I've collected all the controversies and the topics that have been discussed troughout the season to now show and explain them to you. I hope you enjoy it and have a nice day :^)
More notable Controversies:
Flexible Parts
And we are not talking about the DRS (Drag Reduction System). This is the only part of the car that is allowed to change during a race. Particularly it can change if you're less than a second behind someone on a DRS-Straight to make overtaking easier.
Eventough it is not legal, teams build Car parts that are flexible and adapt at certain speeds to either further reduce Drag on normal straights or to increase the front/rear grip. This is especially present on the front and rear wings but it's also evolving for parts like the floor of the car.
How is that possible if it is illegal?
Well the FIA tests this but their testprograms don't work at Highspeed.
What do they do?
In Monza 2024 you could see this very well on the McLarrens front wings
At Highspeed
The Wing bends down to reduce the drag, let the Car go just a teeny tiny little bit faster.
While Breaking
In cintrast to that, when the car brakes, the wings bend up to increase the drag to decrease the pressure minimally but more importantly the bend up to increase the downforce and give the Car or rather the Tyres more grip so the car can break a little, little, little bit faster.
Illustrated in a very simplified way (and yes I've given up on art class as soon as I could :) but) it looks like this
When the wings are down the air flows better and the car can get faster
When wings get up, they are formed in a way so that the incoming air presses the Car down slightly and increases the ground contact area of the Tyres to give them more grip. This function also gives the small breaking effect since the wind doesn't flow as well anymore.
This is a really complicated topic but you can watch a deeper explenation with more examples on YouTube by the "The Race" Guys.
In general the Controversy behind this is to what extend this should be legal/illegal and how it could be fined.
Format Changes
Most controverse are the talks about changing to a "reverse Grid" format like its present in F2.
In F2 the 10 best drivers in the Qualifying session from Friday, start the sprint race in reverse order. The 1st starts as 10th, the 10th as 1st and so on. To still give a motivation to do well in Qualifying, the 1st gets two Championship Points.
To me that still seems incredibly stupid for F1.
Lets take Las Vegas as an example:
Hülkenberg, Gasly and Tsunoda manage to get into Q3 but they know they can't get 1st so all three would have to try to drive as slow as possible to get the best Grid position. Now they obviously did not do that; Hulkenberg nonetheless got 9th, Tsunoda finished 7th and Gasly even managed to 3rd, which is absolutely spectacular for him an Alpine.
Now since he wasn't first he wouldn't get a Point but as a benefit for being by far the best of the rest even beating lots of better cars, he gets removed to 8th position in the starting grid, where he would normally not stand any chance to get back to 3rd position. Hülkenberg however did not manage to beat that many better cars in Q3, but nonetheless gets benefitted with a second place on the Grid, which he could potentially defend to surely stay in the points. That seems just realy unfair to me.
Why do they do that in F2 you now might wonder, well there it's supposed to keep the field closer together, to exaggeratedly not have just one guy dominate every thing, than he gets into F1, starts 16th and doesn't now how to overtake. So I would say for that purpose it is okay since it's just an educational league, for young talents.
Sub-/Juniorteams
You might now this from other sports like Football/Soccer but the major controversy here is whether it is "distortion of competition" to have to teams race against each other that are owned by the same person/company.
Generally speaking there are only four Engine developers in F1:
- Mercedes used by Mercedes, McLarren, Williams and Aston Martin
- Ferrari used by Ferrari, Sauber and Haas
- Honda used by RedBull and Racing Bulls and
- Renault used by Alpine - but they don't want to do that anymore since their engine are bad
Haas is so small they even let Ferrari build their parts, Haas only develops them and they also use Ferraris Windchannel and Simulators and everything so they are also very dependent and probably want Ferrari to do well but still they are an technically independant team and could at anytime say "we produce our own or take it from Mercedes" or whatever.
However with RedBull and RB (RacingBulls) it's a little different.
RB is even officially the Junior-Team of RedBull hwere they let younger drivers get into F1 to later sign them for RedBull. This method has worked on Sebastian Vettel or Max Verstappen for example.
BUT the controvere thing isn't the education of younger drivers it's the fact that if necessary, RB drivers can let RedBull drivers just go through to give them more points without a fight or the other way around, redBull could let RB drivers trough to let them get a better position in the constructors championship and that way make more money. There have been rumours about abusement of this possibility, when Daniel Ricciardo in his last race of the career took the fastest lap from Max Vertsappens biggest rival Lando Norris and therefore took one point away from him. But that's a fairly normal thing to do. Kevin Magnussen for example did that in Abu Dhabi as well and it's totally understandable that in their last race they don't wanna worry about their Tyres or stuff they just wanna have some rounds of quick fun in my opinion.
Nevertheless the possibility is there and while Lawson and Perez have fought alot no RB driver ever fought against Max Verstappen this season, they would just let him pass trough. But is this a "distortion of competition"?
In my opinion it is because while we don't know whether other drivers would just let him trough because they know that after all they don't have a chance and rather keep their Tyres running, we do know for sure that RB wouldn't do that to RedBull drivers when it tis important.
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