The 2024 F1 season was one of the most competitive and diverse ever. For the first time, for example, four teams achieved a double podium finish in a race. After 24 fiercely contested races, it was the McLaren MCL38 that emerged victorious, surpassing Ferrari (by a handful of points) and Red Bull in a much clearer manner.
The key moment of the season came at the Miami Grand Prix when Woking introduced its biggest upgrade of the season. This package, which featured a different sidepod design, included a new front wing that was further refined with a version introduced in Austria. Woking worked hard, focusing on aeroelasticity.
Red Bull had gained a significant advantage by mastering the ground effect regulations better than their rivals. They found an advantage in better integration of suspension and aerodynamics. Pierre Waché, the technical director of the Anglo-Austrian team, explained that both the RB18 and the RB19 were able to rebalance themselves, adapting to any type of track.
McLaren MCL38: the move that surprised the competition
The Miami package and the subsequent Austrian revisions, with a particularly adaptive front wing mounted on the MCL38, allowed the car to be balanced, outperforming the Red Bull RB20, which was carrying issues that hadn’t emerged in previous years due to the significant advantage that had disguised certain weaknesses.
Pierre Wache explained the benefit McLaren achieved with the flexible front wing: “To rebalance the car without a flexible wing, you need some movement in the suspension, and the softer you go, the better it is, which is good for tuning the balance but maybe not for aerodynamic load. The deflection of our rivals’ front wing allowed them to rebalance the car, while maintaining much stiffer suspension.”
Mercedes, appreciating the advantages of the solution, followed McLaren’s lead by designing a more flexible front wing. With these wings, which passed all the static load and deflection tests required by the regulations, a more aggressive flap angle can be used to counter the intrinsic low-speed understeer of cars based on Venturi channels. When the elements flex downward under the load of speed, the front wing “depowers” relative to the aerodynamic load of the rear wing, countering high-speed oversteer.
The narrowness of the window between low-speed understeer and high-speed oversteer is the main limitation inherent to this generation of cars. The aeroelastic front wing is a powerful tool to circumvent this limitation.
Without such a wing, any change to the balance can only be made through the mechanical aspects of the car: suspension, damping, differential, and so on. To make it effective, the suspension must be softer to allow the necessary responsiveness to changes. This limits the amount of aerodynamic load that can be used at high speeds, as the car scrapes the floor. To avoid excessive lowering, a higher ride height must be used, and therefore stiffer springs. The higher the ride height, the less downforce is produced by the underfloor.
The McLaren MCL38’s flexible wing negated Red Bull’s advantage
Before McLaren introduced the flexible front wing, Red Bull had an advantage that had been evident in the past two seasons. Rivals, simply put, couldn’t make their concepts work in the same way the Austrian team’s engineers did. Red Bull’s philosophy reached a development limit, and the RB20 stalled somewhat, as confirmed by the general ineffectiveness of the updates introduced throughout the recently concluded season.
Every attempt to add more aerodynamic load to the car only worsened the balance. For this reason, finding the right setup for the RB20 was often a complex task, requiring enormous efforts and a lot of time to accomplish. For 2025, the goal is to overcome these issues, and for this reason, there is a political-regulatory battle over wing flexibility.
Some, such as McLaren, Mercedes, and even Ferrari, would like to maintain the status quo to preserve their gained advantage. Others, like Red Bull, want a significant crackdown to restore the pre-Miami 2024 status, returning to the conditions that placed their car at the top of the F1 rankings.
These are decisive days, as the FIA is about to deliberate on the matter, and with only one year left to compete under these regulatory conditions, a decision one way or another could make a huge difference. The outcomes of the 2025 championship are being defined these days, even though the engines are off.
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