Adrian Newey was held as a God who could see air travel in his mind when designing new chassis' and their aero design and packages, and I remember the Vetell/RB domination days wherein this man could do no wrong and practically walked on water. Gigi Dall'Igna is his 2 wheel counterpart, and has a reputation for going insane with the aero packages at Ducati, ride height systems etc... and is held equally high esteem in the Motorcycle World.
Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year's win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn't dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.
I don't doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
Being strong in one domain(s) (aero or bypassing regulations) is fine if your pilot can drive/ride around its other deficits, but unless you have that 1 in a billion talent fully committed to this goal it simply won't work to deliver championships: hence why RBR's win last year is considered to be a fluke, and likely a form of cheating if some are to believed: I don't know the full details just the clips as I stopped watching F1 after the Alonso Mclaren-Honda partnership as it was just too brutal to witness such giants fall.
When Vettel, the golden boy and prodigy of the RBR program, drove for Redbull it was clear by how they treated Webber that it was Vettel's team and the chassis was bespoke for ONLY him. This ushered in perhaps one of the dullest eras of F1 which ultimately was a precursor for the Mercedes domination that followed it. At no point in time could Newey come up with anything to rival what Mercedes seemed to have perfected in the V6 era off the platform that Ross Braun (a true genius of the sport) built with the use of the blown diffuser.
Personally speaking, I think F1 has lost it's way, it is no longer the pinnacle of motorsports as it is confined to appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine: the V10 and V8 eras were likely the last gasp what it was.
V6s were fine, the 80s had them and it made the racing immensely interesting, but in a drive to shoehorn the V6 hybrid systems into road cars (when the truth is EV is the future) it lost it's place in a way that I doubt it will ever recover from. If this is what it took to make F1 appeal to broader audience, I hate to say it, but the cost was too high.
> hence why RBR's win last year is considered to be a fluke, and likely a form of cheating if some are to believed: I don't know the full details just the clips
Considered by whom? I follow the sport and I don't have any idea what you're talking about. The last real instance of a serious rule infraction (let's ignore the Racing Point "pink Mercedes" nonsense) involved the 2019 Ferrari power unit, which started out stronger than everyone else but mysteriously lost some power after the FIA scrutinized it and issued updated guidance regarding fuel flow regulations (and settled with Ferrari on the matter secretly).
The only thing about last year that was a "fluke" was the way the final race was officiated.
> I don't doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
Red Bull seem to have done this particularly well with this year's car. After Ricciardo left, they suffered years of Max being trailed distantly by his teammate, but Perez is a legitimate championship contender this year (whether Red Bull management truly want that or not). More to the point, the car is not only faster but a lot more drivable than that of their main rival, Mercedes. When it comes to tailoring a car to its pilots, what more could you want?
For those unfamiliar, the rumor is that Ferrari was somehow detecting the sample rate of the fuel flow sensor (which is a black-box provided by FIA and standard across all the cars), and increasing the flow rate only when the sensor "wasn't looking".
So doing a side-channel attack on the sensor, and designing a pump system to dynamically adjust the rate dozens of times a second. Hacking at its finest
The wording of the rules meant they could basically get away with it, the issue is that they ignored the precedent that informally constituted the rule/s.
> The only thing about last year that was a "fluke" was the way the final race was officiated.
This. It was the way that it was won that made it questionable, Perez was clearly holding HAM up and the Team were telling him to do that in order for Max to win [0] which are just team orders in the end.
As a fan, what Perez did was one of the greatest driving feats I've ever seen and a perfect example of why F1 is a team sport- nothing wrong with that, it would be a travesty if this type of action was removed from racing.
The chaos that happened after Latifi's crash is what needs reform.
Indeed. Safety cars are the problem. It introduces chaos into pit strategies, and allows cars to close up gaps.
I grew up watching F1 in the 80s, and I don't recall EVER seeing a safety car. They either red-flagged the race and had a restart, Or they had sector based cautions.
I'd like to see a return to that style of race management. For added safety, the could using the same technology used to control DRS to enforce a speed-limiter in yellow sectors.
There were no safety cars back then. If you look for races of the 80s on YouTube you can see cars parked all over the place and becoming part of the track (especially at Monaco.)
If you look for races in the 70s and early 80s you can see photographers on the grass at the inside of the curves.
And the invasions at Monza when the cars were going back to the pits after the end of the race. This is one of the last ones
I should have probably noted I’ve only been a fan of F1 (watching every qualifying, race, reading books and listening to podcasts) for the past 3 seasons so my sample size is small
That and the last lap ruling race director to allow some cars to unlap themselves and not others, which is something that never happens. Either all cars unlap themselves or no one does. The upshot was Red Bull was put into a position to win by the Race Director after not being able to match Hamilton’s pace all day.
I take nothing away from Adrian Newey, he designs fast well balanced cars; nor do I take anything away from Max Verstappen, he is a phenomenal driver, it was just a poor decision by the F1 race director.
I think Newey didn’t have the engine to match his aero designs for the Mercedes dominated years. Mercedes won on having the best engine and a chassis designed to maximize that advantage and no team really had an answer to that until their engine tech caught up a bit.
last lap ruling race director to allow some cars to unlap themselves and not others
Micheal Masi absolutely annihilated any chance of an Aussie V8 Supercars racing director from ever getting that job again. He split the hair just right to make for a thrilling end to an otherwise boring race, but at the tyrannical expense of pissing everybody off and killing his reputation stone dead.
Yeah, team orders are fairly lame, but it is common enough in modern F1, and as long as it's not egregious enough to result in a blue flag, nobody really cares anymore. I'm a Valtteri Bottas fan from way back and I can assure you that it's not behavior that is unique to Red Bull.
I would have thought the way the race director restarted the race after Latifi's spin a few laps before the end, in a way that predetermined the race outcome, was what you were referring to. There was always going to be someone pissed off about that situation, although Masi went pretty far in a strange direction and managed to piss off the maximum amount of people. If he'd red flagged it immediately, that would have given a free set of new tires to everyone and blatantly handed the race to Hamilton instead of Verstappen.
Team orders are to be expected. You can't expect a team to pour millions of dollars into competing, and then not to maximize their chance of winning both titles, the indivual and the constructor title.
It's similar to cycling, every cycling team in the tour the france has a captain, the role of every cyclist in the team is to ensure the captain wins the tour. If every cyclist starts to compete just for themselves, teams would have very little chance of winning the tour.
And were illegal not too long ago, remember the Fernando is faster than you[0] scandal? Yeah, that was about the time I think I just couldn't be bothered with F1 anymore and just watched WRC instead. Honestly, F1 has always been a huge advertisement, but things like this is what makes it a mockery.
MotoGP also has team orders but the racing really is way better; I used to dislike it, but the racing has been so close and it's just a uch better spectacle without all the nonsensical pretense and pageantry that F1 has become bloated with.
I actually appreciate that team orders are no longer illegal in F1. When it was illegal the teams did it anyway, but in a way that was like cheating at blackjack or something. At least everyone understands what's happening now, and there is less hypocrisy.
I appreciate Indycar as an alternative to F1, but I recognize that they're about as bad at publicity as they can possibly be.
Mercedes dominating isn't because Newey lost his touch. The Red Bull cars have been in the top three for all those seasons.
The thing is, especially early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else. There was simply no other engine capable of winning championships.
The first few years Mercedes was running the engines downtuned to lose some performance, because they felt the gap so huge that it would make the sport look bad if they were running a second a lap faster than the second team on the grid. With such a gap the FIA would also surely intervene fast. Artificially keeping the gap smaller, and only turning up the engine when needed gave Mercedes easy wins, while keeping the FIA away from intervention.
The fights became closer when the other manufacturers started getting more performance out of their engines.
Last year Red Bull won because the FIA changed some aerodynamic rules. Everyone expected that the changed rules would favor Mercedes and Aston Martin who were running low rake. It turns out the expectations were false, the new rules impacted Mercedes and Aston Martin hugely and the teams running a high-rake setup didn't lose all that much performance. This gave Red Bull a edge which lasted until around Silverstone, when Mercedes brought upgrades to fix the performance of their car.
The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.
> early on in the V6T Hybrid era the Mercedes engine was miles ahead of everyone else
The Merc engine was definitely ahead of everyone through this period but there is the belief that their chassis was also class leading and that they played up the engine stuff so that people wouldn't pay so much attention to it.
One impressive thing RBR did was staying competitive after switching to Honda engines. Anyone remember the ridicule Honda got when they supplied McLaren?
If you don't think there were rumors of cheating you clearly don't watch the sport. The rumors and accusations are pretty much part and parcel of the sport and always have been. It's the Spiderman meme with team principals mouthing of to the FIA and the media in the battle to get an edge.
>The championship lead built by Red Bull was just enough to win the title in the end with some controversy in the final two races. There never were rumors of cheating anywhere.
Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race and Max won because of Masi's decision making. To deny the rumours of cheating when pretty much every driver came out and spoke against it is very strange.
Cheating is when teams are running illegal cars for example, strong rumors existed around the Schumacher championships with Benetton that they were illegally using Traction Control to boost performance.
More recently Ferrari finding a way to circumvent the FIA provided fuel flow sensor allowing them to push more fuel into the engine than allowed.
That's cheating, and no huge problems like that existed last year. Sure there were the usual things. Aerodynamic parts flexing, not proved to be illegal as it passed all FIA mandated tests. It leads to a new Technical Directive in which the FIA reminds teams that aerodynamic parts shouldn't flex and that the FIA is improving the tests. No punishments, no points deduction and no rumors or whatever existed.
The final race isn't cheating, if a referee makes a mistake in a football match you can't accuse one of the teams of cheating. Even Mercedes commented within hours after the race that Red Bull and Max Verstappen did nothing wrong; they did what every team and driver would do. Win the race given the chance they had.
>> Sorry but Hamilton was ahead going into the last race
He wasn’t. They were tied on points going into the last race. It was a huge talking point as it had been a long time since two drivers went into the finale tied on points.
Bad decision making by the stewerds isn’t cheating, even if you think it’s unfair. It would be cheating is Red Bull had bribed them but that never happened.
> Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year's win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn't dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.
I don't buy this. The basis for TFA and the reason Newey is back in the spotlight is because of this current season. RBR is the only team that has nailed the regulations change. The porpoising issue alone makes this clear.
Good, I'm not selling anything, simply taking a more critical look at the recent past: all I'm seeing is the FIA doing what it always does, reshuffles the pack after the racing gets dull which (inadvertently?)always creates another domination era.
Newey is without a doubt an unrivaled aero-savant, and since they re-introduced ground effects, so of course this was going to favour RBR who owe their entire legacy on making the most out of the aero packages during the Vettel era. I've read this article [0], and I think Toto's case is just one of sour grapes which he and Mercedes benefited from when it went to V6, it still stands to reason that it's more circumstantial than it is a re-birth of Newey's infallibility.
Its interesting because they made Honda decide to stay after being adamant of leaving after having been humiliated for countless years (Alonso: GP2 engine!), which makes me think RBR and Newey knew all along of what was coming and gave them a reason to stay. And in an era in which keeping major manufactures is the name of the game they'll do anything to keep them there at all costs.
> Its interesting because they made Honda decide to stay
Honda is leaving. Red Bull bought a license to keep using their engines, operated by their subsidiary RBPT. Honda still provides some engineering services this year, but from next year onwards RBPT is on their own.
> the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
It is probably not a coincidence that Ross Brawn (which you mention later) won so much when paired with Michael Schumacher, which even got out of retirement to join him at Mercedes.
> Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time
Not being able to have the best car was not Newey's fault. When the turbo hybrid era came in, Mercedes absolutely nailed the engine which gave them a massive advantage. Ferrari also had a decent engine some of those years.
Meanwhile Red Bull engine providers Renault and Honda struggled to put up an engine that was on level ground to the Mercedes one. There is only so much a person like Newey can do when other engines are vastly superior.
Verstappen should've had the championship wrapped up long before Abu Dhabi, really. Depending on how you count it Verstappen either lost a lot or a huge amount of points to (say) Bottas and Pirelli
At no point in time could Newey come up with anything to rival what Mercedes seemed to have perfected in the V6 era off the platform that Ross Braun (a true genius of the sport) built with the use of the blown diffuser.
This is largely because Horner hints at wanting moveable-aero pieces and the regulations are super tight on anything that moves. You take the veil off moveable aero and Newey would be back on top.
It was only by McLaren forcing the F-Duct into the game in 2010, did DRS come in 2011, as the one exception to the no-moveable aero.
>appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine
It's been this way for a very long time. Back in the early 2000s there was concern the new cars were too fast to be safe for driver's reactions if they lifted some regulations. If you strapped Traction control back on, with engines as fast as they could go and moveable aero, and less rules on the car layout, you would have absolute monsters.
Keeping it in the butter zone requires sacrifices.
To be fair, I think a big part of Mercedes' dominance is that they had the best engine and the best driver, two factors that are not under Newey's control. I agree with your other points.
Verstappen only really came of age probably halfway between 2019 and today. Fast, yes, but last season was the true changing of the guard as far as I'm concerned.
Adrian Newey was held as a God who could see air travel in his mind when designing new chassis' and their aero design and packages, and I remember the Vetell/RB domination days wherein this man could do no wrong and practically walked on water. Gigi Dall'Igna is his 2 wheel counterpart, and has a reputation for going insane with the aero packages at Ducati, ride height systems etc... and is held equally high esteem in the Motorcycle World.
Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year's win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn't dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.
I don't doubt the prowess of either when it comes to designing cars or bikes, that much is clear and the work speaks for itself; where I fail to give them praise is in understanding that they simply cannot put themselves outside of the engineering domain and realize that the total package of how a chassis is developed must be tailored to suit the pilot if it is to win consistently.
Being strong in one domain(s) (aero or bypassing regulations) is fine if your pilot can drive/ride around its other deficits, but unless you have that 1 in a billion talent fully committed to this goal it simply won't work to deliver championships: hence why RBR's win last year is considered to be a fluke, and likely a form of cheating if some are to believed: I don't know the full details just the clips as I stopped watching F1 after the Alonso Mclaren-Honda partnership as it was just too brutal to witness such giants fall.
When Vettel, the golden boy and prodigy of the RBR program, drove for Redbull it was clear by how they treated Webber that it was Vettel's team and the chassis was bespoke for ONLY him. This ushered in perhaps one of the dullest eras of F1 which ultimately was a precursor for the Mercedes domination that followed it. At no point in time could Newey come up with anything to rival what Mercedes seemed to have perfected in the V6 era off the platform that Ross Braun (a true genius of the sport) built with the use of the blown diffuser.
Personally speaking, I think F1 has lost it's way, it is no longer the pinnacle of motorsports as it is confined to appeal to a larger audience instead of pushing the limits of both man and machine: the V10 and V8 eras were likely the last gasp what it was.
V6s were fine, the 80s had them and it made the racing immensely interesting, but in a drive to shoehorn the V6 hybrid systems into road cars (when the truth is EV is the future) it lost it's place in a way that I doubt it will ever recover from. If this is what it took to make F1 appeal to broader audience, I hate to say it, but the cost was too high.