Formula 1 technical director Ross Brawn says the sport cannot go back to having lighter cars because it would mean getting rid of its hybrid engines.

Drivers including Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel have urged the sport to use its planned overhaul of the regulations in 2021 to reverse the continued rise in the minimum weight limit over recent seasons.

However Brawn said that would mean removing the hybrid elements from current power units. “There are some things we can’t turn the clock back on,” he said.

“We’ve got a very, very impressive engine. But it’s pretty complicated and it’s pretty heavy. The cars have got heavier, we’d all love the cars to be lighter.

“It is frustrating when everyone says ‘oh, we must have much lighter cars’. Well, you can tell me how to do it. We’d love to do it. But we have a car and a battery system and an Energy Recovery System that, unless we abandon it completely, we’re never going to get the cars in a different regime.”

Today’s F1 cars are 135 kilograms heavier than they were 10 years ago, when the team Brawn salvaged following Honda’s withdrawal swept the world championships with its BGP-001 chassis. Jenson Button was reunited with the car he won the drivers’ title in at Silverstone last weekend.

“I ran the Brawn GP on Thursday and it was a delight,” said Brawn. “A nice little normally-aspirated engine. I can’t remember the weight now, six hundred and something. Jenson, who drove the car, said it was a jewel and asked ‘could we go back to those days’?

“Well, the confrontation and the revolution that would have to take place to go back that far I think would be damaging to Formula 1. Too damaging to Formula 1. So we have to work around some constraints that we have now. That’s the commercial reality.”

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F1’s minimum weight limit, 1961 – 2019

NB. Separate minimum weight limits for turbocharged and normally aspirated cars were set in 1987 and 1988.

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2019 F1 season