Formula 1 teams have found one of their biggest rivals in the weight limit during the construction of their cars for the 2022 season.
Although the minimum weight has increased from 752kg to 795kg from last year to this, due to the change in regulations, most teams have not been able to approach that limit.
As a compromise, and to avoid excessive cost increases in an attempt to reduce the weight of the cars, an agreement was reached for the minimum weight to be increased to 798kg for the start of the season.
However, even that has proven challenging for some teams, so they’ve been looking in every area they can to lose any excess they haven’t been able to remove yet.
A close inspection of the cars at last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix shows that many of them are missing paint in places and carbon fiber can be seen instead.
This includes McLaren , whose air intake has gone from being orange at the car’s launch to black today, and Aston Martin , who have even removed paint from some areas of their sidepod, showing just how determined they are. to reduce weight.
Aston Martin technical director Andy Green said that although the overall benefit of the weight seemed small, anything that could help bring it down was welcome.
“Weight is a big deal,” he explained. “These cars are very heavy by the regulations, and reducing the weight to what the regulations mark is quite a challenge.”
“We’ve gone through the whole car, front to back, and stripped paint where we could. I think we’ve saved about 350 grams in total.”
Even the teams at the front face a headache when it comes to shedding weight, especially as they aim to make improvements to the car.
Mercedes consider themselves and Red Bull to be the most overweight teams on the grid at the moment.
Toto Wolff , the Mercedes boss, said: “If I had to do an estimate, probably Red Bull, ourselves, inside the top 10, we’re probably the most overweight. And then there are some who are at or just overweight. over”.
“That’s a lap time advantage or disadvantage. But you have to be smart about it. Some have made the decision to go light, and they’re benefiting from it at the moment. and to remove some of the parts that we have on the car that are too heavy.”
Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan added: “It’s hard to get these cars under the weight limit. Then the more they evolve, especially in the first few races, they can go up.”
“So that requires some lightening efforts to get that weight back down. Everybody is fighting the same battle. Where we are in relation to everybody else, you’ll have to ask the FIA, but it’s a good fight.”
