Viable Collusion Strategy Could Be Implemented to Improve 2025 Competition?

[Chowda22]

I’m fairly new to watching F1 (3 seasons now) but I love it and have read a number of books and watched many historical races. I wonder how come every team tries to build an all-rounder to compete with Red Bull, especially after they’ve established their lead in the current regs. Each team comes up short and it makes for a challenging season.

Wouldn’t it be more viable for say the top 3 teams to execute a strategy such as the following:

-Ferrari design their 2025 competitor focused solely on straight-line speed and would be designed to win Baku, Monza and Spa. They would take penalties in other races or just use 1 turned down engine with no intention of doing well at other races.
-Mercedes design their car with the shortest wheelbase focused purely on ultra slow and slow corners. Would be designed to win Monaco and Singapore.
-Mclaren would focus on medium speed flowing corners, and would be competitive in Silverstone, Hungary, and Suzuka.

The teams would each have a much better chance at their respective tracks of “strength” relative to Red Bull’s all-rounder car. The season would end in a tally where maybe Red Bull wins 7 races, Ferrari 4, Mercedes 2, Mclaren 5, etc….

I know this is unlikely to happen, but would make for a helluva entertaining 2025…

[CaribouBread]

I’m fairly new to watching F1 (3 seasons now) but I love it and have read a number of books and watched many historical races. I wonder how come every team tries to build an all-rounder to compete with Red Bull, especially after they’ve established their lead in the current regs. Each team comes up short and it makes for a challenging season.

Wouldn’t it be more viable for say the top 3 teams to execute a strategy such as the following:
...

Fun to think about but the first question here would be, Whats in it for Ferrari? or Mclaren? or Mercedes? Their goal isn't to prevent someone else winning its to win themselves.
But to play along here, what do you think you could say or offer to convince these teams?

[PapayaFan481]

I’m fairly new to watching F1 (3 seasons now) but I love it and have read a number of books and watched many historical races. I wonder how come every team tries to build an all-rounder to compete with Red Bull, especially after they’ve established their lead in the current regs. Each team comes up short and it makes for a challenging season.

Wouldn’t it be more viable for say the top 3 teams to execute a strategy such as the following:
...

Fun to think about but the first question here would be, Whats in it for Ferrari? or Mclaren? or Mercedes? Their goal isn't to prevent someone else winning its to win themselves.
But to play along here, what do you think you could say or offer to convince these teams?

Just to play devil's advocate, isn't their goal ultimately to make money? So what's in it for them is a more exciting season with higher viewing figures and therefore more exposure for their sponsors.

The sport can withstand a couple of seasons of domination, but during the Schumacher era and the Vettel era viewing figures started to drop off after the 3rd year of unchallenged domination. I don't think this happened as much during Lewis's era but that may have to do with a few factors, the first being that he was did usually have a championship challenger, then Rosberg actually beat him, then towards the end of his era DTS started bringing in new fans, which would mask any drop off in existing viewing figures.

It doesn't matter who is dominating (unless it's McLaren ) it is not good for the sport in terms of audience retention. So these teams would help create a more exciting season.

I don't see it happening though, since next season they'll all just use evolutions of this year's car so that they can focus on 2026 and the new rules.

[AR3-GP]

-Ferrari design their 2025 competitor focused solely on straight-line speed and would be designed to win Baku, Monza and Spa. They would take penalties in other races or just use 1 turned down engine with no intention of doing well at other races.
-Mercedes design their car with the shortest wheelbase focused purely on ultra slow and slow corners. Would be designed to win Monaco and Singapore.
-Mclaren would focus on medium speed flowing corners, and would be competitive in Silverstone, Hungary, and Suzuka.

They would not win enough races to make anything interesting.

Reality is there are not that many specialist circuits on the calendar. Only Monaco, Singapore, are true specialist circuits. The rest of them still require a good balance of straight line speed, slow, medium, and high speed performance. These "Specialist" cars would lose too much time in other areas of the track to a more well rounded car like the RB. As we saw in Silverstone, Mclaren was the fastest in the high speed but losing too much time in the medium and the low speed so they were behind.

[CouncilorIrissa]

I'd argue Singapore isn't a specialist circuit anymore either with the changes to the last sector.

[JordanMugen]

The teams would each have a much better chance at their respective tracks of “strength” relative to Red Bull’s all-rounder car. The season would end in a tally where maybe Red Bull wins 7 races, Ferrari 4, Mercedes 2, Mclaren 5, etc….

Yet Williams have deliberately decided not to specialise at high speed tracks for 2024 and instead add drag to their car and make an all-rounder?!

Which I don't agree with IMO.

Reality is there are not that many specialist circuits on the calendar. Only Monaco, Singapore, are true specialist circuits. The rest of them still require a good balance of straight line speed, slow, medium, and high speed performance.

Jaguar Racing flipped their car between 2001 (high downforce) and 2002 (low drag). They got their only podium in 2001 at Monaco and in 2002 at Monza!

It's better to score 1 podium per season than zero, surely?

If they had built an all-rounder car they may have scored no podiums at all.

Better for a midfield team to be really good (comparatively) at some tracks than mediocre at all tracks, surely? Albeit less so now, than back when points were only paid to the top 6 positions.

[pob]

This is essentially a game theory question, and depends on the aims/ambitions of the teams. It wouldn't have to involve collusion.

I used to think Force India were particularly good at this, both in terms of a specialized car that can fight well at certain tracks and in terms of the sort of strategies they would try.