F1 managing director Ross Brawn claims close racing was never the priority for F1 before Liberty takeover

Former F1 managing director Ross Brawn believes that the sport had been going the wrong direction in terms of aerodynamic regulations over the last decades. According to him, ensuring that teams produce cars that could closely race each other was never a priority in the Bernie Ecclestone era.

Ahead of the 2022 season, when F1’s new sweeping aerodynamic regulations come to force, Brawn, in an interview with The New York Times, said:

"We always suspected that and then, when I joined Liberty Media and Formula 1, we then had the resources to properly investigate what happened with the car that was following another, and our suspicions were confirmed."

"You have this self-defeating situation where a car gets close to another and it starts to lose performance the closer it gets and that doesn't aid good racing. That was something we established in the first year of research we did when I joined the organization in 2017, nearly five years ago now."

Despite being some of the fastest cars ever produced, especially in the corners, F1 cars have struggled to produce good racing since the 2009 season when the initial variant of the current aero regulations was introduced.

Over the next five years, despite intense competition between multiple teams for the championship, only two teams came out on top, one of them four times. Meanwhile, other F1 cars struggled with organic overtaking throughout that time.

At the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, championship protagonist Fernando Alonso was unable to challenge rival Sebastian Vettel simply because he couldn’t overtake a slower car. The following year, DRS (drag reduction system) was introduced to facilitate overtaking on the straights.

In 2014, the aero regulations were further revised to make the cars “slower” in a misguided attempt to improve racing. Rather than improve racing, the regulations, combined with new engine regulations, further spread the field and worsened the competition on track.

Just before Liberty Media’s takeover in 2017, a revised set of aero regulations were introduced, this time increasing the leeway teams for teams to produce more downforce. Predictably, they didn’t have the intended effect.

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Teams influence over rule-making created “unfriendly” F1 cars

Brawn believes the rule-making process in F1 was heavily influenced by the teams, who were only intent on their gains rather than the sport as a whole. This led to regulations that created cars that struggled to follow each other closely.

"The rules had been developed by the teams. The teams had all the knowledge. They had all the expertise. They had the funding and the resource.

"The regulations were evolved through proposals and suggestions from the teams. They never made it a priority to make the cars friendly in terms of racing each other.

"Now, suddenly there was a budget and resource made available and I put together a team under Pat Symonds, our chief technology officer and we mimicked this sort of research group that a team has, and whilst they were chasing performance, we started to chase raceability."

Liberty Media’s initial attempt at achieving greater “raceability” in F1 with a 2019 revision to the regulations didn’t yield many results. The banning of winglets on the front wings did little to ease the vast amount of “dirty air” the cars were generating.

Brawn hopes that the racing spectacle would be vastly improved with the new generation of F1 cars, hopefully enough to finally get rid of DRS.