F1 BBC 2022, Secret Aerodynamicist: biggest year-on-year change for 40 years | Hacker News Reader

F1 BBC 2022, Secret Aerodynamicist: biggest year-on-year change for 40 years

bbc.co.uk

When big aerodynamic changes like this occur, sometimes one team figures out an advantage that the others didn't, setting everyone else hopelessly behind for at least half a season [1]. Let's hope it can be as exciting as this guy predicts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brawn_BGP_001

Typically these technical domination periods go for much longer than half a season. The 4 year (aerodynamic) Red Bull era followed on the Brawn year, and since then until last year a motor regulation change created the Mercedes domination era. Great achievements on the side of those teams, but it has been quite boring sometimes from an audience perspective.

One funny thing were audience reactions like "Formula 1.5" on reddit, where the predictable wins were ignored and instead people cheered for the mid field teams and their positions.

Considering we had eight years of Merc and Hamilton I hope this change will make things a little more exciting again.

Agree, I hope at least it gives the sport a big shake-up which it definitely needs.

What was wrong with last season?

The screw-up of the race director breaking the rule book to hand over the driver's title to an other team. Oops, no. To "spice-up" the race.

I find it disingenious to focus only on that. The whole season was competitive up to the last race.

It was very competitive between the top two teams. And then the battle for third place between McLaren and Ferrari was good as well. I would like to see more teams in contention for points each week. Hopefully Haas and Williams are a bit more competitive this year.

every season is full of controversial race director decisions. People only care when it effects their favourite team.

It was particularly egregious last year.

>Secret Aerodynamicist

Kyle Foster? :) He worked for two years at Mercedes F1. Just posted a series of videos about new F1 cars three weeks ago https://www.youtube.com/c/KYLEDRIVES/videos

Or the Red bull guy from Milton Keynes

This should be an exciting year from a technical perspective. I am not sure how it will make racing competitive or not though. I would love to see a back of field team, such as Williams, suddenly become competitive again, but that is perhaps unlikely.

If nothing else you have the most drastically different looking cars in quite some time and that will undoubtedly evolve throughout the season and into the next couple of years.

The article highlights the dramatic differences between, Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes, but others took bold directions as well such as Aston Martin. Within the first few races we should know who is onto the right direction and who probably need to scrap their current philosophy.

I find it funny that the rule changes were years in the making, but nobody (or at least it seems like nobody) predicted the "porpoising" issues.

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