Formula 1 is unlikely to be able to reduce the weight of its cars significantly due to its planned power unit changes, say designers.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali have recently voiced a desire to bring down the minimum car weight, which has risen gradually in recent years. F1 designers were largely unanimous in their view that car weights need to come down but there is no easy way to do so.“I strongly agree with Stefano,” said Mercedes technical director James Allison. “He’s not alone in thinking the sort of inexorable upward trend in weight is something that has to be arrested and then reversed, because year on year they were getting heavier.
“It isn’t super-trivial to get the weight moving in the other direction. It’s particularly tricky to dream up technical rules that are going to make the car much lighter.”
Allison believes the FIA should lower the minimum weight limit, which is currently set at 798 kilograms, and leave the teams to find ways of lightening their cars.
“The way to make it lighter is to lower the weight limit and make it our problem,” he said. “If cars are over the limit, then it forces us all to make some fairly difficult decisions about what we put in our cars and what we don’t.
“Not everyone agrees with that point of view, but that’s, I think, the most guaranteed way to put downward pressure on the weight of the car.”
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The largest increases in weight over the past decade occured due to the introduction of the current V6 hybrid turbo power units in 2014 and addition of safety enhancements such as the Halo. Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache believes it would be difficult to reduce weight due to those changes, particularly as the planned changes to the power unit rules in 2026 are likely to add more weight.
“I’m not sure that we would have a significant change in term of weight, and I agree we should do [it] with this type of safety we want to achieve, because it’s the most important aspect. Safety improved a lot for the driver, and we would not like to compromise that.
“I think the power unit that is defined now, it’s already massively heavier than what we currently have. I think to make it significantly lighter, as mentioned by Stefano, it would be very, very difficult.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes the best F1 can realistically aim for is a weight reduction of a few kilograms.
“I think reducing by 50 kilograms looks quite ambitious without very significant technical changes, which I don’t think at the moment are under consideration,” said Stella.
“Some of the weight that has been added comes from measures that have to do with safety. Next year there will be an enforcement of safety associated with the roll hoop. So in a way, we welcome this kind of mass that has been added to the cars even if it changed the nature of Formula 1 from what it was 20 years ago, where it was 200 kilograms lighter cars. Cars if anything are quicker now thanks to the downforce and the big tyres.
“So I think retaining the current weight or reducing by a few kilograms is already a good result. It needs smaller tyres and smaller cars to be able to reduce it significantly, so we will see. I’m not sure what the direction is at the moment, we all would welcome lighter cars but certainly not at the expense of safety.”
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F1’s minimum weight limit, 1961 – 2023
NB. Separate minimum weight limits were enforced for turbocharged and normally-aspirated cars in 1987 and 1988.
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Proesterchen (@proesterchen)
17th June 2023, 9:25
“Make the cars lighter” is trivially easy to say.
Actually making cars lighter is at best hellishly hard and expensive to do.
Ergo, bringing up the subject of mass is just a way to distract from other, probably more realistic issues.
MichaelN
17th June 2023, 18:40
To be more precise, making hybrid cars is hard. Or rather, impossible – because those batteries and hybrid components aren’t weightless.
MichaelN
17th June 2023, 18:40
* Making hybrid cars lighter, that is. Making hybrid cars as such is pretty easy for those involved in F1.
BasCB (@bascb)
17th June 2023, 20:10
Yeah, there really is not that much they can do without serious compromises somewhere I would thing @proesterchen.
Safety measures are a no brainer, you cannot cut down on those.
Lighter tyres would be “easy” but then they would have trouble finding a supplier and everyone was pushing to go bigger tyres, going back is probably a non starter.
Powertrain? They are dropping the EMU but replacing it with a larger battery, so probably not going to be lighter then. Making the blocks themselves lighter? That would probably cut into reliability. Sure, they could go back to more exotic materials for the engines, but then the cost would skyrocket. They could mandate less fuel flow to at least make cars have lighter start weight for races, and the car could be a tad shorter too. But is that realistic? Surely nobody will be wanting to go back to the extreme fuel saving they did at the start of the hybrid area.
Mandate shorter cars? Maybe. But that would shorten the floor and make them slower, not sure that will be an option either. Again, using more exotic materials might make the chassis lighter, but then, we are at the cost of the cars again.
SadF1fan
17th June 2023, 9:40
It’s a snowball doh, the heavier car becomes the more reinforcement it needs for safety, whereby it becomes heavier and needs reinforcing of suspension and chassis, and then it needs to be reinforced for safety, and so on and so on.
Another question that can be asked is if F1 still needs Hybrid now its going to do e-fuels.
When it has no positive effect on racing, makes driving more complicated, makes setup more complicated and therefore expensive and energy demanding, makes cars heavier, and is no longer road relevant for car manufacturers, why still use it in this shape and form?
S
17th June 2023, 10:40
Not to mention that the mass of the hybrid system requires more energy to lug it around the track…
If the energy the cars use is renewable, it doesn’t really matter how much of it they use. ‘Efficiency’ becomes largely obsolete.
By far the easiest way to make the cars lighter is to make them shorter and narrower. The teams have the resources to make the car fit into a smaller box, or they can go up. They just don’t want to, because it is less aero-efficient and aero-productive.
Unsurprisingly, this is something that very few series outside of F1 see as a problem.
Sviat
17th June 2023, 9:54
It’s easy to fix this issue. Let the engineers do whatever they need. Lift the restrictions on the car design, and I bet in a few years we’ll see parts with negative weight.
melanos
17th June 2023, 10:23
Yup, an engine made from hydrogen and helium, that would rock
baasbas
17th June 2023, 10:03
@Sviat
Yes, the answer is in the text. Just lower minimum weight and let the engineers loose.
It would be nice to see all kinds of solutions. Maybe a smaller battery pack and give up some of that. The saved weight might yield a faster lap on some tracks
notagrumpyfan
17th June 2023, 12:39
Why have a minimum weight clause anyway?
The technical regulations and budget cap should suffice.
Guilherme
17th June 2023, 16:55
Remove minimum weight limits and all of a sudden the driver’s own weight becomes a huge factor. You’d teams passing over talented tall drivers and you’d push all of them into self-destructive diets. Bottas has been very open about how damaging that is.
Dex
17th June 2023, 11:49
“The way to make it lighter is to lower the weight limit and make it our problem,” he said. “If cars are over the limit, then it forces us all to make some fairly difficult decisions about what we put in our cars and what we don’t.
There you go. Simple as that. What’s the problem? Is safety the excuse again or? For start, let’s allow car designers to try and do the best they can within current rules, before talking about the next generation. Some teams disagree? So losers should limit better people? I don’t think so. It’s a competition.
Proesterchen (@proesterchen)
17th June 2023, 12:15
Strange, I seem to remember 9 teams fighting pretty hard for any extra gram of minimum weight they could get through before the start of the 2020 season, Sauber having done a better job in weight management be damned.
I imagine the team employing Mr Allison is now happier with its current car’s weight to the point of advocating the polar opposite.
Alonso (@alonshow)
17th June 2023, 14:31
What’s the problem with high weights? The cars are faster than they’ve ever been. Who cares if they’re 200 kg lighter or heavier?
Jere (@jerejj)
17th June 2023, 15:57
Even a little reduction would be welcome, but admittedly, PU rules indeed make things difficult to an extent.
Going for a 4-cylinder engine concept with fewer additional components would perhaps be better in this regard, but oh well, other ways exist.
Allison’s suggestion is decent in theory, but ultimately shorter & narrower car dimensions are the simplest solution, which should be achievable without sacrificing safety features.