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This Week – 08/09/2024

News & Analysis This Week

Hello welcome to This Week, there’s always some row in this sport as questions are again raised about flex wings, as the climax of the season edges nearer Max Verstappen warns that Red Bull is under threat and could lose the championship. Could next week give us answers to Adrian Newey’s future?

I feel we are on the verge of an upset could McLaren return to the top step in the constructor’s for the first time in twenty-five years? And even Lando Norris challenging Max Verstappen for the drivers, the next two weeks will set the tone for the climax of this season

General News

Red Bull and Ferrari have called for more clarification about how far flexi-wings can be exploited in F1, amid fresh intrigue over the designs of McLaren and Mercedes. The flexi-wing debate has been one that has continued all season, because of ntrinsic balance problems that dog the current generation of ground-effect cars.

In response to growing interest in the paddock over the matter, the FIA began a series of video checks of various designs at the Belgian Grand Prix in a bid to better understand what competitors were up to.

The governing body made it clear that its move was an information-gathering exercise rather than aimed at finding out if any teams were breaking the rules. The ultimate aim is to work out if the current load tests used to check the flexibility of wings remain fit for purpose in the long term. Onboards from McLaren and Mercedes have raised questions about whether some teams are going too far.

The aim of this appears to be to get a technical directive from the FIA to clarify the rules so they can better exploit this in the coming months until the regulations change in 2026. Asked by media if he shared Red Bull’s interest in the flexi-wing situation, Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur said: “This is a discussion that I don’t want to have with you, I will have it with Tombazis. But we have to respect the decision of the FIA. We will have, again, the discussion…”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner explained at the Italian Grand Prix that he had to trust the FIA over the matter. he said, “I think the regulations are very clear and that’s an FIA issue. Obviously, they are tested and they pass, but then you have to look at the wording of the regulations. But, if you remember back in ’21, certainly around Baku time, there was a change to the front wing regulations, even though our wings passed the test [at the time].’

Asked if further clarity from the FIA that rival designs were all good meant that Red Bull would have to pursue such ideas itself, Horner said: “Well, if it’s acceptable then you have to join in.”

Flexi wings and exploiting aerodynamic elasticity, have been a long-running debate as the team knows as long as the wings pass the tests in the garage on track they can then exploit the flexibility on track.

Red Bull

Max Verstappen is expecting  Red Bull to be “all bad until the end of the season” unless serious improvements are made to the car. The Dutchman’s lead in the Drivers’ Championship has been cut to sixty-two points with eight races remaining following his sixth-placed finish at the Italian Grand Prix and chief title rival Lando Norris coming third, behind Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri.

In Monza he complained about the handling and balance throughout the weekend, after which he said the team were “in no man’s land”. Verstappen said when asked whether Red Bull had pulled out the best performance they could at Monza, “In terms of position, but not in the way we approached the race. The pace was not strong enough, so we had to do our own race.”

“I think strategy-wise we didn’t optimise it. Some cars did a one-stop and we did a two-stop which was not the best. For most of the race we couldn’t run full engine power because of a problem, so that doesn’t help. All in all, a bad race.” Verstappen admits they would still have had a bad race with full engine power, but they may have been more competitive

Team principal Christian Horner is concerned about losing both the drivers’ and constructors’ titles. He remains hopeful fixes can be made to alleviate the balance issues but doubts they can be resolved completely.

He said: “With the pace we had today, both championships will be under pressure, for sure. No one puts us under more pressure than ourselves. Finishing sixth hurts. If we want to win both titles, we have to put performance on the car. We have to turn around the situation very quickly. This circuit has exposed the deficiencies in the car versus last year.

Mercedes

George Russell says his race at Monza last weekend nearly ended in tears, after narrowly avoiding contact at around 340km/h when battling Red Bull’s Sergio Perez for eighth place. After coming from twelfth to ninth by lap thirty-eight he tried to overtake the Mexican, who closed the door on the approach to Variante del Rettifilo and barely left a car’s width on his right. The Briton brushed the grass with his right wheels but made the move stick nonetheless.

He went on to finish seventh after passing Haas’ Kevin Magnussen, albeit 39.7 seconds off race winner Charles Leclerc (Ferrari). After the race, Russell pointed out his tussle with Perez had been too perilous for comfort given the speed both cars were travelling at and the lack of margin left by his rival.

When asked by a reporter if he’d had fun with Perez, the Mercedes driver said, “I mean, fun? I’m not sure you can just describe that ‘fun’, because I thought I was about to go airborne when he was squeezing me at 340km/h. But yeah, hard racing and at least glad to make it one position. It was right at the very, very limit.”

However, Russell does not intend to talk the incident through with Perez: “There’s nothing to say. We didn’t crash at the end of the day, and I got past him, but half a centimetre more and it could have been a different story.”

CEO and team principal Toto Wolff has warned that teams can only write off Red Bull at their peril, labelling the team’s recent drop-off in performance as “really weird” while praising Max Verstappen’s individual ability to keep the car competitive.

After being the team to beat at the start of the season Red Bull is now struggling to fight near the front, with McLaren becoming the team to beat. Verstappen himself said after the poor showing in Monza that it was “not realistic” for Red Bull to retain both crowns, with Lando Norris 62 points shy of the Dutchman in the drivers’ standings and McLaren trailing by just eight points in the constructors’.

Wolff said it had been strange to see their rivals lose their pace, but refused to rule out a change in circumstances before it was too late. He told Motorsport.com, “It is really weird. I have no insight obviously but that is not at all the Red Bull at the start of the year – dominant.”

“I think that Max was able to keep it going for a while with his ability, but it seems now that [the pace has gone] from the sheer results – and that is what I see without understanding or knowing what is going on inside – because it could be a blip, also.”

He says that Red Bull’s race was ‘one of the worst races that we have seen for many years,’ but believes they cannot be written off and that McLaren were now the favourite for the constructors. Also, the variety of circuits, conditions and upgrades over the coming races makes it difficult to predict who will be on the podium.

Wolff also said that its results over the last two races have been impacted by its car being more “on the edge.” Ahead of the summer break, it won three of the four races in July, but at the last two races has been brought back to reality with the best result being fifth with Lewis Hamilton at Monza.

Mercedes doesn’t understand why things have been more difficult but is aware the characteristics of the car have changed.

He said, “I think we are able to extract a single lap, which is in principle good news. But then the balance isn’t in a way good enough to keep the tyres happy for a race. That has been the topic since Zandvoort. It has been more on the edge, more difficult to find the right balance.”

A possible theory has been the floor update at Spa which was abandoned over doubts over benefits, but they continued to analyse it during the Zandvoort and Monza weekends, and are convinced that it is providing the extra downforce hoped for. It is not yet sure if the new design has contributed to the W15 having a less ideal balance, which is making Russell and Hamilton less comfortable in the car.

Speaking in the team’s regular post-weekend video debrief, Mercedes head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said there remained some question marks about the floor. he said, “Over the last three races, we’ve done various compares of the packages and principally comparing the floor.”

“What we are confident in is that it’s generating the load that we expect. The more difficult question that we need to answer is: is there anything subtle in the handling characteristics that this package might be doing that we haven’t anticipated?”

Shovlin said that finding an answer to the situation is not straightforward, because car balance is never consistent on different tracks.

Ferrari

Motorsport.com says it has learned the team’s interest in signing Adrian Newey has cooled because they didn’t want to start a bidding war with Aston Martin. Newey’s future has been one of the biggest talking points after announcing his departure from Red Bull after eighteen years back in May.

With Newey’s value high given his success at Red Bull, particularly with the current generation of cars, he and manager Eddie Jordan were looking for a deal that they felt was worthy of Newey’s stature. The revered designer was heavily linked with a move to Ferrari when the news of his Red Bull departure became public, and it is understood that Ferrari was willing to sanction this.

Sources suggest that team principal Fred Vasseur had secured the budget to sign Newey, who would have joined the team as a consultant and operated from the UK rather than having to uproot to Italy. Ferrari has done this before with John Barnard who created his own office with engineers based  in he UK.

Aston Martin has offered him what is said to be a substantial offer to join the team. Ferrari is understood to have chosen not to match Aston Martin’s offer (believed to be valued at $100m over three seasons, plus bonuses based on results) as it did not wish to be drawn into an auction over his services, and has instead elected to focus on enhancing its own structure in-house.

Loic Serra is to become Ferrari’s chassis technical director. The former performance director at Mercedes will replace Enrico Cardile, who left in July to join Aston Martin as chief technical officer.

Serra will join Ferrari at the start of October and has previously worked for Sauber when it was under the ownership of BMW, before joining Mercedes in 2009 and before becoming performance director in 2019. This is a promotion as he was initially due to join the team as head of chassis performance engineering.

His promotion to chassis technical director comes after a reassessment of the team’s technical structure by team principal Fred Vasseur following Cardile’s departure. Vasseur has been acting technical director since Cardile left the team. The team has slipped in competitiveness during the summer when an upgrade to the car’s floor induced aerodynamic instability.

McLaren

McLaren are considering imposing team orders to favour Lando Norris after Oscar Piastri finished in second place in the Italian Grand Prix, ahead of the Briton, but both were beaten by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc despite starting with a front-row lock-out.

Norris is currently sixty-two points behind Max Verstappen with eight races to go and two hundred and thirty-two still to play for. That means Norris has to reduce Verstappen’s lead by an average of 7.75 points a race – slightly more than the difference between first and second place.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said: “Max is good even with his tongue, not only on track. He knows the car he is driving at the moment seems to provide him with some challenges, but we need to be better at capitalising on the opportunities that Red Bull seem to offer by not being in their usual possibility of competing for podiums. I hope we will be in condition to have these situations frequently in the future.”

McLaren says they will adjust the ‘paypa rules’ to allow them to go after both the drivers and constructors, given the issues for Red Bull and Verstappen. Saying “We need to put the team and Lando in position to pursue both championships. Both drivers are mathematically in condition to do so but Lando is in the best position from a numbers point of view and we are fighting Max Verstappen.”

I think they need to make this decision which is believed to favour Norris given his performances this season and the fact he is second in the championship. Stella has long experience in F1 and knows the impact of team orders, I think the challenge is maintaining team unity as Norris and Piastri are going to be the long-term future of McLaren

Aston Martin

Adrian Newey’s move to the Aston Martin looks set to be announced in the build-up to next weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Since announcing his departure in May there has been plenty of speculation about where he would end up, it soon became clear Aston was his preferred option.

As well as team owner Lawrence Stroll doing some personal bidding to convince Newey to come on board, a secret visit to Aston Martin’s Silverstone factory in June is understood to have played a major part in his decision to believe that they can give him what he needs. It’s understood by Motorsport.com, that a clause in his departure meant he had to wait until now to announce where he was going next.

The likely imminent confirmation of Newey’s arrival comes amid a major recruitment drive by Aston Martin to secure the top engineering talent the squad thinks is needed to take on the best in F1. Before the summer break, the outfit announced that former Mercedes engine boss Andy Cowell would be joining it as Group CEO in October, replacing Martin Whitmarsh.

Aston Martin signed Newey’s deputy Dan Fallows as technical director, raising questions about how easy it would be to create a coherent structure that involved all its star talent. But team principal Mike Krack said it would not be a big issue to resolve.

Williams

Team principal James Vowles says he was impressed with how the team’s rookie driver Franco Colapinto managed his debut last weekend at Monza. The Argentine was brought in to replace Logan Sergeant after his crash at Zandvoort qualifying eighteenth and finishing twelfth despite not having the opportunity to earn a seat for 2025

After a mistake in qualifying left him eighteenth on the grid, he had a faultless race to come home twelfth, having been close to team-mate Alex Albon’s pace for the majority of the race. Vowles told Motorsport.com, “To finish within a few seconds of Alex, of which the delta was all made in the first stint when he qualified out of position, is a good result. He procedurally got everything correct that he needed to; at the start he didn’t lose position, he did a good job at the pitstop.”

“Up to his mistake in qualifying he was about within a tenth of Alex. That’s the only mistake that anyone can put on him, and without that, I think he could have been fighting for a point on his first outing. So I’m very, very happy with everything that he’s done and how he’s built up into it.”

I think it was a decent result for him being able to chase for points and cope with the pressure of the sport in a car which hasn’t regularly been in the points. Colapinto coped with the pressure and unlike Nyck De Vries it wasn’t a one-off, but he needed to deliver a string of performances to put himself on the map.

Vowles admitted that Colapinto’s lack of experience was a factor counting against him, but felt he had seen enough from the endless simulator runs and his mature Silverstone F1 outing to put his faith in him. Also saying he coped really well with the pressure and has the ability to drive quickly.

Asked how realistic it is to start expecting points from his new driver, he replied: “I would still say that there’s every reason to be encouraged at how he’s going to perform in Baku and Singapore and all the remaining tracks. I think he could have scored points if qualifying had gone well.”

Sauber

Valtteri Bottas says F1 rookie Franco Colapinto was to blame for the lengthy delay in forming up on the grid at Monza that earned the ire of commentator Martin Brundle. At Monza Bottas and teammate Guanyu Zhou qualified on the back row behind Colapinto, which Brundle said was not great for the drivers at the front were having to wait there for a while with tyres cooling down.

Speaking on Sky’s broadcast, Brundle said: “They’re having to sit on the front of the grid for quite a long time and the problem they had last week in Zandvoort, they didn’t get enough heat into their rear tyres and a long wait on the front row of the grid won’t help that for McLaren.”

After waiting a bit longer for Bottas and Zhou to get to their grid slots, he added: “This is taking too long. They really need to talk in the drivers’ briefing about this, there is too long for the back row to line up.”

The images did back up what Brundle was saying but the issue says Bottas was caused by the Williams dropping too far behind Lance Stroll. He told engineer Steven Petrik: “The gap between the car in front and the car in front was very big, according to the rules.” Asked if he felt Colapinto was too slow, Bottas replied: “Yes, very slow.”

F1’s rules are not specific on how big the gap can be between cars during the formation lap, as article 44.8 is quite loose in its wording. It states: “During the formation lap practice starts are forbidden and the formation must be kept as tight as possible.”

But even without a specified distance, Bottas revealed afterwards that he made sure to report it just in case it helped catch the attention of race control – who could have punished Colapinto for what he did.

Sauber has admitted they are facing a choice of youth v experience when deciding its driver line up as it transitions to Audi in 2026. The team failed to secure Carlos Sainz to partner Nico Hulkenberg as he was concerned about the competitiveness of the project, and joined Williams.

COO and CTO Mattia Binotto has singled out sorting out the driver situation as one of his first tasks and is eager to get the matter sorted as soon as possible. However, he says that before committing, he needs to agree with Audi chiefs whether it goes for a well-established driver like Valtteri Bottas, or opts for a youngster like its reserve Theo Pourchaire or rising F2 star Gabriel Bortoleto.

Speaking about his thoughts on the driver choice for 2025, Binotto said: “It’s a couple of weeks I’m there, so it’s early for me. But it’s definitely something that we need to judge: are we going for experience or something else? This is a project which is looking to a long-term objective, so [the question is] what’s the best for us from now to the final goal?”

“Is it more having short term experience and then moving to something different? We need to decide and today I think we are not in a position to answer. We are certainly listening to all potential drivers. We are certainly evaluating what the pros and the cons are for the best compromise.”

I think this is a very important decision going into what will be a transition year next year as the regulation changes and the full transition to Audi in 2026, as they admit. They need to I think not having to embed a new driver in 2026 could make the transition easier, but as Binotto admitted the team did not want to wait too long before making decisions.

Bottas is understood to be the favourite to be given a contract extension, the team says that young drivers Pourchaire and Bortoleto have their chances too. However, they are not the only ones under consideration.

Mick Schumacher and Liam Lawson have also been linked to the Sauber team in the past. Binotto added: “Theo is our reserve driver today, so somehow he’s already part of the family, and no doubt that he’s in our list. Gabriel is doing very well today in F2, I think he has shown to be a great talent, and certainly we are looking to what he’s doing – as we are looking to many others.”

Haas

Ollie Bearman will make his debut for the team next weekend in Baku after Kevin Magnussen was given a one-race ban after gaining twelve points on his licence following his collision with Pierre Gasly at Monza. Bearman who has been announced as a 2025 driver for the team after standing in for Carlos Sainz in Jeddah after he was taken unwell.

As Haas confirmed the decision on Friday, Bearman said: “It’s definitely more of a challenge stepping in to race as a reserve driver, with limited prep-time and so on, but I’m in the fortunate position of having done it earlier in the year with Ferrari, so I can at least call on that experience.

“I’ve also had four FP1 sessions with Haas in the VF-24 already this season, so undoubtedly that will also prove to be valuable in tackling the full race weekend in Baku. The team is in good form at the moment and I’ll do my best to be prepared with the time we have available. The aim is to get out there and have a solid weekend in Azerbaijan.”

Alongside his debut in Saudi Arabia, the Englishman has taken part in four practice sessions for Haas and one for Ferrari this season. Last weekend the FDA driver took his second win of the F2 season at Monza, and currently fourteenth in championship following a difficult season.

team principal Ayao Komatsu said: “I’m excited that Ollie will be driving the VF-24 alongside Nico in Baku. He’s already shown great promise in his FP1 outings and post-season test, and he performed very well when he drove for Scuderia Ferrari in Saudi Arabia, picking up points in the process.

“This is another excellent opportunity for both Ollie and the team to work together, this time throughout an entire race weekend, and he couldn’t ask for better teammate than Nico to provide him with a reference.”

Magnussen is the first driver to be banned since the penalty points system was introduced in 2014, similar to the UK system drivers cannot exceed twelve points.

The Week Ahead

The next week I feel there could be big questions about Red Bull given the drop in performance we have seen Baku could again be another difficult weekend given how they struggled in Monza. I feel this could be the main talking point over the next fourteen days until after Singapore, I don’t think they are just a sleeping giant there has to be something fundamentally going wrong.

I think it’s going to be interesting how Red Bull and McLaren spin this, we know Max Verstappen effectively will be saying ‘We are being hunted and are at risk of losing the championship,’ while McLaren play up the ‘underdogs’ line. We know the truth in this sport in is the data and the spin is often somewhere in the middle.

We may start to hear more about the deals and what going on behind the scenes in the next week, as we head to Singapore it’s like Monaco in terms of business deals being done. So, we normally get an idea of things going on at the race before, same with the driver market though there aren’t many seats left.

Ollie Bearman will not be classed as a rookie after Baku, he will make his debut for Haas next weekend I feel it will be interesting how he goes into his first full weekend ahead of his debut as a full-time driver in Melbourne in March. But it’s another tough weekend like Jeddah to jump in the car, his interviews will be interesting.

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