Haas F1 team boss Guenther Steiner has cast doubt on the impact changes to the front and rear wings will have on the racing for 2019.
Following a disappointing Australian GP to start the year, the FIA focused turned to a study which was already being conducted under the guidance of Pat Symonds and Ross Brawn for Liberty Media, ahead of an overhaul of the technical regulations in 2021.
The goal of their research is to design cars which encourage closer racing and more overtaking, therefore, the wings are set to be wider and simpler next year with the DRS also made more powerful.
However, Steiner believes the actual impact the tweaks will have is unknown.
“These aero people, they do a study in a week, and they say ‘This is what it is’, then they do a study of two months, and [the outcome is] completely different, because they use every little bit of how the regulation is written to get as much performance,” he claimed.
“The three-week study was out of a good purpose, to make overtaking easier but now the aero guys are on it too [with a different focus], forget about overtaking, get performance.
“They are working to find out how much it is actually doing. I don’t think anybody has the answer yet.”
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As with any regulation change concerning the external design, it does require a certain amount of a re-think of the overhaul car philosophy. Not only is that expensive but as the Italian pointed out, also time-consuming.
“We [Haas] are still looking to find out how much it affects what we are doing,” he admitted. “They need to do some CFD [computational fluid dynamics] runs to see what the new front wing does.
“Then they decide, in the next two to three weeks, if we focus a little bit more on 2019 than with the old regs.
“There is a point we will need to switch to 2019, and with the limited windtunnel development and CFD time, everybody is in the same situation.
“I think we will for obvious reasons – we don’t want to be behind.”
