Formula 1 drivers are a brave bunch, but when Oscar Piastri recently voiced his concerns about the safety of the race start in Melbourne, a number of his colleagues also had their reservations.
Why? This year’s cars must adhere to the most radical upheaval of F1’s rule set in the sport’s history.
One or two major elements are often revised or tweaked whenever a new rule set is introduced. This year, it’s almost everything.
The power units have changed, the aero regulations are vastly different, the tyres have been changed, the workload on the driver has gone through the roof and we also have the wildcard factor of a box-fresh rookie team on the grid in the shape of Cadillac.
The teams are struggling to make sense of how best to exploit the complex technical regulations.
One of the key changes for this year is that the reliance on electrical power has been increased. In effect, the cars are energy-starved. Since 2014, all F1 engines featured a device called the MGU-H (Motor Generator Unit – Heat) which utilised the stream of hot exhaust gases to generate electrical energy.
That electrical energy could be utilised in two ways. It could either to charge the battery for use later on in the lap, or to rapidly spool the turbocharger up to speed, eliminating what is known as ‘turbo lag’.
In road cars that manifests as a dead-feeling throttle until the turbo spins up and then you feel the sudden rush of boost.
This year’s rule set does away with the MGU-H. This means that when trying to accelerate from a standstill, the drivers will have to counteract meaningful turbo lag for the very first time in an F1 car in the heat of competition.
They’ll need to build boost on the grid by holding high engine revs. This fundamentally changes the nature of the pre-start process.
“We need to make sure that the race start procedure allows all cars to have the power unit ready to go because the grid is not the place in which you want to have cars slow in taking off the grid,” said McLaren’s team principal Andrea Stella.
Timing how the drivers lift the clutch to plug in to exactly the optimum amount of fading boost and to time that with the lights sequence is sure to be incredibly difficult.
With too much boost on board, the cars will just sit on their grid spots, spinning their rear wheels.
Too little and the cars will bog down, go into an anti-stall mode and the field will come streaming past.
The trick will be to back off the boost pressure in order to anticipate the lights going out. It’s going to be an incredibly small window between too little and too much.
Get it right and the car will rocket away, with its electrical assistance then chiming in at 50km/h to help catapult them the first 300m to the braking zone for the tight Turn One right-hander. If the weather’s anything like the biblical flood of last year, it could be the perfect storm for chaos.
Watching the practice race starts in Bahrain pre-season testing showed just what a shambles the process could be. Very few drivers had the process taped.
This is what concerns the driver corps, as there’s scope for cars to be moving very quickly towards the rear of cars moving very slowly, possibly wreathed in tyre smoke. It’s easy to see how a huge collision could happen.
To compound that, there has been speculation that some drivers would force their cars into the new low downforce 'straight-line mode' in an attempt to eke out an advantage at the first corner.
“A pack of 22 cars with a couple hundred points less downforce sounds like a recipe for disaster to me,” Piastri said.
It’s rumoured that Ferrari has designed its power unit around a small turbo, in the process leveraging an advantage for race starts. This means it's less susceptible to turbo lag than a big one.
But while that might give the Maranello team the drop off the line and out of corners on tight circuits like Monaco, it could well prove a liability on power circuits like Monza, Silverstone and Baku.
Indeed, Ferrari has moved to block a proposed change to start line procedures, feeling that any changes could erode their possible start line advantage. Certainly in Bahrain, the red cars were like a rocket off the mark.
A development time squeeze, complex new rules, little time to test the results and a grid that’s packed with hard chargers could well be the perfect storm for a start line melee in Melbourne come March 8th.
Here's hoping for a clean one.
Andy brings almost 30 years automotive writing experience to his role at Drive. When he wasn’t showing people which way the Nürburgring went, he freelanced for outlets such as Car, Autocar, and The Times. After contributing to Top Gear Australia, Andy subsequently moved Down Under, serving as editor at MOTOR and Wheels. As Drive’s Road Test Editor, he’s at the heart of our vehicle testing, but also loves to spin a long-form yarn.
