Exploring what might happen to F1 in 2022 by looking to the past
No heroics into Sainte Devote
The upcoming Formula 1 season is set to take off this Friday, March 18, 2022. This is a huge year for F1 as the new regulations have come into effect and have made the cars vastly different. I wanted to look back at how regulations have changed racing over the years. I chose to compare the track times over the years at the Monaco Grand Prix. As the track has changed very little in the last 70 years, I thought it would make for easy analysis. Now obviously the cars get faster over time, but they do not get faster every year. Regulations typically come in to either make the cars safer or to improve the racing quality. The changes this year are put in to make for closer and better racing. Changing the profile of the aerodynamics by allowing for the use of ground effect and by changing the size of the tires. This is with the hopes of allowing cars to follow closer than before as the ground effect produces far less dirty air, giving the chasing car more downforce, while the tire changes aim to put more stress on suspension setups to encourage better strategy.
What does this mean for the speed of the cars? Well, for now, they are slower. This is not the first time that the cars have gotten slower on a year-to-year basis. There have been regulations changes in the past that have reduced the speed, but they eventually catch up and end up going faster over time. As shown in the Monaco analysis of lap times and average speed, regulations change and at first, the cars are sometimes slower. This year is expected to be no different, but I suspect that even with the drastic tire changes I still think the reintroduction of ground effect the cars could be quicker than last year by the end of the season, almost certainly by the time of 2023 testing.
What does this mean for the racing quality? It means the cars will be closer together, while in following and hopefully in the standings as well. As seen in the pie chart in the Monaco analysis the driver who starts the race from the pole wins more often over the years. Monaco is an insanely tight track with very few overtaking opportunities, with the new aerodynamics this should make it easier to follow the car in front and get closer through corners. This will make it easier to overtake so we can hopefully see more of the driver's racecraft and less of their outright pace. This will bring more excitement that fans have craved for a track like Monaco where the Saturday qualifying has been the most important and exciting part of that weekend.
Now that we are getting what we want in terms of speed and racing quality, what else can we expect to see? It seems so far through testing times at Bahrain 2022 that the standings could be much tighter. Mercedes claim to have work to do before winning races in their car but others have doubts that they are struggling as much as they lead on. Ferrari looks very strong and Haas looks to get out of the basement after a horrific year. Hopefully, we can have more than two teams and two drivers going for the championship and give us something to wash the sour taste out of our mouth after the events of 2021. With the end of the flat floor era, we can now look forward to a new type of racing and Formula 1.
