Now that F1’s CFD had been correlated with the wind tunnel and the results from teams, they could then crack on with evolving the F1 2021 concept. The next iteration of which was referred to as the India model. In February 2019, teams were asked to conduct further analysis on the behaviour of the front wheel wakes and underbody aerodynamics. To spread the workload, each team could nominate a project that they wanted to work on. Once processed, the results were then shared with F1 and the FIA. All of this CFD work however was not subject to the usual aerodynamic testing restrictions as it was completed during two specified six-week periods, the first concluding at the end of March 2019 and the second in May 2019.

The technical, sporting and financial regulations were released in October 2019 and since then, the role of the F1 aero group has changed. ‘Now the whole of the aero group is looking for loopholes,’ highlights Symonds. ‘Effectively we have our car to the regulations and now we’re trying to add performance to it in exactly the same way a team would. So we are trying to see what teams might do that could destroy the wake. Along the way we have found some performance so although these rules don’t allow quite as much design freedom, there are still gains to be had.’

The latest CAD model that has been sent to the teams is called November (continuing the phenetic alphabet naming methodology), which again the teams will work on, as F1 together with the FIA continue to evolve the F1 2021 regulations.

18inch wheels and tyres

Another big change for 2021 is the switch to 18inch wheels and tyres, with everyone wondering if Pirelli can improve their tyre grip for 2021.

‘In fairness to Pirelli, they’ve had so many diverse inputs to what has been demanded from them,’ Ross Brawn, Managing Director at F1 points out. ‘They’ve been struggling to have clarity on what they should focus on. For a long time everyone was telling them we need tyres with high degradation and lots of pitstops, which created tyres that were thermally fragile so the drivers couldn’t push. Now with the FIA, teams and drivers we’ve had a much better process to try and identify what we need to aim for. We still want to have a reasonable number of pitstops, but we’re changing the objectives for Pirelli and giving more clarity on what F1 really needs and I think they’ve been responding quite well.’

Along with aesthetics and road-car relevance, another reason behind the 18inch tyre decision was to improve that all-important wake. ‘A lot of people think we went for 18inch tyres to look more modern but that wasn’t the thinking at all,’ explains Symonds. ‘You only have to watch some of the slow motion footage of 13inch tyres, and you can see how the tall sidewall vibrates and deflects, which makes the aerodynamic design incredibly difficult because you can’t reproduce that in a wind tunnel or in CFD very accurately,’ Symonds continues. ‘By having a tyre with a slightly lower profile and shorter sidewall and by moving some of the bodywork away from the critical areas of interaction, we’ve made the aerodynamics more stable and easier to understand and therefore given some of the smaller teams a bit of a leg up.’