F1 Teams Abandon 2013 Car Changes

Formula One teams have agreed to abandon plans to radically change the race cars for the 2013 season.

The team’s technical chiefs voted to reject a move by the FIA, the governing body of the sport, to bring back ‘ground-effect’ underbody aerodynamics, similar to the design used in the late nineties.

However the teams have now decided to pursue less radical changes that will keep cars similar to the 2011 editions, but still reduce drag and fuel consumption.

The FIA could still force through its plans against the teams’ wishes, and has until the end of June to decide whether or not to do so.

The original aims were to help reduce fuel consumption by 35% in tandem with a switch from the current 2.4-litre V8s to 1.6-litre turbo engines with ‘green’ technology and for the cars to be more challenging to drive while being no more than five seconds slower per lap.

But teams felt this would require a lot of work and expense, and an alternative solution would be instead to introduce a number of detailed aerodynamic restrictions to reduce drag.

These changes could reportedly achieve the same targets as those set by the FIA, but the cars will not be as aerodynamically efficient as had initially been hoped.

Sam Michael, technical director at Williams, said: ‘The biggest concern was that it’s a massive amount of investment for the teams. It’s quite a big departure’.

‘If you were going to go down that route and have a very different set of drag and lift coefficients that you couldn’t achieve with the current rules, fine, that’s different. But the teams saw it as a massive amount of investment and work for something we don’t really understand’.