Ross Brawn Making Progress with Overtaking Solution

Drivers found it difficult in Melbourne to overtake, bringing up the issues again with the new F1 cars.

Ross Brawn and his assembled team have been working on a solution to the problem that has plagued the new F1 cars, overtaking or rather a lack of it. Drivers had little joy trying to overtake one another after becoming stuck in the dirty air kicked up by the car in front.

It is an issue that has been slowly creeping up on the sport with the complexity of front wings specifically meaning that cars have more and more difficulty following each other closely and consistently due to the wake from the car in front.

Brawn has said that although the problem will not be eliminated with a quick fix, he and his team have made decent progress with possible solutions to one of the sports main issues.

"One of the things we've started, and we're now six to nine months into it, is a programme to understand how we can enable the cars to race each other more effectively," he told SiriusXM.

"We need to keep the aerodynamic performance at a high level, but we need to do it in a way that's more benign and more friendly to the cars around it.

"There's almost a force field that exists at the moment," he added, "a bubble around each car. And the car attacking it can't get near it, because as soon as it gets within 1.5 to 2.0s of the car in front, it loses so much performance. It can't get near.

"So we started the programme, and I'm really excited by what I'm seeing.

"The front wing is for sure one area that is sensitive in both respects, in terms of the disturbance it creates, and then the sensitivity to the disturbance of the car in front. It's not the only area. There's all the furniture and bargeboards you see behind the front wheels that are equally as sensitive. And there are areas of the rear floor and rear aerodynamics which are sensitive,

"We're looking at the whole thing, and I don't think we should get into chopping one piece off without understanding all the implications of the impact we will have. So we're looking at a total solution, a holistic solution, of all the parts.

"We know the percentage drop in performance that comes as a car approaches another car, and already we've found ways of improving that in reducing the disturbed flow from the car in front, and reducing the sensitivity of the following car to that disturbed flow. We're trying to do it in a properly structured way, and that will be the solution we'll apply for 2021.

"Anything we can learn in the meantime, which we feel is safe and fair and correct to apply, will be done."

Due to the existing Concorde Agreement between teams, the earliest we could see these changes would be the 2021 season, but will the lack of overtaking prompt a solution before then?