The Teams Have Defeated the Regs

Dirty air has been getting worse as the current regulation cycle unfolded.

Max Verstappen won the Japanese Grand Prix for the fourth consecutive year, and he is now just one point behind the leader, Lando Norris, in the standings. While the results add some excitement to the championship race, many fans found the event itself to be dull due to a relative lack of action.

This prompted the usual jokes in the comments section of the official highlights, with viewers suggesting that the editors deserve a raise for crafting an eight-minute video from a long, relatively uneventful race.

The tires benefited from the cooler temperatures, which reduced the risk of overheating, as well as from a newly resurfaced track that was traditionally very abrasive. Overall degradation was not a concern, resulting in no significant differences in wear that would give one car an advantage over the other.

The nature of the Suzuka circuit did not help either; the high-speed corners, highly adored by the drivers, make it very difficult to follow closely. Ironically, the ground effect regulations were designed to address this issue.

Early Success

And they were designed by exceptional individuals with decades of experience in Formula 1, such as Ross Brawn, Pat Symonds, and Nikolas Tombazis. They applied their brilliant minds to mitigate the wake effect, commonly known as dirty air: the turbulence and loss of downforce experienced when closely following another car.

They succeeded, at least initially. The rules were effective from the outset. During the first test in Barcelona in late February 2022, Verstappen and Charles Leclerc noted that dirty air was less of an issue, which was very encouraging, considering the venue—Circuit de Catalunya, one of the most challenging tracks for overtaking.

Overall, 2022 and 2023 achieved the goals set by the rule makers. However, the situation has become alarming since last year.

Same Old Story

The following was easier during the first two years of the current regulations; however, as time went on, it became increasingly difficult. After the opening race of the 2024 season in Bahrain, the drivers complained about dirty air again being a problem.

It is safe to say that the issue has not been resolved since then, and it is reasonable to expect that it will be worse in 2025 than in the previous season, as the recent Japanese Grand Prix appears to indicate.

According to Tombazis, the cause of this reversal from early success is that the rule makers failed to address all potential areas of development, which increased the wake effect and making it harder to follow.

We believe that that was the outcome of some specific parts of the car, maybe not being as tightly regulated as possible.

The aerodynamic development went in the direction of increasing performance for the teams, which is what they want to do, but worsening the wake. The key areas where this happened were the front wing endplates of current cars, the floor edges, the diffuser edges and front wheel furniture.

It is understandable that the regulations have left some loopholes for dirty air to infiltrate the sport. Just as game developers cannot eliminate all the bugs before releasing a game—leaving players to discover them— the F1 teams have identified and exploited advantages that benefit them, often at the expense of close racing.

The question is, why hasn't the FIA closed the loopholes once the teams discovered them?