Why is it more difficult to upgrade current generation F1 cars?

The last two years have indicated that it's more difficult to bring effective upgrades to the cars than in the previous technical era. F1Technical's senior writer Balazs Szabo delivers his latest analysis why development might have caused issues since the introduction of the ground-effect cars.

The 2022 F1 season saw Formula One introduce a completely new set of technical regulations with the sport having brought back the ground-effect cars.

The new regulation saw many changes to the pecking order. Ferrari kicked off the new era in the best fashion, having dominated the opening races before Red Bull having taken over the dominant force. Having dominated the sport for seven consecutive season, Mercedes slid back while the start of the last season saw Aston Martin emerge as a surprise front-runner.

Although it was initially believed that the new regulation would lead to very similar cars, there have been many technical innovations up and down the field, and it has happened multiple times that the leading teams took inspiration from rivals from the back end of the pecking order.

Teams introduce upgrades to their cars on a regular basis, but they often encounter difficulties when adding new parts to their machines. Last year's Texas F1 race saw Haas introduce an all-new aerodynamic package that failed to work, while Mercedes endured its own difficulties at the start of the current season.

Ferrari have become the latest team to suffer from unexpected results of their development push, having struggled with bouncing since having introduced a comprehensive set of upgrades at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Asked what leads to unsuccessful upgrades, Aston Martin's technical director Dan Fallows said that the current regulations created cars that are extremely sensitive to a series of external factors.

"I think we've seen that with a lot of people. It's not just ourselves. We've had issues in terms of putting additional performance on the car and maintaining the same good characteristics, good balance, ability to run the car at certain different circuits, different ambient conditions.

"We have found that difficult to do that, to keep those good characteristics and to improve the overall performance. I don't think there's any secret of that. I think any team that says they have managed to do that consistently is probably... No, I'm not going to say that!

"But I think generally it's something that we're fighting with, and I think once you know that that's the case, it's really a question of what are the most important things that you need to retain as you put these improvements on the car. And then if you feel like you've degraded something, how do you then attack that area and get it back to where you want it to be? That's the really critical bit."

Red Bull's technical director Pierre Wache echoed Fallow's words, claiming that interactions between various elements of the F1 cars often lead to unintended effects.

"And as Dan mentioned, you have a massive interaction between all the elements of the car, especially aerodynamically with the restriction we have. Everything is linked together, that you have to update multiple parts to achieve something interesting."

Kick Sauber's Racing Director, Xevi Pujolar noted that teams "need to be quite cautious when you start to push all the boundaries."

"From what we see that some drivers can be more or less sensitive to depending on where you end up running the car and especially on the high-speed sections or how you could need to run mechanically to extract the performance. These are areas that we need to be more careful with this generation of cars.

Mercedes' trackside engineer director Andrew Shovlin insists that it might be quite easy to add more downforce to the cars, but doing it without a careful analysis might lead to unintended side-effects like bouncing that has hindered the Brackley-based outfit's progress at the dawn of the new technical era.

"Well, just the rules meant there was a lot of extra learning that you had to undertake as a team to properly understand how these cars work, how you put performance on them.

"And over time, people are getting better at doing that. But it's always easy to chase headline numbers and then end up with problems like bouncing. I think everyone's facing that.