Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff has lamented that there is no “magic bullet” after the new Formula 1 rules on flexi-wings flattered to deceive in terms of spicing up the competition.
The FIA’s technical directive [TD], which clamped down on the amount of flexibility in cars’ front wings under heavy load, was initially hyped as a potential way of reducing gaps between teams, with McLaren apparently benefiting from the previous regulations.
However, once qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix was done, it became apparent the TD had made little difference, with the McLarens locking out the front row, with the third and fourth-placed cars three tenths of a second behind.
The Woking-based squad also secured a 1-2 in the race, reaffirming that little difference had been made, with Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton even going as far as saying the change was “a waste of money“.
The intrigue of the rule change had also perhaps been a red herring clutched onto by some of the teams, many of which were hoping that it would give them the chance to get back into contention.
After the race, Wolff was frank about its apparent failure to change the competition, telling media including Motorsport Week: “I mean, maybe sometimes, sometimes we try to believe that there is a magic bullet in Formula 1 that’s going to solve everything. But it’s not the case.”
TD stalemate disappoints Ferrari but vindicates McLaren
In the build-up to the race, the simmering of speculation reached boiling point, as judgement day drew nearer and whether the proof would be in the pudding, or if the pudding had indeed been over-egged.
Ferrari’s boss Fred Vasseur revealed that the team had been working on a new front wing and appeared excited at the prospect of how the TD could reshape the grid, saying: “We are working on it for ages now and this can be a gamechanger for everybody, because we don’t know the impact on every single team of the new regulation.”
But the Italian marque may need to find more answers back at Maranello, with Charles Leclerc an opportunistic third, and Hamilton sixth.
This prompted Vasseur to say, when asked if he was disappointed about the outcome, having performed well at the previous round in Monaco: “I don’t think that you can take Monaco as a reference,” he told media including Motorsport Week, adding that the SF-25’s performance has improved on the whole since the Miami Grand Prix.
“I think that if you take the picture of the race [on] Lap 40, we were five seconds behind Norris. That pace was much better than three or four races ago when we were lapped in Miami.
“I don’t want to say that it’s the front wing. I don’t do a shortcut on this. But the picture of each race is different.
“I think that we have all the same issue to understand perfectly the tyres, between the compounds and the consistency and performance.
“It was true for us, but I think it was true for the others today. I think we have much more in this than on the delta difference of the front wing.
“But even if it’s not the biggest performance contributor, you have to take it into consideration, because today for one tenth you move completely, you change completely the grid, and that can be a position differentiator.”
Wolff’s sentiments were echoed across the weeking by other leading team bosses, including Andrea Stella, whose McLaren cars were being closely watched to discover if they were to show a chink in their armour through the TD’s introduction.
After qualifying, Stella concluded that it was “relatively negligible” and that things had “unfolded pretty much like we at McLaren were expecting”.
Stella added: “We always thought that the impact would be relatively negligible because when we saw the numbers associated to this change of aeroelastic effect, they were small numbers in terms of downforce, and in terms of the variation of the downforce with speed.
“When we tested this wing in Imola, if we hadn’t told Lando that it was a different wing, he wouldn’t have spotted it.
“And when we simulated in the simulator or in the offline simulation, numerically, it was almost at zero.
“So we were not expecting a change of the pecking order, a function of the technical directive that was released for this race.”
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