new look for a new era? Aerodynamics, the source of all the curiosities

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A historic 2021 season, a merciless struggle, breathtaking suspense, growing public interest: all the lights are green for Formula 1. However, this 2022 season is seeing a real revolution take place and reshuffle all the cards. Originally planned to come into force a year earlier before the Covid-19 got involved, a new technical regulation is coming to upset F1 and especially the look of all the racing cars in the paddock. To the point of putting the return to the track of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, the two rivals of last year, in the background.

It must be said that the single-seaters, vintage 2022, are worth the aesthetic detour. Considerably wider tires, redesigned fins or fins above the wheels, the facelift is striking. The organizers of F1 wanted to rethink their main working tool with a clear objective: to accentuate the duels on the track. To move forward, the discipline took a big leap back, going back to the genesis of aerodynamics in Formula 1. The cars are again designed to exploit “ground effect”, which gives cars stuck to the track, as if sucked. It’s the same principle as an airplane, which takes advantage of the airflow generated under its wings to fly away, but in reverse.

This process, banned from the 80s, aims to reduce the phenomenon known as “dirty air”, the aerodynamic disturbances when a car cuts through the air. This dirty breath limited the performance of cars following another, making it more difficult to overtake, and degrading the tires more quickly. The new aero philosophy for 2022 will largely eliminate this problem. With these changes, some observers feared that Formula 1 would become sanitized, and the single-seaters look like large copies of the models presented by F1 in 2021. Winter testing has largely swept away these doubts.

Each team has its own team of engineers with its own reading of the regulations, keen to explore the gray areas as best they can. Ferrari presented itself during pre-season testing with a car with side pods, flanks, wide and flared curves. By unveiling for its part a machine with almost non-existent sides, Mercedes for its part amazed everyone in Bahrain.

“We had not anticipated the concept of Mercedesadmitted Ross Brawn, sporting director of Formula 1 on the F1TV platform. In any case, it is impossible to predict how far the creativity of these teams can go. You have hundreds of engineers working on the regulations and trying to unravel all the mysteries.” “After a while, everyone will end up converging on the best solutionanticipates however for us Cyril Abiteboul, former boss of Renault F1. But that’s not going to happen right away.”

This new era of aerodynamics is not lacking in shadows. The teams are moving forward with few benchmarks vis-à-vis their performance and that of the competition before the first Grand Prix in Bahrain on Sunday. And through testing, an unexpected problem appeared: porpoising. At high speeds, the single-seaters kept bouncing, rocking the riders up and down as if they were on springs. The cars, thus modified, all suffered from the same evil which, if it amused the fans, made the mechanics laugh less.

“The aerodynamic load generated is such at high speed that the car crashes because it is sucked into this ground effectdeciphers Cyril Abiteboul. She gets to a critical distance from the ground, where the aero eventually stops working at all, the suction stops, and the car straightens out. Which again generates downforce, and so on. It is then necessary to play on a parameter to end this loop. You can increase the ride height, or play on the suspensions. But this comes at the expense of the car’s performance. A stiffer suspension will be more effective in a straight line to suppress this rebound, but performance will be affected in the slower parts of a circuit.“

The workshops therefore had to partially review the copy on which they had been working all winter to avoid this porpoising, which is difficult to bear for single-seaters and pilots alike. And they have probably not finished being caught off guard. From all these attempts and approximations should be born the Formula 1 of the future. Aesthetically successful cars and even more battle on the track: tempting promises, especially after the grandiose spectacle already offered only a few months ago.


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