F1 teams talk about the difficulties deploying updates with the current generation of cars, while adding on plans before 2026.
The current era has one common phenomenon happening across the grid. The updates brought on by F1 teams is often getting a hit and miss situation. While it is working wonders for some, it is confusing few others and setting them back.
The current year has seen updates working for McLaren, Haas and even Mercedes to a certain extent, but the ones for Red Bull, Ferrari, Visa Cash App RB, Aston Martin, Williams and Stake F1 Team not delivering results as per their expectations.
The peaky nature of the car has often been talked about by the F1 drivers. And the updates too is inconsistent with lots of variable factors in play. The team’s technical gurus agree to the core point about difficulties in deploying the right update.
Update difficulties with current gen cars –
Dan Fallows: “Yes, I think it’s a short answer. I think we’ve seen that with a lot of people. It’s not just ourselves. We’ve had issues in terms of putting additional performance on the car and maintaining the same good characteristics, good balance, ability to run the car at certain different circuits, different ambient conditions. Yeah, we have found that difficult to do that, to keep those good characteristics and to improve the overall performance. I don’t think there’s any secret of that. I think any team that says they have managed to do that consistently is probably… No, I’m not going to say that! But I think generally it’s something that we’re fighting with, and I think once you know that that’s the case, it’s really a question of what are the most important things that you need to retain as you put these improvements on the car. And then if you feel like you’ve degraded something, how do you then attack that area and get it back to where you want it to be? That’s the really critical bit.”
Pierre Wache: “I think we base on what we learn from the different seasons with this type of car generation. And also, we use massively the simulation, to be honest with you. The simulation will give us the direction of where we should develop the car and how the characteristics should be to help the driver. The driver in the loop simulator and the offline sim, for sure. But it’s a big part of it here. And as Dan mentioned, you have a massive interaction between all the elements of the car, especially aerodynamically with the restriction we have. everything is linked together, that you have to update multiple parts to achieve something interesting.”
Xevi Pujolar: “Yeah, I will say that you need to be quite cautious when you start to push all the boundaries and also from what we see that some drivers can be more or less sensitive to depending on where you end up running the car and especially on the high-speed sections or how you could need to run mechanically to extract the performance. This is areas that we need to be more careful with this generation of cars.”
Andrew Shovlin: “Well, yeah, just the rules meant there was a lot of extra learning that you had to undertake as a team to properly understand how these cars work, how you put performance on them. And over time, people are getting better at doing that. But it’s always easy to chase headline numbers and then end up with problems like bouncing. I think everyone’s facing that.”
Development cycle, how to manage before 2026 –
Wache: “It’s for sure the fact that the regulation stays the same and is quite mature now in terms of overall concept of the car could affect this aspect. However, you still have the car to build for next year. And your capacity and the budget cap is limited to what you can do. I’m sure if we find something and we want to double check how it’s going on the track, and if the fight in the championship is very tight, for sure you will bring the update. But yeah, it’s pushing you more, but after you still have some limitation.”
Pujolar: “Yeah, from our side, for sure we’ll keep pushing until the end of the season, especially with the situation that we are at the moment. And with the upgrade that we’ve got now, we’ve got the scope to keep developing in the second part of the season, yes.”
Shovlin: “Well, we’ll be reviewing the situation, see where we are by the break, but we’ve got plans for updates that run into that second bit of the season. Just where you position that resource split, we’ll see how the championship’s going and what we can achieve. But certainly everyone’s going to be updating until we get into that final block of flyaways, I think.”
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