This Week – 26/03/2023
Hello again, Are Red Bull beatable or will they dominate the current era until 2026? Jeddah saw them look so in control of the sport and the way Max Verstappen bounced back after being knocked out in Q2 to finish second shows what a strong car Red Bull has. But they are still wary, but should we believe them?
General News
This week the governing body put out a tender for the next four-year exclusive tyre supply between 2025 and 2029. Pirelli has been the sole provider of tyres to the series since 2011. This followed on from a one-make deal with Bridgestone, which also featured alongside Michelin in the last tyre war that ran through the mid-2000s.
While Pirelli are expected to bid and are the favourite the regulations require a formal tender the contract is expected to remain with the Italian manufacturer. This new deal will come into effect for the 2025 campaign and last for at least three seasons, while an option for 2028 will also be up for consideration.
The design brief and desired tyre behaviour will remain largely unchanged from the current 23-inch specification (for the 18-inch wheel rims) that was enlarged for 2022. Like the basic characteristics, sizing will not change either in a bid to remain relevant to the road car industry.
The only change to the brief is a greater consideration for sustainability, as an extension of F1’s drive to be net-zero carbon by 2030.
Does one question remain following the opening race can anyone catch Red Bull? Its rivals believe its their “duty” rather than moan about their dominance ruining the show. Red Bull’s pace in the opening two races makes it look almost like it could be an easy cruise to the championship.
Toto Wolff said: “I think we’ve had those years where we were as strong, but it’s a meritocracy, this sport. Even if it’s not great for the show that the same guys win all the time, it’s because they’ve done a good job and we haven’t. We all hope for a good entertainment factor. But it’s our duty, with all we have, to catch up and fight these guys.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz said he never understood why people got upset about a single team dominating, as it was only ever the result of someone having done a better job.
he said, “I’ve never been a fan of being concerned of one team dominating, because if they are, they’ve done such a good job,”. “They deserve it. I mean, I wish it was us. And then I would get really angry if people were concerned that we are dominating in Formula 1.”
While as fans its not good that a team is dominating you need to credit Red Bull with what they have done given the regulations should have prevented this from happening. But we always get these kinds of discussions we had during the Mercedes dominate between 2014 and 2020 as well as Red Bull between 2011 and 2013.
Motorsport.com says that they have learned that teams are discussing potential changes to the budget cap to help smaller teams catch up. While the introduction of a cost cap since the start of 2021 is widely viewed as having been a success in closing up the field, there are some areas where its scope is felt to be too restrictive.
The cap and its sliding scale of reductions has stopped the bigger teams spending their way to success, the medium and smaller teams haven’t made the jump forwards to the top teams. Though the midfield pack has become more competitive.
One of the issues that has gained traction in recent months is the fact that teams are strictly limited on capital expenditure, so there is not much freedom to improve infrastructure back at base. A potential solution could be excluding things like infrastructure investment from the cap, allowing more money to be spent on the development car.
preliminary discussions have taken place about teams being given greater freedoms in terms of capital expenditure – so they do have the ability to improve facilities at their factories. To me this seems a bit counterintuitive, we know ‘levelling up’ is the long-term objective and improving the show, but we are in an age where the global economy is under pressure.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Swisse isn’t expected to trigger a 2008-09 situation where several manufacturers withdrew, but we know the pandemic and war in Ukraine has hit the teams financially.
While the idea of more freedom for capital expenditure would help the smallest teams most of all, bigger squads are understood to be in favour of it, pending the final details.
For a rule change to go through for 2024, it would require six of the current teams to back it – a level that appears to be possible to reach. If eight teams support it then the rules could change for this year.
Mercedes
Lewis Hamilton has revealed that his comfort in this year’s car is being held back by a specific design element not suiting him. Mercedes went into 2023 hoping to return to the front and t hoped to be able to challenge Red Bull this year.
However, his situation has been further hampered by the fact that he does not appear as settled with the handling of the W14 as team-mate George Russell. Hamilton thinks his situation could be helped by the team bringing more downforce to its car, especially to make the rear more stable, Hamilton says there is something else inherent to the design that he is not happy with.
He said after finishing fifth in Jeddah, “We’re a long way down on downforce. So we’ve got to pick up the rear end downforce particularly. The more rear we gain, the more stable the rear becomes, and the more confident I’ll be able to attack. But I think in general, just this car, even if we do change that, there’s a specific thing with something on the car that I have never had before.”
Toto Wolf said the team weren’t aware of the “fundamental issue,” which Hamilton wasn’t happy with, but is “it something that can be cured quickly. The drivers are the most important sensors in the car and if they tell us that’s what they feel, we need to consider that.”
While Hamilton has not gone into details about what the problem is, the issue seems to manifest itself in making the car very uncomfortable for him when it is taken to the limit – especially in qualifying.
George Russell thinks Mercedes has “got some more performance in the locker” for the next few races after an encouraging. Russell hasn’t appeared to struggle with the car compared to Hamilton which allowed him to finish fourth in Jeddah where Russell saying after qualifying that Mercedes gained “more performance in a week than we found in almost a month”.
The team said following Bahrain it needed a radical concept change is still in the works – Russell does feel optimistic that there is more to come from the Brackley team on the short term. This should be expected for Imola when all the teams should bring updates.
Red Bull
Max Verstappen went into last weekend’s race in Jeddah as the favourite, however, a driveshaft issue saw him knocked out of qualifying in Q2. He then used the pace advantage of the car to drive through the field to finish second behind his teammate Sergio Perez and take the fastest lap.
while Verstappen limited the damage and retained his championship lead, he was still unhappy at losing out on a better chance to win and felt Red Bull must do better to avoid more reliability issues. We know if Ferrari, Aston Martin and Mercedes become a serious threat from Baku onwards reliability could see it become a major factor in the championship.
Verstappen said, “We need to do better as a team, we can’t have problems like these. Otherwise this would have been a very different race for me. At the end, we limited the damage a little bit, but I should have won here.”
Verstappen’s charge was hampered by fresh driveshaft concerns in the latter stages of the race.
Perez voiced his concerns, admitting that Red Bull’s massive performance advantage has saved them from provoking more reliability issues. He even claimed that the Red Bulls might not have finished the season opener in Bahrain, where Verstappen led home Perez at a canter if they had been put under any serious pressure by the competition.
Red Bull make look dominant but underneath there appear to be weaknesses which could bite them if other teams catch up or if they get a series of reliability issues. With Red Bull dominating both races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it seems a foregone conclusion that Verstappen and Perez will decide the championship amongst themselves.
Verstappen, therefore, called on Red Bull to fix its reliability issues and ensure a fair battle between himself and Perez, who according to team boss Christian Horner are “free to race”.
CEO Christian Horner has cautioned that the team has to “make hay while the sun shines” before rivals improve their cars. While their rivals admit it could be difficult for it to stop Red Bull, Horner believes it’s a matter of time before its advantage closes.
He told Sky News “It’s so early in the season. I mean, it’s a 23-race calendar, we’ve done two races in Bahrain and Jeddah so far. I’m sure it’s going to ebb and flow. But we’re hopeful that we can extract more performance from the car.”
“I’m expecting to see an awful lot of convergence during the course of the year, and the grid is going to tighten up. So we need to make hay while the sun shines at the moment while we’ve got a competitive car, and just keep pushing through the season.”
Red Bull has made a brilliant start winning the opening races, but I think as the season goes on its restrictions for winning last years championship and the breech of the budget cap in 2021 bites. But the restrictions are likely to hit as well as the wind tunnel reset after Austria.
Speaking about the penalty, he added “we couldn’t afford to miss the target with that limited running, because you’d never be able to engineer your way out of that with that handicap.
Ferrari
Team principal Fred Vasseur says that the team mustn’t “bull*** itself” about the situation they are in following a disappointing race last weekend in Jeddah. They went into the weekend hoping that the could challenge Red Bull however lacked pace in the race. They eventually dropped behind Mercedes after falling away on the hard tyre, dropping behind both Aston Martin and Mercedes.
Vasseur said that it was now vital for Ferrari to get an understanding of why things had not worked out with its car so far – and not to pretend things were better than they are.
Asked what would be the first thing he will ask the engineers, Vasseur said: “To not bullshit ourselves. The most important thing in this kind of situation is to know where we are going well and what we are doing wrong. But we cannot bullshit ourselves.
“We have to change. We have to understand where we are wrong, and we have to push. It’s not [good enough] to speak, we will not be faster like this. For me the picture is quite clear. The potential of the car is good, but it’s not enough compared to Red Bull, because we are not able to extract the maximum from the car every time.”
The team are however confident that they have a good baseline, but is unable to run the car at its peak performance, Vasseur suggests that its qualifying pace, which has proved to be close to Red Bull, offers a glimmer of the potential there is in the car.
Later in the week, Vasseur suggests that the hard compound simply didn’t work effectively on the SF-23 with the track temperatures at the time, and stresses that the team has to focus on ensuring that the car is competitive in all conditions through a race weekend.
He added, “I think the balance was quite good. If you look at the balance in quali it was OK. It’s not that we had a big issue with the balance, we were not complaining about oversteering or understeering, and even on the bumps the car was decent.
“My first feeling is more that we were able to extract the maximum potential of the car on some occasions, with the soft in qualifying, or on the medium in the first part of the race. In the end when the track temp went down, it’s related to the compound.”
Vasseur also said the team will not panic because they aren’t performing.
Asked if Red Bull can be caught this season he said: “I think so. We have to continue to push. I think it’s not the right attitude to think about the gap and say, will we be able to close the gap? We have to be focused on ourselves, that we know when we are weak and we have to improve on this one. We will see what is the outcome, when we do a decent step.”
McLaren
Technical director James Key has left McLaren after a difficult couple of seasons and has been replaced by a new design-office structure at the team. Key’s role has been split into three separate technical director positions under team principal Andrea Stella.
David Sanchez joins from Ferrari to lead car concept and performance, once he has completed his gardening leave at the start of 2024. He is joined by two internal promotions – Peter Prodromou on aerodynamics and Neil Houldley on engineering and design. All three will operate with the job title of technical director in charge of their own area of expertise.
These changes aren’t to surprising given the fact they have gone backwards and have another difficult start to the year. McLaren admit they have missed their targets after a year of catch-up in 2022 following the ‘nightmare’ in Bahrain. In the opening two races they were below-par performance and poor reliability.
McLaren are hopeful upgrades scheduled to be introduced from the fourth race of the season will return them to a more competitive position. I think there is also the fact that they are hoping to make progress next year after a number of key infrastructure projects at McLaren are due for completion in mid-2023.
These issues as well have been voiced last year when there were concerns by management that the team was not developing at the rate intended.
This year McLaren’s lap-time deficit to the front doubled and the team dropped a place in the constructors’ championship, losing out in the fight for fourth to Alpine. COVID has played a role as its impact on supply chains has caused the delay on building their wind tunnel.
More recruitment is in the pipeline and McLaren believes they have course-corrected and are now back on target with their ambitions.
Alpine
The teams sporting director Alan Permane has called for a rethink over the grid box rules that caught out Esteban Ocon in Bahrain and Fernando Alonso in Saudi Arabia. Both drivers were given penalties as they were deemed to have placed their cars too far to one side of their grid boxes at the start/
The decisions by the stewards were based on an addition to the International Sporting Code that was introduced for 2022, which says that a car “must be stationary at its allocated grid box with no part of the contact patch of its front tyres outside of the lines (front and sides) at the time of the start signal”.
While the ISC applies to F1, the same wording was subsequently added to the FIA Sporting Regulations for 2023, which is why the matter has come under more scrutiny this season. Though there is no specific regulation regarding the width, although it’s understood that race director Niels Wittich has told teams that he is introducing a standard width this season. Permane described that as a “bit draconian.”
Explaining “No one is getting an advantage from being 10 centimetres over on one side or the other side. I don’t quite really see why. And they’re free to paint the grid boxes as wide as they want, there doesn’t seem to be regulation for that.” We know the stewards have been tighter with track limits this season, but we know lining the cars up in the right place can be difficult. Permane expects the subject to be discussed in the next meeting of F1’s sporting advisory committee.
Ocon says that the team “can’t be satisfied” with its performance at the start of this season. Following Jeddah he and his teammate Pierre Gasly called for more performance after they finish eighth and ninth.
The two cars ran a few seconds apart for much of the race, with the drivers enjoying a brief fight after the safety car restart. The A523’s pace clearly indicated that it is the fifth quickest car at the moment.
Ocon says “There are a couple of teams that have improved massively over the others. It shows that it is possible, and we need to keep fighting, we need to keep digging, keep thinking, and that’s the atmosphere inside the team as well. But no, we can’t be satisfied with where we finished today.”
Alpine I think needed a good weekend as they are going to be midfield contenders all year, they need to continue to maximise races because they don’t look to have the pace and performance to challenge Aston martin.
Alpha Tauri
Lars Stegelmann has been appointed to a newly created role of head of commercial. Stegelmann will be responsible for the ‘Global Partnership Acquisition’ at the team and its fashion branch.
Stegelmann previously worked as Chief Commercial Officer of the Motorsport Network, later managing the sales team of ITR, which organised the DTM series until 2022. He was also involved in the sales and marketing concept, development and implementation of Formula E.
He seems on paper like a decent guy with an excellent CV for the job I think this also signals that the team may be wanting greater autonym from Red Bull. As well as Red Bull wants to push its fashion brand and we know F1 generally has grown in recent years. Red Bull no longer view them as a ‘B-team’ that’s been the case for a while.
Here is what team principal Franz Tost said “With the support of Lars, we also want to develop our commercial activities. He has an exciting mix of strategic know-how, international sales experience and a great understanding of the advertising industry.”
Stegelmann added: “Formula One is booming and is offering companies excellent activation and communication opportunities, premium hospitality and awareness on a global scale like no other sport series.”
Aston Martin
Fernando Alonso said the team “needs some help” if they are to win races this year. Over the last month, Aston Martin has been one of the biggest surprises and has been fighting with Mercedes and Ferrari for ‘best behind Red Bull’ which has prompted its rivals to say they need to catch up.
In response to Max Verstappen’s comments that Aston can be victorious this season, Alonso said: “We need some help from them, but it will happen eventually when they cannot finish always first and second. One day it’s a pitstop, one day it’s a gearbox,”
Alonso added in deference to Verstappen being eliminated in Q2 in Saudi owing to a driveshaft failure on the right-hand side of his RB19. He continued: “Max had it [in qualifying] and if he had it [in the race] he would have had to retire the car. So, there’s going to be some circuits where maybe reliability or whatever could help us and hopefully in those races, we take the opportunity.”
The big question I think still remains is whether they can beat Red Bull on merit and use the April break to close the gap. I think Baku and Miami could be key to figuring out how big the gap is between Red Bull, Aston and the other teams.
The Week Ahead
Next weekend we head to Melbourne so there will be some focus on Oscar Piastri as he heads into his home race. With the difficult start McLaren has had I feel some of the pressure will be off as they aren’t near the front of the midfield, but Aussie doesn’t generally have a good record at their home race. But it will be interesting to see how he handles the weekend.
Red Bull are the favourite, but it will be interesting how they start to spin that, you could say that’s already started as they say the other teams will catch up pointing to things like the mid-season wind tunnel reset. I think the spring break where we don’t have the two-week shutdown given this was unplanned, is going to be important to allowing other teams to catch up.
In the week building up to Melbourne I think there will be some questions for Ferrari about how they close the gap, they are I believe the most likely team to do that. You will get the message like ‘we are confident we can,’ they need to manage expectation and see where they are in Baku.
Ferrari and Mercedes in the short term need to start talking about catching Aston Martin. Aston has been the biggest surprise but how do they stay ahead while their will be no real upgrades until Baku or Imola they will be hoping to stay close behind. Teams may start giving an idea of their hopes of what they want to achieve in the spring break.