This season was arguably the greatest in Formula One’s history. This was not just because of a year-long, controversial and highly charged fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, but also due to the midfield closing up. McLaren won their first race for nine years and there were podiums for every team but Alfa Romeo and Haas.
But that will all change as 2022 brings in a new era, with significant regulation changes that follow measures such as a cost cap and an aero development sliding scale that favours teams who finish lower in the standings. They are partly a response to the dominance of Mercedes and the lack of competition throughout the field, but also aimed to limit the effects of ‘dirty air’, to make the racing better and the competitive order more balanced. Planned for 2021, the financial implications of the pandemic delayed them by a year.
Yet, after such a competitive season this year, might these technical changes ironically bring about the opposite of their desired effect? And who might they favour? Are the hopes for a similar battle between Verstappen and Hamilton in 2022 optimistic?
We take a look at every little detail that we know about next year.
What are the regulation changes for 2022?
The concept for 2022 is, in essence, a simplified race car, with changes based around the car’s aerodynamics. There are fewer of the aero accoutrements and designs than on the 2021 cars, so the new generation should look sleeker. This is for the better: by the end of this season, the cars were as ugly as they had been for decades.
But aesthetics are not the focus – performance and the quality of racing is. F1 teams are experts at finding downforce and the relatively stable regulations has allowed them to find plenty of it recently. Bolting on downforce in any which area of the car they could ultimately led to a significant dirty air stream and a lot of this furniture becoming hugely inefficient for following cars.
So often in the past few years we have seen drivers drop back from one to three or four seconds behind the car ahead in order to preserve their tyres. That is not what racing should be.
According to estimates by F1, the current cars lose 35 per cent of their downforce when around 20 metres behind, and a loss of 47 percent at 10m. In the new cars that should reduce to four per cent and 18 per cent respectively.
This is partly by virtue of increased “ground effect”. In other words, the downforce being generated is more from beneath the car, not from “on” it.
The 2022 regulations include other changes. A new, more “sustainable” synthetic fuel mixture will be used. There are heavier and more robust tyres, 18-inch wheels and the return of wheel caps. By far the most significant is the new aero philosophy.
Will better racing materialise, as hoped? With F1’s technical and design personnel experts in clawing back aerodynamic efficiency, it is impossible to say at this stage, according to former grand prix driver and Sky Sports analyst Anthony Davidson.
“We’ll only really know in that first test session when the cars hit the track for real and follow each other,” he tells Telegraph Sport.
“Hopefully, because it’s [2022’s aero vs 2021’s] achieved in a different way aerodynamically, that allows them to follow closer. I think the jury’s still out at this stage.”
Will the 2022 cars end up close to the concept car made by F1?
That is difficult to say as it stands but it seems unlikely. F1 used a small team of engineers to come up with the concept of what the 2022 cars might look like, but that is a long way from 10 teams using vast resources to come up with their own designs.
The concepts may look roughly the same, but do not expect a grid of 10 near-identical cars. Teams will exploit the regulations as much as they can, finding loopholes that were not envisaged when the regulations were drafted. That is what they do best. Look at the double diffusers from 2009 or the awful coat hanger ‘t-wings’ from 2017 as evidence.
Who might the new regulations favour?
A set of regulation changes this significant will always lead to hope of a shaking-up of the order. But it is optimistic to believe that the grid will be turned on its head. The top teams are there for a reason.
In short, though, Mercedes could be early favourites. They have won the last eight constructors’ titles for a reason and, crucially, shifted their focus to the 2022 cars early. That did not seem to be as much the case for Red Bull, who threw everything at Verstappen’s 2021 title charge.
“When you’re the team with the advantage it gives you more time to look at the new rules. Because you have that comfort blanket, that buffer of having the advantage over your competition, it allows you to kind of take your foot off the throttle a bit,” Davidson says.
That said, rivals Red Bull have a not-so-secret weapon: Adrian Newey. Employing arguably the greatest ever car designer and a man who is said to understand aerodynamics so well that he can “see air” will work in their favour, but by how much?
Down the field, Aston Martin could be a team to watch, too. This year they were hurt by the slight change in aerodynamic regulations – after a strong 2020 – but have ploughed huge resource into the team after Lawrence Stroll’s rescue buyout of Racing Point in 2019. They have recruited heavily from the top teams and will have likely started to focus on 2022 earlier in the season than their rivals, as their lack of progress from the half-way point this year shows.
If Ferrari’s improvement from their nadir of 2020 continues they could well find themselves in contention at the front, too. Their engine upgrade towards the end of the season certainly helped them in their push for third in the standings. The aero development sliding scale rules that F1 uses – which allows more resource for teams based on their championship position – also favours them for 2022, after they finished sixth in the standings in 2020.
Expect Haas, who never developed their 2021 car to prioritise 2022, to be much improved.
Who might be caught out?
That is hard to say at the moment but, in short, teams who developed their 2021 cars deep into the season may find themselves behind.
The worry for Red Bull might not be so much the aero regulations, but the issue of engines. Yes there is an effective development freeze on power units, but Honda’s departure from F1 can only be a negative for the team’s future.
Things might not be so bad in the short term as Honda will retain some influence and involvement technically – though they will be branded as Red Bull engines – but the long-term future remains uncertain.
Will it lead to a return of 2014’s one-team dominance?
The last time F1 had a regulations overhaul as large as those due next year was in 2014. And that ended up with Mercedes nailing the new formula to become the most dominant team in the history of the sport and by a painfully large margin. It was a damaging period.
With so many unknowns over how to approach the new regulations next year, it is likely that the performance gaps will open up again throughout the field. 2021’s competitiveness at the front owed as much to Mercedes dominance fading as it did a tweak in the regulations after seven years of reasonable stability.
It is often the case that, with new regulations, one team finds a magic answer that other teams have not. Aside from Mercedes’ emergence at the front in 2014, there was Brawn GP’s double diffuser in 2009, which was also the year Red Bull went from midfield also-rans to contenders.
The issue of development focus, as outlined earlier, makes one-team dominance more likely, too. “There’s that reality that you may have a team that finds more performance in the wind tunnels because they had more time to turn their attention to it over a longer period,” says Anthony Davidson.
This year’s competition throughout the field was atypical of the post-2014 order. Six drivers won, the most since 2012’s eight. Thirteen drivers finished on the podium, the equal most since 2012. For the first time since 2009, more than seven teams have had a car finish in the top three. Might this unpredictability end in 2022?
Karun Chandhok, Davidson’s colleague at Sky and former HRT and Caterham driver, believes this to be the case. The regular return to the podium of teams like McLaren, AlphaTauri, Alpine and Aston Martin could be short-lived.
“On the chassis side, I think both Red Bull and Mercedes, they’re very good teams that start at a high level. I’m fairly sure that in the short term, the gap to the midfield will open – the rich will get richer.”
Might we see a return to the bad old days when Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes hoovered up 90 per cent of the podiums and wins between them?
Reasons to be optimistic
A season like 2021 will be hard to replicate but there are reasons for optimism. Or, at least, reasons to not expect a repeat of the dulling dominance Mercedes had when the regulations changed for 2014.
Firstly, the emphasis on the engine. 2014’s new regulations revolved primarily around the arrival of hybrid power units. Mercedes’ was the best by far and outclassed their rivals at Renault and Ferrari, and later Honda.
The enormous advantage they had was down to their revolutionary power unit. Williams’ resurgence in 2014 and 2015 was dragged along by that, before other teams developed their cars – rather than their engines – and caught up. By 2018, Williams were comfortably the slowest team. Next year the engines are not part of the changes.
“I think that’s a huge piece of the puzzle that will pretty much go untouched. And therefore, at least from a power sensitivity point of view you won’t you won’t see a repeat of 2014,” Davidson says.
Secondly, aero development should be easier to match. Things should be able to close up much more quickly. Chandhok is optimistic in this regard. “The design or the rule philosophy for this next era is a simplified race car. The idea being [that] gains from aero are going to be reduced, and therefore, the performance differentials should be reduced,” he says.
“What I’m hoping for is it doesn’t take seven years for convergence, where we see the midfield catch up. What we’re all hoping for is it takes three years, maybe for the midfield to be able to close the gap up to the top teams because they’re almost standardised components that are simplified rules in terms of the aero on the cars,” he adds.
Being better than 2021 should not be how the new regulations and era are judged. It should bring an improvement on that period from 2014-2021 in general. And that is much more likely. If gaps do open up, we should not expect it to stay that way for long.