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After the spectacularly close fight at the front of Formula 1 over the second half of last year, teams and fans are gearing themselves up for an even tighter battle in 2025.
With so little separating race-winners Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes at times, there should be every reason to believe that the fight for title glory is going to resume in a similar fashion.
As Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said after seeing McLaren capture the constructors’ championship in Abu Dhabi: “It's going to be massively close next year. You've got at least four teams that are going to be in contention in the last year of these regulations.
“The biggest winner will be F1 next year. I think that there are going to be fine margins everywhere.”
While on paper the contest between the top squads has all the potential to be a classic, there is one aspect to F1 right now that could put a dampener on things – especially if there is little separating cars in pace terms.
It is the ever-increasing dirty air problem that is limiting the prospects for good racing.
Time and again over the closing stages of last year drivers would complain about an inability to properly be able to follow each other, with the current ground effect cars having evolved well away from the good intentions rulemakers originally had for them.
Having started this current rules era in 2022 allowing drivers to follow each much closer than before, that gain has, in the words of the FIA’s single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis "deteriorated" quite a bit.
And if cars cannot follow each other closely – either because they lose downforce or the tyres overheat – then that is not a good catalyst for exciting wheel-to-wheel battles.
What the stats tell us
As well as repeated comments from drivers lamenting dirty air affecting their ability to race, there have been some incidents where the impact of the problem has been more obvious to see.
In the season finale in Abu Dhabi, for example, Oscar Piastri had a notable wild moment at Turn 15 after being caught out by the disturbed air from Yuki Tsunoda ahead of him as they battled for position late on.
The raw statistics certainly point to overtaking having got harder, with the official numbers of passes in 2024 dropping to 788 from 858 in 2023, despite there being two extra races on the calendar.
It means that the average number of overtakes per race dropped from 39 in 2023 to 32.8 in 2024.
Going back to 2022, the first year of the current ground effect cars, the total for the season was 784 – an average of 35.6 for each race.
Below is a summary of the overtakes of the 2024 calendar, with comparison figures from previous seasons.
It is based on genuine passes that were not down to crashes or retirements, and excluded the opening lap.
Looking at the races in more detail, it is clear to see that 2023’s statistics were slightly skewed by the crazy rain-impacted Dutch GP – and wet races do throw up better numbers across all years.
If we take the races that have been a part of the calendar for the past three seasons (so excluding China, Imola, Vegas and Qatar), then the stats show the number of passes from the 20 consistent events were: 741 in 2022, 733 in 2023 and down to only 636 in 2024.
The trend seems clear.
What has caused the problem?
The drop in the ability of drivers to follow each other is the result of car development having moved in a direction that throws up more turbulent air for the pursuing cars.
This has a double whammy of both reducing downforce for the car behind, and also having an impact on tyre temperatures.
A car that slides more overheats its tyres quicker, but there is also an element of the cooling effect being reduced when following someone else too.
As Tombazis has previously explained: “When you have a worse wake, you have slow-moving air which hits the rear car and makes it lose downforce. And you also have slow moving air going over the tyres, so cooling is a bit less.
“Plus, when you're close to the front car, you may be sliding a bit more. It's a combination. So it's not the two things happening [in isolation], they sort of go a bit hand in hand.”
From the FIA’s perspective, the trigger for the way things have gone was the door being left open in the regulations for teams to develop areas of the car that disturbed the wake more than F1's chiefs wanted.
Speaking late last year about why the wake performance had deteriorated, Tombazis said: “We believe that that was the outcome of some specific parts of the car, maybe not being as tightly regulated as possible.
“The aerodynamic development went in the direction of increasing performance for the teams, which is what they want to do, but worsening the wake. The key areas where this happened were the front wing endplates of current cars, the floor edges, the diffuser edges and front wheel furniture.
“Those were the key areas where we missed a few tricks on the regulatory side and therefore allowed some options that made this wake effect become worse.”
Is there hope for a reprieve?
The driver feedback, stats and FIA’s acceptance that things have got worse does not bode well for believing that overtaking will be any easier in 2025.
It is inevitable that teams are only going to push ever harder to exploit aero gains that disturb the wake, so things will only get worse for the following cars.
And while there may be some improvement from new Pirelli construction and compounds, there is not going to be a situation where drivers are able to push flat out and not worry about temperatures.
Pirelli’s head of F1 and car racing Mario Isola said after the first proper test of the 2025 tyres in Abu Dhabi: “The target for us is to provide compounds that are giving the teams the possibility to have mixed strategies. And to have mixed strategies, we need to keep a certain level of degradation.
“If we reduce the degradation too much, the result is that everybody can push, but we have a one-stop strategy with the same compounds and the same stint for everybody.
“When everybody can push, this is not just the cars behind, it is the leader too. And I would say the leader can push more because he's in free air and, with the current cars, when you follow another car closely, you lose a lot of downforce.
“Unfortunately, the situation we had in 2022 when we started with this generation of car is no longer the same.”
While the prospects for 2025 may not be ideal then, the way wake manipulation has changed since 2022 has at least alerted the FIA to areas it got wrong with the current rules – which should be addressed for 2026 at least.
As Tombazis said: “We believe we've learned from this for the '26 regulations.
“The concept of the 2026 car is different. For example, it has the flow board, which is this device in front of the sidepod which helps control the front wheel wake. And the numbers we have for wake performance is far better than anything we had before.
“So we believe we have identified areas where they could have loopholes and try to deteriorate this effect.
“The bottom line is the current 2026 regulations, we believe, will be significantly better in the wake and I would say, also much better than where even the current cars were in 2022.”
