Formula 1 teams thinking twice before bringing car upgrades

The current F1 regulations have been around since the 2022 season and are a major departure from the previous set as the cars generated downforce from their underbody (their floors) through what is known as "ground effect".

But this concept has proven to be a challenge for many teams, as the generation of downforce has created a dreadful biproduct that was bouncing. The cars are also run with stiff suspensions to make sure the ground effect is maximized, which, in the case of Red Bull, for example, caused an issue with kerb riding for the car.

Red Bull mastered the current rules from the start, but since the F1 race at Imola, where they introduced an upgrade for their RB20, they seemed to have lost their way and are now playing catch up with McLaren, who since an upgrade to their MCL38 in Miami have been flying.

Ferrari also improved, as did Mercedes, but the former hit a bump after an upgrade in Spain made the SF-24 bounce hard in the high-speed corners while the latter are yet to understand how their W15 works - fast at times, painfully slow at others. Aston Martin as well had their issues with upgrades making their car worse.

As such, introducing a new upgrade, a new floor in particular, has become a matter of concern for F1 teams, as they have to worry about the new parts backfiring while standing still in this sport is the same as moving backwards.

McLaren are now enjoying a surge of performance and have won the last two races in a row, in Baku and Singapore, but they are planning to bring an upgrade to their car but are concerned about how it would behave.

“In fairness, that was one of my thoughts after the race," Andrea Stella said after Lando Norris won in Singapore when asked whether McLaren are concerned about their upcoming upgrades.

“We do have some stuff in the pipeline, and obviously, when you have this kind of performance on track, you always may approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development.

“But at the same time, we need to trust the process," he pointed out. "We need to trust the way we've been working so far. I've said already that we have taken our time to make sure that once we deliver trackside, we have done the due diligence. So, I don't think this will change our plans."

Stella explained that slowing the upgrade process is out of the question; he added: "You know, in Formula 1, I'm not sure you can back off too much, because backing off means that the others may catch up.

"And we don't know what the plans of the others are. Red Bull, we see that in a track in which they thought they would not have been very competitive ultimately, they were potentially second-best. And I think we haven't seen Ferrari [at their best], as even in P1, P2, they seemed to be as fast as us.

"So, I think this race may have been a bit flattering. The situation from a competitiveness point of view, I would say we need to keep being aggressive in terms of development," Stella concluded.

McLaren's head of design, Rob Marshall, who joined them from Red Bull, explained his team's upgrade philosophy. Quoted by Motorsport.com he said: "It's about chasing downforce all the time.

"We kind of like to gather the chunks up and deliver it in a big hit. So far we've just been focusing on basically gathering those bits up. At some point, hopefully we'll have another upgrade to deliver.

“In a way it's nice to be delivering lots of little upgrades all the time, a bit like our beam wing here this weekend [Singapore], but equally sometimes you just have to hold on a little bit while you wait for a chunk of bits to come all at the same time.

"The advantage in doing that is that often bits don't combine very well, or as well as you think they would," he pointed out. "And if you deliver them in one lump, then that sort of combination of parts has been in CFD together, it was developed together, it's been through the wind tunnel together, so you can be more confident that combination of bits works well together.

"Whereas if you do it bit by bit, you might introduce an upgrade on one part and then work on another part and find out actually it's a bit compromised by the previous change you made," Marshall concluded.

Ferrari struggled with bouncing ever since they brought a new floor to their SF-24 back in Spain and have had to remove the floor for races after that - that is, until they found out the reason behind their troubles, an anomaly in their wind tunnel.

Ferrari's senior performance engineer, Jock Clear, echoed the sentiments of his McLaren counterparts, admitting the F1 car upgrade process is not straight forward.

"You're never fully confident, but I think it's a good picture of how the ebb and flow of everybody's development goes," he told Motorsport.com.

"But you're probably asking the same questions to [other teams] - have you lost your way? And certainly after Spain, we didn't feel we'd lost our way, but there was some anomaly between what was happening in the tunnel and what we were seeing on track, and we had to get on top of that.

"That's just the process; when you see an anomaly, you have to get on top of it, try and understand it, and then get back on track.

"And I think what you've seen since is that we've understood it; we got back on track, we just have to be eyes wide open for what the next anomaly will be, because there will be another one because that is the process at the moment.

"So it's not that sometimes the development works, sometimes these developments don't work: the development process is exactly that you are testing something new every week.

"We're confident that our process is working, confident that we're on top of everything. We'll just wait for the next banana skin," Clear admitted.

The Ferrari engineer went on to explain how the floor geometry with the current regulations in relation to car ride height is a very delicate balance the teams have to find between generating downforce and bouncing.

He said: "I think ever since we brought these ground effect cars back, it's presented challenges that have... in simple terms, when the car's a long way from the floor and the floor is not generating huge amounts of downforce based on its proximity to the floor, then the tunnel can be pretty accurate.

"But as soon as you get into what's happening over a kerb, what's happening when you're bouncing, the tunnel can't do that.

"We can bounce the car up and down. But of course, the data then looks a mess. But however much the data looks a mess on track, the driver has to drive it.

"There's a certain level of correlation between the tunnel and the track, that it's difficult that you're ever going to get 100% fidelity.

"You're always going to have these anomalies, and with the ground effect, the anomalies are bigger because that proximity to the ground becomes all the more powerful as soon as it.

"When it gets to zero, you lose all your downforce, and when it comes back up to five millimeters, you get loads of downforce and you get into this really peaky area on the floor.

"And everybody's challenged with that all the time," Clear concluded.

Red Bull Racing lost their way after an upgrade for Imola failed and while they have slightly improved recently, they are banking on a new package for Austin to get them back on track.

Mercedes on the other hand thought to have found a magic bullet back in June (Montreal) when they changed their approach with their W15, but their oscillating performances after that showed they still have some head scratching to do.