Outspoken drivers say that F1's new rules are an accident waiting to happen — and there are signs that they are being listened to. Mark Hughes examines the driver unrest beneath the Australian GP spectacle
Although the Australian Grand Prix was at times a great spectacle, there was a lot of driver discontent beneath that picture. About the style of racing and about safety. They were all pretty free with their opinions about it, too. Coming into the weekend, F1 boss Stefano Domenicali said in his interview with Sky F1 that certain drivers had been far too premature with their criticisms.
But outspoken drivers are part of the very DNA of F1. They are not supposed to be meek, grateful employees and pointing out F1’s problems doesn’t mean they are in opposition to it. Everyone involved wants to see it succeed and while high-profile drivers criticising the sport may make things more difficult for its owners, it comes from a place of love. But there are things that need to be addressed – and trying to silence the drivers in speaking about them would potentially create a massive backlash against the sport’s commercial masters. One which could be commercially very damaging.
No one expected the first race of the most radical regulation revolution in the sport’s history to be without its problems. But they were mainly problems which had long been predicted: the chosen electrical/combustion mix for these regulations isn’t quite right, makes the cars so energy starved that we have the debacle of drivers backing off through corners they’d otherwise be attacking because the time loss of doing so is less than that gained by the greater battery deployment it allows down the straights.
We have overtaking not predicated on driving skill but on driving tactically slowly at certain points on the lap to induce your opponent to suddenly be 450bhp down before the straight ends. We have an imprecisely defined and unpredictable moment of power reduction, making for potentially dangerous speed differentials. We have a power unit with a startline procedure so complex that the chances of stationary or slow-moving cars off the grid is much more likely.
Norris believes there’s a big accident waiting to happen
We saw an amazing avoidance by Franco Colapinto on the near-stationary car of Liam Lawson off the grid. Colapinto had been accelerating for a long time by the time his view of the P8-qualifying Lawson was revealed to him and the potential impact speed was horrifying.
Then we had a long flat-out 7th/8th gear section between Turns 6 and 9 where the ‘straight line mode’ of the active aero (the wings run flat) made the cars on the verge of a major accident on their own. Complaints from the drivers had led the FIA to initially cancel the straight line mode there from Saturday onwards before the teams pointed out to them that they’d use so much more energy with the wings up, the racing would be feeble.
Go onboard with Lawson and from the dummy grid he’s already experiencing problems getting his car off the line. There’s a technical glitch which means he can’t initially accelerate as he releases the clutch. The team is frantically trying to find a solution as he makes his warm-up lap and believes it will be ok at the start proper. But the trepidation Lawson must be feeling as he sits on that grid, not knowing if the car will get going at all, can only be imagined.
F1 got away with it at Albert Park and in general it put on a great show. But it could easily have been very different. The drivers are the ones in the middle of all this and their unwillingness to be quiet isn’t surprising. World champion Lando Norris was perhaps the most outspoken of all: “It’s chaos, you’re going have a big accident,” he said. “We’re just waiting for something to go quite horribly wrong and that’s not a nice position to be in.
“Depending what people do, you can have a 30, 40, 50km/h speed [difference] and when someone hits someone at that speed you’re going to fly and you’re going to go over the fence and you’re going to do a lot of damage to yourself and maybe to others, and that’s a pretty horrible thing to think about.
Verstappen is not backing down with his criticism
Grand Prix Photo
“But there’s nothing we can really do about that now. It’s a shame, it’s very artificial. Depending on what the power unit decides to do and randomly does at times.”
Carlos Sainz was typically thoughtful and analytical in his comments about the straight line mode (SLM): “The issue is not the SLM. We need it. You saw already how we were doing lift and coast like crazy yesterday in qually, all teams. Without it, it would be even worse. We should not need to have active aero for racing, in my opinion. I think the active aero and the SLM is a plaster on top of the issue of the engine.
“And then when you come to circuits like these, that you’re energy-starved, you end up having to use SLM in places where we shouldn’t, to protect the thing, the deployment, so in the end you end up having a dangerous situation like we had in lap one and racing in general.
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Mark Hughes
“If you now remove SLM, we cannot even race with the deployment we have. So we kind of need SLM. But it’s a plaster to a solution to an engine formula that for me just doesn’t seem to work very well right now.”
Max Verstappen wasn’t about to stay quiet either. But he perhaps hit the deepest truth after being asked about his reaction to suggestions his criticisms were premature. He felt the F1 powers should stop worrying about what he was saying and instead, “They should worry about the rules. Just focus on that. They ask questions, and I give my opinion of what I would like to see what I think is better for the sport, because I do care about it. I do love racing, and I want it to be better than this, right?…
“They’re willing to listen, FIA and F1. But I just hope, of course, that there is some action. Because I’m not the only one saying it; a lot of people are speaking the same: drivers, fans, we just want the best for the sport, we’re critical for a reason. We want it to be Formula 1, Formula 1 on steroids. Today that was not the case.”
Between that stance and that of Domenicali, there is hope: “The approach that we have discussed already in the last F1 Commission with the FIA, with the team, is very open,” the boss says. “If we see something that needs to be addressed, we’re going to address it in that way. But I think that now we are in a world where everyone realises that if there is something clear that has to be done to improve, why not? Let’s do it.”
