Despite the major North American professional sports leagues generating many billions of dollars in revenue every season, it’s surprising how parity and equality between teams is a fundamental concept compared to many of their European counterparts.
From player drafts that offer the worst performing teams the first choice at signing the most promising young talent to salary caps intended to stop teams hoarding the best players simply by having the biggest budgets, sporting parity is a cornerstone of these leagues. Meaning that when teams achieve repeated success over a sustained period of time, it’s because they are truly the best of the best.
For most of its existence, however, Formula 1 has been anything but equal. Not only do the cars themselves vary widely in performance from team to team, but the budgets, factories, resources, prize money and political power of each team have traditionally been worlds apart between the front and rear of the F1 field.
But in the Liberty Media era, the sport has undergone a drastic fundamental change. Since 2021, all ten teams have been restricted by a budget cap that limits their total expenditure across all racing and development activities – with some exemptions. However, as well as restricting teams’ spending, another crucial new element has been the introduction of aerodynamic testing restrictions (ATR).
Like the NFL draft, ATR is a parity measure that applies to teams based on their performance in the championship. Each of the ten teams receives a different allowance for the volume of wind tunnel testing time and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations they can run depending on their position in the championship.
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While the team sitting in seventh place in the standings gets the base level of testing time, the team sitting in last place get 15% additional testing time to help them try and catch up to the field ahead. Meanwhile, the world champions and the team at the top of the constructors’ championship standings have to make do with only 70% of the base level of testing time – a significant reduction.
The idea was to provide more opportunities for those further down the order to work their way into more competitive positions. Four seasons into ATR being active, the 2024 season is the most competitive for many years with four teams and seven separate drivers having won a grand prix over the first 14 rounds of the championship. But have these restrictions been a positive element to introduce into the world championship?
For
Looking at how competitive the field is, with multiple teams in contention to fight for victories each grand prix weekend, it’s clear that the ATR has enhanced the racing in Formula 1.
Now, teams at the top of the standings have to be smart an efficient in how they approach their development and testing time and can no longer throw money and resources at a problem to fix it.
This has forced teams to be more resourceful and given opportunities for smaller teams to compete on a more level playing field, which is a good thing for the sport.
Against
The concept of aerodynamic testing restrictions goes against much of the fundamental concept of Formula 1 as an engineering competition between constructors.
By handicapping the best teams in limiting how much work they can do on developing parts of their cars, it is inherently artificial. Would Red Bull be facing this much competition if they were being limited in their aero testing compared to all of their rivals?
From Williams to McLaren to Ferrari to Red Bull – teams have naturally risen and fallen over the years without any need for artificial restrictions placed on them. That means ATR is unnecessary.
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I say
There is nothing worse in professional sport than teams who have the best resources and the biggest budgets remaining untouchable at the very top of their leagues largely because they just have more than their rivals do.
Soccer is the poster child for this. Man City have won the last four Premier League titles and been victorious in six of the last seven seasons. Real Madrid and Barcelona hold La Liga effectively hostage. And in Germany, Bayer Leverkusen only just managed to snap Bayern Munich’s 11-season streak as champions this season. An utterly absurd lack of competition and parity for a sport that somehow manages to remain the most popular in the world.
Meanwhile, Formula 1 has seen Mercedes dominate for several years before Red Bull have taken over the top spot largely thanks to Max Verstappen. But as the 2024 season has progressed, the sport has become as enthralling and unpredictable as it has been in recent memory. Imagine telling someone after Max Verstappen won his second straight grand prix of the season in Saudi Arabia that by the summer break, we would have seven different race winners and that Lewis Hamilton would be the only multiple winner aside from the world champion?
Unlike the World Endurance Championship and its Balance of Performance element that its teams are forbidden from even daring to question publicly, ATR is a much better and much more acceptable means of trying to generate increased competition in the sport. Applying based purely on championship position is a fair approach and means that if Red Bull do lose the top spot in the championship, they will receive a boost in their efforts to try and catch back up again.
But more importantly, it is finally breaking the negative feedback loop for smaller and lower teams that because almost impossible to escape in decades by where a lack of success would only make it harder for teams to achieve the better results they needed to climb back up the field again. Now, they get a chance to fight back – not a fast track up the field by any means.
For these reasons, Formula 1 is largely better off for having ATR than it would be without it.
You say
Do you believe ATR has had a positive or negative impact on Formula 1 since its introduction in 2021?
Do you agree that the introduction of aerodynamic testing restrictions has had a positive impact on Formula 1?
- No opinion (0%)
- Strongly disagree (0%)
- Slightly disagree (0%)
- Neither agree nor disagree (0%)
- Slightly agree (50%)
- Strongly agree (50%)
Total Voters: 2
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