I said on the last Motor Sport podcast that I stood firmly with the purists on whether the Australian Grand Prix was a great race or just a facsimile of one, rendered artificial by the latest electrical/combustion/active aero regulations. But the superficially similar Chinese Grand Prix actually demolished most — but not all — of those objections. As outlined in our Monday reflections piece, the very different layout of the Shanghai circuit and its different energy demands meant that the many passing moves were generally not being made because one guy was suddenly over 400 horsepower down on the other at the end of the straight.
The moves, when they came, were invariably outbraking and/or positioning moves into Turn 14 and the Turn 1/2/3 sequence, moves which absolutely required the driver’s skill to make work.
All the various deployment strategies were doing was keeping the dicing cars together for longer, keeping the car which had been overtaken in the game, ready for retaliatory moves. So it was still a yo-yo race like Melbourne but with a crucial difference: the moves were being done by the driver, not the battery.
The fight between Hamilton and Leclerc was the highlight of the race
This distinction, while not visually obvious to the casual fan, and largely ignored by both sides of the polarised opinions around the new F1, is fundamental to pointing the way forward. The exact same regulations on two very different tracks produced one artifice of a race and one genuinely great race, both of which the new fans that F1 is chasing would have found thrilling.
As we’ve said before, the electrical/combustion energy split is not quite right yet and long term we probably do need a greater contribution from the combustion ‘half’ of the equation. But we now know that it is possible to get authentic racing, requiring old-school skills, to be compatible with the current formula. Greater variation of the maximum harvest, deployment and storage limits, tailored to the track layout, is going to be key. Not easy, given how much the optimum deployment changes with grip levels, etc., but probably achievable.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.motorsportmagazine.com ’
