Hello everybody, and welcome back to another edition of Steve’s Motorsports Blog!
This past weekend was the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. Ever since the new regulations were announced, this race was the one predicted to be the worst race for energy management, and that it would produce some extremely different racing. Now that we’ve seen the race actually unfold, let’s review and discuss.
From China onwards, we started to get used to the “yo-yo” racing that these new cars produce; aka pass and re-pass based on the energy available in the battery, coupled with “overtake mode”. Personally, I like it as a spectator. You still get the uncertainty at the beginning of the race, but once the faster car broke out of the 1s gap to the car behind (to prevent the following car of having overtake mode), things started to look more normal, just as they always have been. The faster car always seems to break away eventually.
At these tracks where top speed is more important than overall downforce (Spa, Monza, Baku etc), the yo-yo racing has been more prominent. However, Monza produced an extreme amount of it, to the point where I started thinking “ok, this is too much of a good thing.”
It was completely reasonable to think that Antonelli would catch Russell on a softer compound of tire and get by. However, for Russell to keep up and even make passes lap after lap, it didn’t seem to be logical. I suppose after a greater number of laps when the tire wear would start entering the calculations, then I suppose it would have made sense. However, we never really got to that phase, and if anything we had the opposite with Kimi on fresher/softer rubber at the end of the race.
Between George and Kimi, I didn’t know who would prevail by the mid-point of the race. Logically it seemed Kimi would edge out George on strategy (which ended up being the case), but in the moment, it seemed George could hold on and win in the slower pacing car. This may end-up being a wake up call to the F1 paddock and force a re-think about how to race these cars at energy starved tracks.
I started thinking that this races would logically convert to the peloton-style racing as they do in Formula E. However, the difference here would be tire limitation as opposed to energy limitation. Keeping the tires alive by not fighting hard until the last handful of laps would allow you to go flat out and try to win. However, I think the F1 purists would scream about that, because that’s not what they want to see.
The thing is; the casual / less-informed viewer won’t care. They want to see wheel-to-wheel racing and lots of passes. This race delivered on that promise. Whether or not we end up with these peloton style races at Baku, it remains to be seen. The engineers will take their data back with them to HQ and dissect it, and we may see something completely different next time out.
Overall, I don’t think this race was as terrible as everyone dreaded it would be. In fact, I would say the opposite. This may have been one of the better races we’ve had this season. Some of the drivers may not have liked it, the purists may not have liked it, but I’ll be damned if the vast majority of the fans didn’t love it. Going back to my original thought; “was this too much yo-yo’ing?” I don’t think so. This is something that F1 should study and try to replicate at other tracks.
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