MPH: F1 ratings dilemma - slow down Verstappen or wait for rivals to catch up?

This being F1, we can forget about success ballast or anything as blatantly artificial; the current sliding scale wind tunnel restrictions are as near as it will probably ever come to that. No, when F1 attempts to put a brake on the most successful team, what it invariably does is find the area where the advantage is being found and then disrupt it. Red Bull has many times in the past been the victim of this, as has Mercedes in more recent years.

The problem for the regulation makers tasked with slowing Red Bull down this time around would be understanding the root cause of the team’s advantage. Because it isn’t one thing, it’s a combination of aerodynamic and mechanical qualities which give a fantastic spread of highly efficient downforce through all the operating conditions the cars see. How the rear suspension internals in particular support the very benign aerodynamic map of the car is a key part of Red Bull’s advantage, as is the fidelity of the team’s understanding of how to set the combination up to spread the tyre load between front and rear axles. There are so many points of access to this harmonious whole that changing one would probably just allow the same point to be reached slightly differently.

But just as the regulators might struggle with identifying where the key sensitivity spot of Red Bull’s advantage is, so have the rival teams. But there are signs – notably at McLaren – that the secret may have been decoded. Mercedes and Ferrari, the two teams which might have been expected to be Red Bull’s closest challengers, have saddled themselves with cars of a completely different aerodynamic concept, both of which have proven to be more limited in their potential than the Red Bull blueprint. Both have said they will be abandoning those concepts in their 2024 cars. McLaren has followed the Red Bull philosophy, in particular with its post-Austria upgrade, and since then has leapfrogged Ferrari and Mercedes to be Red Bull’s most consistent challenger.

With all this new understanding, the hope is that Red Bull will face some proper competition next year. Ideally, the rival teams have understood the secrets before the rule makers, because tweaking regulations with the deliberate aim of making the cars more equal (as opposed to the cars becoming more equal naturally) would devalue F1. Sure, it might make for a short term gain in popularity but with the spotlight upon it like never before, any whiff of inauthenticity to the competition could do long term damage. F1 is a technical competition as well as a sporting one. If the aim was just to align the reality of who the top drivers are with the outcome of a points competition, it could be just another spec formula.

That’s the uneasy truth that F1 balances upon. So long as the technical competition gives cars which can be competitive with each other, the show can be sold as a contest to find the best driver. When in reality, it’s nothing of the sort – and never has been. The best driver very often wins the contest, but when that happens it’s often just a happy co-incidence. When one team finds a technical advantage and has one of the greatest drivers in the cockpit, then no rival driver is going to be able to bridge that gap. Which leads to all sorts of difficulties in how the sport is sold.

Stefano Domenicali is simply wrestling with how to keep the difference between reality and perception hidden in how the sport is projected. It’s not a new thing. But in an age of transparency it’s a more difficult thing.