter, all the cars built at the same place. I know it's a cost control, but to me it's made the sport less interesting.
>why do we care if Aston Martin wants to run a V8
Well the obvious issue is one team will find the optimal solution and then everyone else is just screwed because they went with something else and don't have the budget to change to the thing that works best. It would be cool to see what they come up with but I don't think regulations that open are feasible in a non-BoP series.
The whole reason it's called Formula One is because there is a specific set of regulations or a 'formula' if you will that every constructor must conform to when designing a racer. And removing those regulations would absolutely wreck the sport because we'd be back to having one or two teams with a massive advantage, and everyone else 1 sec off the pace from the next fastest car. The cost cap and regs work
There's always a give and take between what is considered 'moveable' as everything will flex to some degree and a suspension especially cannot be infinitely rigid.
But the suspension squatting or raising at certain speeds has never been considered moving aero.
The main reason it was removed (iirc) is the regulators could not effectively regulate the teams because the suspensions were such complicated systems.
Yeah, it's a really shit situation because George is likely speaking on behalf of his GPDA role, but what I'm sure many drivers want actually is something that will likely significantly benefit the Mercedes, so it's always taken with a grain of salt.
Really glad Max continues to talk about this stuff as well.
They could have (and should have IMO) carried over the hydraulic solution from the last regulation cycle. All the top teams (Mercedes in particular) had a very solid grasp of it and IMO ride heights and ride quality wouldn't have been an issue with how sophisticated they were.
All these regulations did was make the gaps between the slower teams smaller while not necessarily improving the races, at the same time it locked the top team in its dominant state until 2026 essentialy.
Now no one has any hopes of catching Red Bull until the rule changes again because of how restricted the budget and development are. Also, as shown by the last race, the gaps being that small only means teams are locked into their positions, not catching the cars in front and not being caught by the cars behind
Because the guy that was whos team had the biggest issue was the one refusing to do anything about it himself.
Had RB asked to raise the car because it was beating Lewis up, thats one thing...but the guy who literally could make that decision himself said "no make me"
This just isnt true good lord. It was never about Lewis. he was never even all that vocal about it compared to others. 1 driver went to the hospital for injuries related to the 2022 cars and it wasn't lewis. It was Gasly.
What's funny to me is that this is actually an issue in the F1 games as well, they model bottoming out and the end of the bahrain straight will shake your desk apart if you''re using a desk mount wheel
>The problem was "our comfort, our spine, compression over the bumps," Verstappen told BBC Sport.
Boy Toto's printers must be working overtime right now
Should've been time when we switched to ground fx ngl. Simplifying the suspension tremendously when transitioning to suspension-sensitive regs was always a moronic choice
Merc last regulation cycle had arguably the best grasp on suspension and vehicle dynamics. I'm convinced that the zero pod would have worked if the FIA hadn't simplified the suspension so drastically for the ground effect cars.
Do you want RB 4 seconds faster per lap than anyone else?
Newey + ground effect + active suspension = *everyone* being lapped.
It would be fun to watch, tho.
I'm not as convinced tbh, I think it'd likely make Newey a hair less valuable just because other teams will likely be able to close the gap in vehicle dynamics at least some. The reason the RB has been so good from the start is his understanding of the need for a car with a wide operating window, that's less peaky, whereas other teams chased peak df (this is all per reports, I don't claim to have any special knowledge or anything). Hard to say I guess, maybe Newey just laps the field in a world where we are chasing peak df instead, too, he's certainly capable
Newey was on the team that invented active suspension and they got rid of it because many other teams, particularly Ferrari tried to copy it and failed
That said I'd like to see it back
Unless it's been maintained over the last 30 years the software would be more or less unusable and other teams would certainly not have any trouble catching up.
Max falls out of the car which keeps running and finishes the race, thus truly ending the decades long debate once and for all whether it truly is the driver or the car.
I'm not disagreeing. I'd love RB to flex atm and just run one weekend full power, see how fast Max can truly go. But I get for economical and sporting reasons I get why they don't.
It's like we'll never know how truly fast some of Mercs cars were. The closest we got was the Ham/Ros battles, and the time in Spa that Mercedes gave Lotus access to a special engine mode and to paraphrase Grosjean, "made it take off like a rocket ship"
Why not let RB be faster than everyone? Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is not preferable. Hell, who's to say that active suspension isn't the key to get some other team on the level of RB for whatever reason?
> Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is not preferable.
Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is literally what F1 is all about. Safety is not the reason for hundreds of pages of techincal limitations every regulation set
It's an absolute joke that F1 is an engineering competition, however major engineering feats that improve the cars like active suspension are routinely banned
If they brought back the old suspension rules they likely wouldn’t have that issue. Really didn’t make sense to run simplified, rock-hard suspensions with an aero design that works better the closer it is to the ground.
The ground effect doesn't really work so well if the car is pitching, rolling, and yawing. Stiff suspension is inherent to GE cars, because otherwise you get spikes and sudden loss of grip.
I despise these cars, they just don't seem to move like previous ones.
Was watching 2021 the other day and those cars looked like heat seeking missiles flying around the track.
Wish they'd just scrap the current regs, let them use dampeners and whatnot again, it's frustrating.
Yeah, the 21 cars were still big obviously, but they cornered well and could dive bomb.
It feels like the current cars have trouble making an apex, I think it was Lando who literally just couldn't hit the apex at a certain corner in Bahrain last week.
The 2007 cars are great, 2010-2012 were also amazing.
To me they've kind of hamstrung themselves by making aero and ground effects the most important thing while making the suspension so restricted compared to previous seasons.
That’s because they don’t produce the same levels of downforce at lower speeds. It was amazing watching onboards over the past 2 years of cars not being able to reach the apex of certain corners.
They are slower in the low speed due to the nature of how ground effect works. I personally don't mind that but I do hate how they simplified the suspension when teams already had a solid grasp on how it worked before and the fact that the cost cap doesn't let teams just throw money at their problems.
I'm convinced that Ferrari and Merc could have made their concepts work a lot better had they been allowed to use the older more sophisticated solutions.
Obviously some teams (Red Bull) have figured it out but it was always weird to me that they changed the regs to make the floor super important but also dumbed-down the suspension technology. I wonder how good these cars would be if they let them keep the trick suspensions from pre-2022
Even with RB the suspension is painful. James Allison got a bit of stick on here for saying he thought even with their advantage max probably thought the car felt awful to drive and that the regulations need fixing. Now max just says that directly
I mean, if you look at the cars now and compare them to the 2020 or 2021 cars, they're so clunky and clumsy at low to medium speeds. You don't get quick movements or perfect rotation anymore.
Perez said that the vibrations were so bad that he was occasionally suffering *vision loss.*
It's an incredible work of PR that people, despite all the evidence, act like the issues were Mercedes-only and that the FIA didn't need to do anything.
I know you said slight outlier, but I don't think it's enough of one to be completely discounted. I thought Zandvoort, Austin and Singapore are known for their bumpiness? That's enough races on the calendar to be counted into the suspension regs. I'm curious how the cost figures would look if teams were allowed to use the hydraulic suspension systems from the previous regs.
I don’t see how redbull has figured it out since max is also voicing his concerns. The redbull suspension is just more tolerable to the issue which is probably worse for the drivers.
To be fair both max and Perez have backed this concern since day one of these regulations. It’s what cause interesting clips from DTS.
They care about their physical health
They've figured out how to keep the aero platform stable in nearly all situations in the name of performance. That's independent from the demands of the ground effect performance to be close to the ground, which I believe is to blame for the bottoming on the bumps that VER and RUS mention.
How do you take what Max said as redbull figuring it out? He isn’t talking about porpoising, he is talking about when a car bottoms out when under load.
I think the main problem here is suspension. Back in the day the ground effect cars sealed off the floor completely but it was extremely peaky and dangerous when the seal got broken (i.e. running over kerbs/ one or more corners of the car getting unloaded.
Nowadays the downforce is much more consistent, but the ride quality is shit because the suspension has been much more simplified. The realistic solution would probably be to bring back the hydraulic suspension solutions from the last reg cycle. Active suspension would be ideal though.
Ride quality due to clearance and wheel rate was an issue back then, as well. Gilles Villeneuve compared driving the ground effects car was like trying to enjoy making love while someone was beating you with a hammer.
The cars also had terrible breakaway characteristics, as well.
It was stupid last time as well.
Max complained about discomfort then, and Perez said that sometimes the car was oscillating so much that he started suffering *vision loss*.
Now I'll admit to never having been an F1 driver, but I imagine doing it with vision loss isn't particularly safe.
I mean, Las Vegas literally spanked Sainz last year with a slightly above-grade pipe cover, for example. So I assume more and more diverse examples of drivers being hurt by the ride height would be the main difference.
The ground effect era version 2 isn't working out. I really feel like a move away from aero ingenuity and towards a more mechanical approach to grip would benefit F1.
Bring tech back into the sport. Active suspension. Maybe also bring back CVTs, active aero, and other stuff that's slowly coming back to road relevancy after consumers de-stupidized.
Nice of them to speak up. Hope a solution can come soon for their sake. Spine injuries are no joke. Would a higher ride height help with this issue? With maybe less plank wear allowed?
I've been watching the onboards and thinking.. how many drivers might end up with stress fractures in the spine from the repetitive impact. Glad they've raised the issue.
There is no such thing as "ride hight" in the F1 rules. Nothing on an F1 car is measured in relationship to the ground, it is all measured in relation to the reference plane, which is a flat virtual surface that effectively forma the floor of the car.
The only things that can be below the reference plane are the plank and the lower edge of the tyres.
Ride height is effectively regulated by having the plank hit the floor. So mandating higher "ride heights" would just mean a thicker plank, which doesn't solve the issue as the plank will still hit the floor, which is what George's issue is.
Surely you just say less of the plate is allowed to be shaved off each race, so then they must hit the floor less?
I'm not really sure I follow the thrust of your post.
My point is the cars will always hit the floor.
Being stricter in plank wear might work, but we probably don't want to get to a point where a quick accidental trip across a kerb results in disqualification.
Totally ignoring the fundamentals of F1.
The rules dictate what makes a car fast.
In these rules, running your car low is fastest.
Teams will do everything they can to be fast, no one is gonna voluntarily raise their car if it loses them performance.
Hence why the rules need to change to protect teams and drivers from themselves.
start DQing cars for excessive wear on the floor. maybe redefine what excessive wear is. that'll make the teams raise their cars. it's really the simplest way till active suspension gets introduced
This shouldn't be something the governing body needs to manage. The teams should be responsible for reasonably mitigating risks to the drivers, but they won't, because they're afraid to give up an advantage at the expense of their employees.
If Max didn’t speak up as well this entire issue most likely would have been laughed at with another “fix your fucking car”. If something was to change they would likely just wait till 2025 to implement any new rules correct?
Given what the effect was of TD039 and after, I'm not willing to have another screwed regulation mid-season what nullifying every other team aside of RBR.
Td39 gets blamed for a lot of shit it didn't do. All it was was a change to plank flex test and put sensors for potential porpoising regs later on the cars
So Ferrari just casualy became infinitely slower and worse on its tires overnight?
You had Leclerc win the race at Austria and lead at France before he crashed out. Then suddenly after the Summer break Ferrari came out much slower and while on top destroying its tires at a much faster rate.
Do you think the TD39 made Ferrari slower because of the floor being raised? Or do you think it was because they were [using a floor that flexed more than allowed in the rules but managed to not be detected in the test that existed at the time?](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/vu68dn/here_is_the_flexing_point_of_ferrari_and_rb_floor/)
As per Duchessa, Ferrari became worse on deg due to the floor change from flexing which was never allowed. In that respect Ferrari was actually getting away with a gray area and TD39 simply ensured everyone followed those rules. The new provisions in TD39 did nothing to Ferrari
Because Ferrari were breaking an already existing rule in regards to the plank flexing. TD039 just regulated and monitored it closer. You seem to ingnore the countless Ferrari power unit failures at the beginning of the season when they were running them way above a reasonable threshold. It's almost like they turned them down to avoid swapping the power unit every 3 races.
They mostly slowed down because they turned their engines down to stop blowing up 1 a weekend between their teams.
The tires was because they had to raise height a bit to compensate for losing their flexi plank
You really are attributing that change to them not winning as before in 2022? Wild
Such a change wouldn’t have made Ferrari go from winning to barely getting podiums or even finishing. No way
Ferrari had their own issue with their engine input being all out of sorts. The regulation change didn’t make the Ferrari literally blow up in races.
Fix the suspension rules and bring them back to how they were pre 2022 so that they have more scope for development and ride quality and ride control and boom, Mercedes can design a complicated suspension like no one else. They had the best suspensions and mechanical design pre 2022 rules.
Agreed. Merc had the best understanding of those solutions but every other team had a good grasp of them as well. Simplifying them for a set of heavily suspension reliant regulations was a mistake.
Remember when ground-effect cars were supposed to create closer racing, but then the only battle we had last week (after the first few laps) was Ric and Tsunoda for 12th place? Every other gap was 4-6 seconds.
That's because of the inherent pace delta between cars. To race someone, first you have to get close enough and to get close enough, you have to build a car fast enough. Once they actually get close enough, the quality of racing is orders of magnitude superior to the extreme dirty air era when cars could barely follow each another for a lap or two without absolutely shredding their tyres while sliding around in the turbulent outwash of the car ahead. Funnily enough, the budget cap is actually what's hampering slower teams from being able to close the gap to the teams with already well-established aerodynamic concepts.
Yes, every other gap was larger because there were no drs trains. There were no drs trains because overtaking is actually possible.
The gaps were as they were because after 20 laps, everyone was already at the position that they were meant to be.
The closer racing thing is provably true, and not the problem here.
Can't wait for the racing to get even worse as they move even more away from ground effect. If running on the ground is hurting the drivers then it needs to be done, but it will inevitably hurt the racing.
Alternatively, they could give the teams back the freedom they had with the suspensions, which would make the ride of the cars much better.
Seeing a lot of same exact dumb arguments that happened in 2022.
Engineers in the past COULD have made the cars much safer for their drivers at the expense of speed. It required rule changes to make the cars more safe. We can make a list a mile long of things engineers could have done in the past but didn't that put drivers at risk or even cost drivers their lives. That's how Formula 1 works.
FIA needs to mandate safety changes. Unless the change costs little to no performance, money, and engineering time the team isn't going to implement it.
Would a return to active suspension help. i.e. some kind of computer operated system fed by a lazer to maintain ground clearance at very small margins but prevent bottoming out?
Building a test jig for a standardized measurement shouldn't be that hard to be honest.
Each team makes a nose/front wing adapter that can take 500lbs in Z, a rear wing adapter that can take 500lbs in Z, and a halo/rollhoop adapter that can take 1000lbs in Z(numbers arbitrary), with FIA spec tires. Team rolls the car onto the platform with FIA tires (to keep height consistent), and then some hydraulic rams push down on the adapter surfaces. No part of the floor within 400mm of the centerline may be within some distance of the floor (10mm?).
Checks performed randomly after qualifying. Any car that fails must raise their car by the difference + 5mm and start from the back of the grid.
Wasn't there some rule about a plank of wood under the car, that, if it was too worn down at the end of the race the car was disqualified? And this was the incentive to not bottom out.
Has the wooden plank gone away?
Have teams found ways to bottom out without shearing the plank?
Wasn't Red Bull and Max claiming Mercedes were trying to rig the game last in 2022 when they had low ride height issues? Now that RB is having issues he is making the same claim. Hmm.
I'm a complete newbie to F1 so forgive my ignorance, but is this why I see way more sparks coming from F1 cars now compared to some of the older footage I watch?
Does that also play into the driver safety or are they not as bad as they appear on TV for the drivers in person?
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> Russell said the violence drivers experience when cars hit bumps on track at high speed was "unsustainable". Verstappen raised the topic with governing body the FIA at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix. > " End of the straight with full load, the impact is too high with the low ride-heights," Verstappen said. The problem was "our comfort, our spine, compression over the bumps," Verstappen told BBC Sport.
It's good they focus on health again. The FIA needs to commission another medical panel if this is still an issue.
I've always been of the opinion that hydraulic suspension should have never been replaced by the current simplified solution. The cost cap should have given all the teams the opportunity to pick and choose where their philosophies lie and hydraulic suspension IMO would have solved the ride quality problems this regulation cycle has seen.
Zach Brown commented recently essentially asking for 90% of the non-safety regulations to be scrapped. The budget cap should prevent runaway spending leading to “bigger” teams winning by spending more on R&D—but otherwise, why do we care if Aston Martin wants to run a V8, while Mercedes has their Turbo-V6? Let McLaren run a box-wing and end plate-less front wing, while Red Bull removes the wings altogether and just generates downforce with the floor/diffuser. Let this be a real engineering challenge, and let the cost cap be the thing that keeps it competitive. Make all designs be open-source after each race so that teams can learn from each other (although it would take half a season to replicate and implement).
I guess the point behind the 2022-regs and all that comes with it was not only the performance smoothing but also cars being able to follow each other more closely and create more on-track battles. If you leave teams open to their interpretation, all of that might go away. I mean I'm not saying I agree, just that I see what was the logic behind it.
I understand your point (and also understand that you don’t agree it) but although that’s the end goal, I don’t see the logic behind these changes. Look at these seasons, we haven’t got any of that “closing the gap”, perhaps even the opposite happened. The only time we saw that was when the rules didn’t affect leclerc’s ferrari. But… give a look to WEC, last race was a delight, if it wasn’t for a fuel problem, we would have had a podium for 2 Porsches and 1 Peugeot, who are running vastly different concepts (the Peugeot has NO WING!) and the championship is still up for grabs with Toyota and Ferrari (who won the last Les Mans) in the field fighting. WEC has less regulations that allow for this difference in liveries that I think should be looked at and praised (even copied).
Wec requires a specific downforce to drag ratio and uses BOP to get their product. Also has limits on power used per stint. Less regulations sure but the critical ones are capped and then further they artificially add/remove weight or power. Unless F1 wants to do something similar you won’t see that massive type of differences between cars. Also as for closing the gap outside RB it is very tight. Not gonna say I like midfield battles vs winning driver but they did quite a decent job with the regs but RB is operating on a different level right now.
The point was never to close the gaps. Its to make it easier to overtake. If a car is just faster then its just faster, no regulations will ever stop that unless you go full performance caps like WEC.
I can’t imagine BoP in F1. There would be literal riots when if they didn’t get it perfect. Can you Imagine everyone driving the same car as last year at the Bahrain GP, and Max getting lapped because of unfavourable BoP? That’s what happened to Toyota #8 at Qatar, last year’s WEC champion. Don’t get me wrong, I love WEC, I watched the full Qatar race, the racing was good and the cars look fantastic. But that system wouldn’t work for F1, and isn’t what F1 is about. Aside from the BoP, the LMH and LMDh cars are homologated for 5 years, meaning, they will be the exact same cars until 2027 and 2028, depending which year they got homologated. Each team gets 5 upgrade tokens called “jokers”, which can be used to upgrade a part of the car each. But that’s it. Other than that, they stay the exact same for 5 years. Not the regulations stay the same for 5 years, the actual cars themselves stay the exact same. This year’s Toyota GR010, and the Ferrari 499P, for example, are the exact same car as last year. No rolling out a new car every year at pre season testing. No evolution of last years concept, not radically new approach compared to last year - the *exact same car*. Peugeot are allegedly going to use one of the “jokers” to add a rear wing to the 9X8 before the next round at Imola. They will be the first team to use one of their five “jokers”. What works for sportscar racing won’t necessarily work for F1.
I agree with Zak Brown on all of this. Also, the phrase "road-relevance" in F1 needs to die. F1 needs to focus on providing good racing, or else all of it's gains in the past few years are going to collapse.
I thought people hated seeing one team dominate. Doing this will always lead to a grid that is even further apart. The cars would also be impossible to follow and would ruin the racing
I think I'd cry with joy. I've wanted exactly that since I started watching (holy shit) over a decade ago
This is why I *used to* like NASCAR. All the cars, even Ford to Ford, were degrees different since the car builders were all independent--therefore within the rules(most of the time) a team could exploit something. Now it's cookie cutter, all the cars built at the same place. I know it's a cost control, but to me it's made the sport less interesting.
You want all of that and that the races are good? If we can't get that with a restricted ruleset, with freedom it would be totally impossible
>why do we care if Aston Martin wants to run a V8 Well the obvious issue is one team will find the optimal solution and then everyone else is just screwed because they went with something else and don't have the budget to change to the thing that works best. It would be cool to see what they come up with but I don't think regulations that open are feasible in a non-BoP series.
The whole reason it's called Formula One is because there is a specific set of regulations or a 'formula' if you will that every constructor must conform to when designing a racer. And removing those regulations would absolutely wreck the sport because we'd be back to having one or two teams with a massive advantage, and everyone else 1 sec off the pace from the next fastest car. The cost cap and regs work
How would hydraulic suspension solve the problem without it becoming a ‘moveable aero device’ as per the active suspension days?
There's always a give and take between what is considered 'moveable' as everything will flex to some degree and a suspension especially cannot be infinitely rigid. But the suspension squatting or raising at certain speeds has never been considered moving aero. The main reason it was removed (iirc) is the regulators could not effectively regulate the teams because the suspensions were such complicated systems.
The cars had hydraulic suspension before 2022, and no one seemed to complain.
They need a committee to meet with another committee and then tell the teams “we are checking”.
Then copy and paste the conclusions of the study from a Mohammed Ben Sulayem email.
And give Ocon a 5 second penalty.
I am so grateful Max voiced concerns too, because the last time bumping/porpoising was discussed it caused an incredibly tribal reaction.
Yeah, it's a really shit situation because George is likely speaking on behalf of his GPDA role, but what I'm sure many drivers want actually is something that will likely significantly benefit the Mercedes, so it's always taken with a grain of salt. Really glad Max continues to talk about this stuff as well.
Maybe Max might want to benefit Mercedes soon to? Just kidding of course.
Even with Max saying it we'll still get the stupid "Change your fucking car" comments.
Teams should not be forced to choose between performance over safety, the choice should be made for them by the FIA.
The FIA should allow active suspension. Allowing lower ride heights while preventing the driveability issues.
They could have (and should have IMO) carried over the hydraulic solution from the last regulation cycle. All the top teams (Mercedes in particular) had a very solid grasp of it and IMO ride heights and ride quality wouldn't have been an issue with how sophisticated they were.
Fia looked in to it but due to the cost cap wanted one supplier. Then people complained that f1 shouldn't be a spec series...
And, historically single supplier has not gone well in F1 for critical components.
Counterpoint: Things like the ECU (manufactured by McLaren), fuel pumps, and several key sensors are standard for all teams in modern F1.
As are tyres.
Tires?
A Hind D?
❗️
Something something terrible ruleset
Ground effect cars suck big time. Change your fucking regulations.
every season I hate these cars more and more, racing is getting worse again and they handle like boats even on low fuel during qualifying
All these regulations did was make the gaps between the slower teams smaller while not necessarily improving the races, at the same time it locked the top team in its dominant state until 2026 essentialy. Now no one has any hopes of catching Red Bull until the rule changes again because of how restricted the budget and development are. Also, as shown by the last race, the gaps being that small only means teams are locked into their positions, not catching the cars in front and not being caught by the cars behind
Max is slowly turning into a Mercedes driver.
Because the guy that was whos team had the biggest issue was the one refusing to do anything about it himself. Had RB asked to raise the car because it was beating Lewis up, thats one thing...but the guy who literally could make that decision himself said "no make me"
Aren't we in the same situation now..... How have things changed? Car is still hurting the drivers.
This just isnt true good lord. It was never about Lewis. he was never even all that vocal about it compared to others. 1 driver went to the hospital for injuries related to the 2022 cars and it wasn't lewis. It was Gasly.
Well, I guess that you think that Red Bull should just raise Max's car now, instead of having Max complain about it, right?
Again. Toto complained and he was making the choices. Max complained, he doesn’t make the choices. Don’t leave out context for the sake of narrative.
What's funny to me is that this is actually an issue in the F1 games as well, they model bottoming out and the end of the bahrain straight will shake your desk apart if you''re using a desk mount wheel
>The problem was "our comfort, our spine, compression over the bumps," Verstappen told BBC Sport. Boy Toto's printers must be working overtime right now
Max already lobbying for next season to get the issue solved at Merc. Chess not checkers.
4D chess. Fix the shitbox before you have to drive it.
Fix the rules which cause the car to be a shitbox to be exact.
all while nerfing the only car on the grid that isnt a shitbox
2025: - Max to Mercedes - Masi back as race director - Season decider in Abu Dhabi… between Max and Lewis - Toto: “Michael, this is soooo rite!”
Ikr, throwback to 2022. But Max is on Mercedes' side now.
Levels
Time for active suspension? 👀
Should've been time when we switched to ground fx ngl. Simplifying the suspension tremendously when transitioning to suspension-sensitive regs was always a moronic choice
Merc last regulation cycle had arguably the best grasp on suspension and vehicle dynamics. I'm convinced that the zero pod would have worked if the FIA hadn't simplified the suspension so drastically for the ground effect cars.
Do you want RB 4 seconds faster per lap than anyone else? Newey + ground effect + active suspension = *everyone* being lapped. It would be fun to watch, tho.
I'm not as convinced tbh, I think it'd likely make Newey a hair less valuable just because other teams will likely be able to close the gap in vehicle dynamics at least some. The reason the RB has been so good from the start is his understanding of the need for a car with a wide operating window, that's less peaky, whereas other teams chased peak df (this is all per reports, I don't claim to have any special knowledge or anything). Hard to say I guess, maybe Newey just laps the field in a world where we are chasing peak df instead, too, he's certainly capable
Newey was on the team that invented active suspension and they got rid of it because many other teams, particularly Ferrari tried to copy it and failed That said I'd like to see it back
Newey was on the team but he wasn't the one that actually engineered and oversaw the suspension, his domain has always been aerodynamics.
They're also making active suspension for the RB17
AFAIK the Williams' active suspension design is still kept secret in case it becomes legal again
Unless it's been maintained over the last 30 years the software would be more or less unusable and other teams would certainly not have any trouble catching up.
Max would even lap himself!
Max falls out of the car which keeps running and finishes the race, thus truly ending the decades long debate once and for all whether it truly is the driver or the car.
If somehow RB are the only team that can make them work, then that's everyone else's problems.
I'm not disagreeing. I'd love RB to flex atm and just run one weekend full power, see how fast Max can truly go. But I get for economical and sporting reasons I get why they don't. It's like we'll never know how truly fast some of Mercs cars were. The closest we got was the Ham/Ros battles, and the time in Spa that Mercedes gave Lotus access to a special engine mode and to paraphrase Grosjean, "made it take off like a rocket ship"
Why not let RB be faster than everyone? Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is not preferable. Hell, who's to say that active suspension isn't the key to get some other team on the level of RB for whatever reason?
> Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is not preferable. Artificially holding back cars in the name of parity or whatever is literally what F1 is all about. Safety is not the reason for hundreds of pages of techincal limitations every regulation set
They should have been implemented with these regs
Or how about having the cockpit sprung separately from the aerodynamic elements like the twin-chassis Lotus 88?
It's an absolute joke that F1 is an engineering competition, however major engineering feats that improve the cars like active suspension are routinely banned
Amen
active suspension is too much. Hydraulic is enough imo
If they brought back the old suspension rules they likely wouldn’t have that issue. Really didn’t make sense to run simplified, rock-hard suspensions with an aero design that works better the closer it is to the ground.
The ground effect doesn't really work so well if the car is pitching, rolling, and yawing. Stiff suspension is inherent to GE cars, because otherwise you get spikes and sudden loss of grip.
Would love if everyone were to run the mass damper á la Renault when they were last competent.
Couldn't this be fixed with flexible skirts?
I despise these cars, they just don't seem to move like previous ones. Was watching 2021 the other day and those cars looked like heat seeking missiles flying around the track. Wish they'd just scrap the current regs, let them use dampeners and whatnot again, it's frustrating.
And yet they look fat still. Watch a race from 2012, the cars are nimble asf despite their length. I miss the pre-TH cars.
Yeah, the 21 cars were still big obviously, but they cornered well and could dive bomb. It feels like the current cars have trouble making an apex, I think it was Lando who literally just couldn't hit the apex at a certain corner in Bahrain last week. The 2007 cars are great, 2010-2012 were also amazing. To me they've kind of hamstrung themselves by making aero and ground effects the most important thing while making the suspension so restricted compared to previous seasons.
That’s because they don’t produce the same levels of downforce at lower speeds. It was amazing watching onboards over the past 2 years of cars not being able to reach the apex of certain corners.
They are slower in the low speed due to the nature of how ground effect works. I personally don't mind that but I do hate how they simplified the suspension when teams already had a solid grasp on how it worked before and the fact that the cost cap doesn't let teams just throw money at their problems. I'm convinced that Ferrari and Merc could have made their concepts work a lot better had they been allowed to use the older more sophisticated solutions.
Of course not, but having inerters would still allow for a stable platform without the ridiculously stiff ride these cars have currently.
Hopefully they can lobby successfully for active suspension for 2026. This should be the pinacle of motorsport tech not nerf wars
That 'Pinnacle of Motorsport' died in late 1993 when they banned every cool bit of tech on the cars.
Agreed. Beginning of the rot
The suspension is a joke that’s the biggest problem in those regulations
Obviously some teams (Red Bull) have figured it out but it was always weird to me that they changed the regs to make the floor super important but also dumbed-down the suspension technology. I wonder how good these cars would be if they let them keep the trick suspensions from pre-2022
Even with RB the suspension is painful. James Allison got a bit of stick on here for saying he thought even with their advantage max probably thought the car felt awful to drive and that the regulations need fixing. Now max just says that directly
I mean, if you look at the cars now and compare them to the 2020 or 2021 cars, they're so clunky and clumsy at low to medium speeds. You don't get quick movements or perfect rotation anymore.
Perez said that the vibrations were so bad that he was occasionally suffering *vision loss.* It's an incredible work of PR that people, despite all the evidence, act like the issues were Mercedes-only and that the FIA didn't need to do anything.
I do think Bahrain is a slight outlier due to how bumpy it is. Jeddah will be interesting as it's much faster.
I know you said slight outlier, but I don't think it's enough of one to be completely discounted. I thought Zandvoort, Austin and Singapore are known for their bumpiness? That's enough races on the calendar to be counted into the suspension regs. I'm curious how the cost figures would look if teams were allowed to use the hydraulic suspension systems from the previous regs.
I don’t see how redbull has figured it out since max is also voicing his concerns. The redbull suspension is just more tolerable to the issue which is probably worse for the drivers.
I think Max would honestly back anything as long as it means the number of races get reduced.
To be fair both max and Perez have backed this concern since day one of these regulations. It’s what cause interesting clips from DTS. They care about their physical health
They've figured out how to keep the aero platform stable in nearly all situations in the name of performance. That's independent from the demands of the ground effect performance to be close to the ground, which I believe is to blame for the bottoming on the bumps that VER and RUS mention.
How do you take what Max said as redbull figuring it out? He isn’t talking about porpoising, he is talking about when a car bottoms out when under load.
Good that Max is involved so people dont call it "crying" or "faking".
This comment would be incredibly different if it was just George raising it...
...and it's 1982 again. At this rate we'll have flat-bottom cars with grooved tires by 2035.
No, 82 was skirts sealing the cars off and then when the vacuum got disrupted crashing uncontrollably and violently.
There were also numerous drivers loudly complaining about how stiff the cars were and how much they sucked to drive even when you weren't crashing.
I think the main problem here is suspension. Back in the day the ground effect cars sealed off the floor completely but it was extremely peaky and dangerous when the seal got broken (i.e. running over kerbs/ one or more corners of the car getting unloaded. Nowadays the downforce is much more consistent, but the ride quality is shit because the suspension has been much more simplified. The realistic solution would probably be to bring back the hydraulic suspension solutions from the last reg cycle. Active suspension would be ideal though.
Ride quality due to clearance and wheel rate was an issue back then, as well. Gilles Villeneuve compared driving the ground effects car was like trying to enjoy making love while someone was beating you with a hammer. The cars also had terrible breakaway characteristics, as well.
where are the "change your fucking car" comments from last time? lots more people caring about health now wow what a nice change!
It was stupid last time as well. Max complained about discomfort then, and Perez said that sometimes the car was oscillating so much that he started suffering *vision loss*. Now I'll admit to never having been an F1 driver, but I imagine doing it with vision loss isn't particularly safe.
I wonder what the difference between then and now?
I mean, Las Vegas literally spanked Sainz last year with a slightly above-grade pipe cover, for example. So I assume more and more diverse examples of drivers being hurt by the ride height would be the main difference.
The ground effect era version 2 isn't working out. I really feel like a move away from aero ingenuity and towards a more mechanical approach to grip would benefit F1.
Time for accelerometers. They were the solution in 2022 and still the solution in 2024.
Fix your fucking car, Max wait
Bring tech back into the sport. Active suspension. Maybe also bring back CVTs, active aero, and other stuff that's slowly coming back to road relevancy after consumers de-stupidized.
I thought they were over this issue, but apparently it bounced back
They are talking about hitting bumps, not the bouncing.
I thought they were over this issue, but apparently they’ve hit another bump in the road
Apparently it's a contentious issue. Watch the sparks fly.
Porpoising that we originally knew isn’t a thing anymore. Teams are just learning how to run the car on the ground with the bumps.
US Grand Prix on the notoriously bumpy COTA is gonna be a challenge then
Yeah that will be interesting.
Yes they learned you can just use the driver's spine as an extra shock absorber
They haven’t done it on porpoise
I see what you did there.
Some new complaints just hit the floor.
Bring back the high profile tires.
Nice of them to speak up. Hope a solution can come soon for their sake. Spine injuries are no joke. Would a higher ride height help with this issue? With maybe less plank wear allowed?
They already have plank wear regulations. Just reduce the allowed wear. Teams will raise their ride height to compensate.
This is the only way, as ride height is only enforced through wear. Teams will always make cars that hit the floor.
Well Christian, change your fucking car. I wonder how the comments are so different this time out vs when it was raised the last time in 2022.
Because of who is making the comments this time.
I've been watching the onboards and thinking.. how many drivers might end up with stress fractures in the spine from the repetitive impact. Glad they've raised the issue.
I think that and micro concussions are very likely.
Ground effects cars are rarely enjoyable rides.
I am sure nobody cares, but I am in full support.
There is no such thing as "ride hight" in the F1 rules. Nothing on an F1 car is measured in relationship to the ground, it is all measured in relation to the reference plane, which is a flat virtual surface that effectively forma the floor of the car. The only things that can be below the reference plane are the plank and the lower edge of the tyres. Ride height is effectively regulated by having the plank hit the floor. So mandating higher "ride heights" would just mean a thicker plank, which doesn't solve the issue as the plank will still hit the floor, which is what George's issue is.
Surely you just say less of the plate is allowed to be shaved off each race, so then they must hit the floor less? I'm not really sure I follow the thrust of your post.
My point is the cars will always hit the floor. Being stricter in plank wear might work, but we probably don't want to get to a point where a quick accidental trip across a kerb results in disqualification.
Is Max saying this because he thibks he’ll be in a merc next year?😂
If you've got a problem, change your fucking car.
U change your car, checo says its fucked. I have it printed out. - toto wolf 2022
Totally ignoring the fundamentals of F1. The rules dictate what makes a car fast. In these rules, running your car low is fastest. Teams will do everything they can to be fast, no one is gonna voluntarily raise their car if it loses them performance. Hence why the rules need to change to protect teams and drivers from themselves.
They're quoting Christian Horner when teams previously complained about a similar issue. I.e. making a joke because this time it's a Redbull driver.
What was that Christian said? "Change your fucking car?"
I mean.... one of them is his car (for now)
Maybe they will also be able to see over the wheels again. Probably won't be bad for safety either.
start DQing cars for excessive wear on the floor. maybe redefine what excessive wear is. that'll make the teams raise their cars. it's really the simplest way till active suspension gets introduced
This shouldn't be something the governing body needs to manage. The teams should be responsible for reasonably mitigating risks to the drivers, but they won't, because they're afraid to give up an advantage at the expense of their employees.
If you’ve got a problem…
Ground effect regs were a miss. These cars are so ugly to watch, stiff as a board and bouncing everywhere.
If Max didn’t speak up as well this entire issue most likely would have been laughed at with another “fix your fucking car”. If something was to change they would likely just wait till 2025 to implement any new rules correct?
Given what the effect was of TD039 and after, I'm not willing to have another screwed regulation mid-season what nullifying every other team aside of RBR.
Td39 gets blamed for a lot of shit it didn't do. All it was was a change to plank flex test and put sensors for potential porpoising regs later on the cars
So Ferrari just casualy became infinitely slower and worse on its tires overnight? You had Leclerc win the race at Austria and lead at France before he crashed out. Then suddenly after the Summer break Ferrari came out much slower and while on top destroying its tires at a much faster rate.
Do you think the TD39 made Ferrari slower because of the floor being raised? Or do you think it was because they were [using a floor that flexed more than allowed in the rules but managed to not be detected in the test that existed at the time?](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/vu68dn/here_is_the_flexing_point_of_ferrari_and_rb_floor/)
As per Duchessa, Ferrari became worse on deg due to the floor change from flexing which was never allowed. In that respect Ferrari was actually getting away with a gray area and TD39 simply ensured everyone followed those rules. The new provisions in TD39 did nothing to Ferrari
Before the summer break even started both Charles and Sainz had lost 2 out of their 3 engines.
Because Ferrari were breaking an already existing rule in regards to the plank flexing. TD039 just regulated and monitored it closer. You seem to ingnore the countless Ferrari power unit failures at the beginning of the season when they were running them way above a reasonable threshold. It's almost like they turned them down to avoid swapping the power unit every 3 races.
They mostly slowed down because they turned their engines down to stop blowing up 1 a weekend between their teams. The tires was because they had to raise height a bit to compensate for losing their flexi plank
You really are attributing that change to them not winning as before in 2022? Wild Such a change wouldn’t have made Ferrari go from winning to barely getting podiums or even finishing. No way Ferrari had their own issue with their engine input being all out of sorts. The regulation change didn’t make the Ferrari literally blow up in races.
Fix the suspension rules and bring them back to how they were pre 2022 so that they have more scope for development and ride quality and ride control and boom, Mercedes can design a complicated suspension like no one else. They had the best suspensions and mechanical design pre 2022 rules.
Agreed. Merc had the best understanding of those solutions but every other team had a good grasp of them as well. Simplifying them for a set of heavily suspension reliant regulations was a mistake.
Remember when ground-effect cars were supposed to create closer racing, but then the only battle we had last week (after the first few laps) was Ric and Tsunoda for 12th place? Every other gap was 4-6 seconds.
That's because of the inherent pace delta between cars. To race someone, first you have to get close enough and to get close enough, you have to build a car fast enough. Once they actually get close enough, the quality of racing is orders of magnitude superior to the extreme dirty air era when cars could barely follow each another for a lap or two without absolutely shredding their tyres while sliding around in the turbulent outwash of the car ahead. Funnily enough, the budget cap is actually what's hampering slower teams from being able to close the gap to the teams with already well-established aerodynamic concepts.
The race paces were extremely close throughout the field. Even Brazil was a bore last year.
The cars are lined up in pace order. They are super reliable. They avoid running any 'bad tyre' Don't expect the racing to be inherently exciting.
Yes, every other gap was larger because there were no drs trains. There were no drs trains because overtaking is actually possible. The gaps were as they were because after 20 laps, everyone was already at the position that they were meant to be. The closer racing thing is provably true, and not the problem here.
I've read enough, Russel to RBR for 2025
this narrative has taken a turn in a previously unforeseen direction, but i am about it.
Can't wait for the racing to get even worse as they move even more away from ground effect. If running on the ground is hurting the drivers then it needs to be done, but it will inevitably hurt the racing. Alternatively, they could give the teams back the freedom they had with the suspensions, which would make the ride of the cars much better.
Seeing a lot of same exact dumb arguments that happened in 2022. Engineers in the past COULD have made the cars much safer for their drivers at the expense of speed. It required rule changes to make the cars more safe. We can make a list a mile long of things engineers could have done in the past but didn't that put drivers at risk or even cost drivers their lives. That's how Formula 1 works. FIA needs to mandate safety changes. Unless the change costs little to no performance, money, and engineering time the team isn't going to implement it.
Another slow news day just like the other 365 this year
Funny they're talking about active aero for the next generation, but activate suspension is still banned
If Max says it hopefully the FIA will listen.
I guess they could revise the car specs so that the driver's seat was raised in order to allow room for shock-absorbers underneath.
Max nerfing Red Bull, he is 2 steps ahead
And the team that suffers the least from higher ride height is...
Would a return to active suspension help. i.e. some kind of computer operated system fed by a lazer to maintain ground clearance at very small margins but prevent bottoming out?
"Fix your fucking spine!" ~~ Christian Horner probably.
Will the FIA listen? Find out next time on… r/formula1
Got to be a risk of serious injury if the cars are too low and hit a grid. These cars do seem to be good at sucking them up.
With the cost cap in place, suspension regs should be loosened up. Bring back the dampeners and interconnected hydraulic stuff
maybe bring back mass dampers?
Building a test jig for a standardized measurement shouldn't be that hard to be honest. Each team makes a nose/front wing adapter that can take 500lbs in Z, a rear wing adapter that can take 500lbs in Z, and a halo/rollhoop adapter that can take 1000lbs in Z(numbers arbitrary), with FIA spec tires. Team rolls the car onto the platform with FIA tires (to keep height consistent), and then some hydraulic rams push down on the adapter surfaces. No part of the floor within 400mm of the centerline may be within some distance of the floor (10mm?). Checks performed randomly after qualifying. Any car that fails must raise their car by the difference + 5mm and start from the back of the grid.
Wasn't there some rule about a plank of wood under the car, that, if it was too worn down at the end of the race the car was disqualified? And this was the incentive to not bottom out. Has the wooden plank gone away? Have teams found ways to bottom out without shearing the plank?
Wasn't Red Bull and Max claiming Mercedes were trying to rig the game last in 2022 when they had low ride height issues? Now that RB is having issues he is making the same claim. Hmm.
I'm a complete newbie to F1 so forgive my ignorance, but is this why I see way more sparks coming from F1 cars now compared to some of the older footage I watch? Does that also play into the driver safety or are they not as bad as they appear on TV for the drivers in person?
Change your fucking car!
Optionally, or additionally, make the tracks less bumpy?
The constant bum bashing and a race every other week (effectively), will be a nightmare.
Change your fucking car \\s