Mercedes Technical Director James Allison believes Formula 1’s return to ground effect machinery is “not great” due to the super-stiff low ride heights needed to extract performance.
The 2022 overhaul of F1’s technical regulations saw the return of ground effect, whereby the shaped underside of the car floor is used to generate as much as 60% of total downforce.
However, peak downforce levels are produced the lower a car is slung relative to the asphalt, forcing teams to run stiff suspension geometries to maximise the ground effect.
The necessity to run lower ride heights to extract performance has yielded complaints as set-up options become limited in line with the sensitivities of the stiffer suspension settings.
“You guys [the media] used to carry on endlessly about high-rake, low-rake cars as if that was the beginning, end, and middle of everything,” Allison told Autosport.
“A high-rake car was around 140mm [rear ride height]. A low-rake car would be like 120mm or whatever. Well, both of them are stratospheric ranges compared with these cars.
“These are all cars that are setting off in the 60mms. There might be a few millimetres of difference between them, but they’re all just on the ground.”
The 55-year-old suggested that narrower operating windows have boxed in engineers in terms of viable options to extract more performance.
“Well, you could have a car that was a little bit more one-dimensional at tracks that are a bit more one-dimensional,” Allison continued to explain regarding the difference in rule sets.
“So if there isn’t a big speed range, then you could maybe set your car up such that the corners coincide with where your good bit is, and you don’t suffer horribly for it dropping away either side.
“But when you go to a place that’s a bit more of a broad test of a car, like Austin for example, where you’ve got real fast stuff, some slow stuff, and some in-between stuff, and some decent straights, and some bumps, then that’s going to test the bit where it’s falling off the back end of the performance.
“It’s going to test the end of straight [downforce] failure, it’s going to need to stay strong in the fast [corners] and it’s hard to persuade the car to do all of those things with a set of rules that basically don’t want to do anything except be near the ground.”
Allison stated that he is not particularly fond of the current regulations for this reason, and suggested that the sentiment would be shared by Max Verstappen and Red Bull despite the partnership’s domination of the sport in recent years.
“I’m sure I bang on about this because it’s been a bug-bear of mine, but I personally don’t think it’s a great thing,” he added.
“I don’t think it’s good having the cars operating, when they leave the garage, with that much space [millimetres] to the ground.
“You get the person who’s winning the championship by one of the biggest margins ever, and has every reason to love his car to bits, and I doubt he’ll tell you it’s a lovely thing. It is not like it was a couple of years ago.”
Active suspension then…. Patrick Head suggested that from the outset