Mercedes: F1 should lower weight limit and ‘make it our problem’

Mercedes Technical Director James Allison has suggested that Formula 1 could solve its weight problem by simply lowering the limit and letting teams deal with it.

In recent weeks, there have been discussions over the ever-increasing weight of F1 cars.

Currently, F1 challengers have a minimum weight of 798kg.

However, 10 years ago in 2013, the final year before the turbo-hybrid power units were introduced, the car’s minimum figure was set 642kg.  

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F1 is targeting shorter and lighter cars in 2026, when a new cycle of regulations comes into play amid a series of criticisms over how the heavy cars are handling.

Recently, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali admitted that “weight is an issue” and that the sport would “like to be able to give the drivers a lighter car”.

Allison says that F1 should make it a problem for the teams to solve.

“I strongly agree with Stefano, and he’s not alone in thinking that this sort of inexorable upward trend in weight is something that has to be arrested and then reversed,” he said. 

“Because, you know, year-on-year they were getting heavier. It isn’t super trivial to get the weight moving in the other direction. 

“It is particularly tricky to dream up technical rules that are going to make the car much lighter. 

“The way to make it lighter, I think, is to lower the weight limit and make it our problem. If cars are over the limit, then it forces us all to make some fairly difficult decisions about what we put in our cars and what we don’t. 

“But not everyone agrees with that point of view. But that’s sort of, I think, the most guaranteed way to put downward pressure on the weight of the car.”

At the start of the 2022 season, when new technical regulations were enforced, a number of cars were overweight, forcing teams to find their own solutions to whittle the figure down.