F1: New car regulations definitely working (Update)

–by Mark Cipolloni–

More evidence that the new F1 regulations to make the racing closer are working as researched by Total-Motorsports:

Data suggests that 2023 season is the most competitive in over a decade.

AlphaTauri the slowest team this season is only 1.96% slower than Red Bull based on average lap time – 1.7 seconds per lap. For comparison, in 2022 the teams of Haas, Aston Martin and Williams were all over 2% slower than Ferrari – the overall pace setter that year. If we look at 2021 then Williams 1.98% slower and Haas were around 2.5s slower/lap

Even though we may not have a title fight the grid is the closest it’s ever been since 2012.

2012 is the closest benchmark of the 2010s – seven teams were within around 1% of pacesetters McLaren compared to just three in 2023, but the cripplingly slow Caterham, Marussia and HRT teams hugely inflated the gap to the back of the grid, to over five seconds.

The flip side of this argument is the gap from the quickest team to second-quickest is eight times as big as it was in 2022 – Red Bull were 0.05% behind but now Ferrari are 0.4% slower than the championship leaders and Aston Martin and Mercedes are over half a percentage behind.

But that gap is not caused by the regulations, but by the Red Bull engineers simply designing a better car. There is nothing the regulations can do to stop better engineering.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

With the advent of the new aero rules in F1 in 2022 the series saw a 30% increase in the number of passes over 2021 – 599 in 2021 vs. 785 in 2022.

That trend continues this year when 2 of the 3 races run so far have seen an increase in passing. Overall passes are still down because Bahrain last year produced an unusually high number of passes because the porpoising problem was so bad for many of the cars the drivers could not defend.

So, anyone who says the racing is boring is probably a Lewis Hamilton fan who is unhappy because the Red Bull Drivers are cleaning his clock out front.  How soon they forget all the years of parades fans had to endure with the superior Mercedes cars out front and running away.