What exactly is a `concept' in F1? 'More than just the sidepods'

The hot word in Formula 1 these days is the 'concept' of the car. More and more teams are making the switch to 'the concept' of Red Bull Racing's RB19, with the latest rumour being that Mercedes will also do so. But what exactly do teams mean by a concept?

The concept is about more than the sidepods

People often think about the sidepods when they think about the concept of the car. After all, that is also a part of the car that stands out and where changes are easy to see. However, a change of concept for F1 teams means much more than "just" changing the sidepods of the car, as Mercedes did in Monaco, for example, where they abandoned the zeropod concept.

"We view it in a bit more complicated way than just what do the sidepods look like. And what the sidepods look like interacts very heavily with what's going on with the floor. And the floor is the thing that's generating most of the downforce. So, you know, you use the word like we're going down a different [path], or exploring a different concept, but, generally, that, for the teams, will mean that there are changes right underneath the car, and it's about putting the bits together above that are going to be conditioning the flow. So that's one element," said Mercedes' Andrew Shovlin.

Mercedes came up with an innovative concept in 2022 as a solution to the new regulations, but it now appears that this was not the right concept. However, the budget cap makes it very difficult for the teams to simply flip that, Shovlin explained. This was evident with Mercedes who took over a year to change concept.

"But then the other thing, with a new set of regulations, is working out where you want to target the downforce. Where are you wanting to chase in terms of efficiency or drag levels? And a lot of the work we do when we're talking about going off on a different development route, is actually saying, where do we think the real value is? And when your resources are so limited, you need to be very careful about where you're searching for performance because it's got to be fruitful because you've got so little tunnel time, the cost cap is making things difficult… You don't want to be exploring in barren lands," Mercedes' technical director concluded.

New 'concept' hard to learn

A new 'concept' not only takes a long time to get on the track, but after that, according to Jonathan Eddolls, head of AlphaTauri, it also takes a long time to make it work properly on the track. "For our part, when we come to a track with a different concept, generally a lot of time goes into learning to understand whether it works as expected, especially on the aerodynamics side."

"Clearly from our side, when we come to the track with a different concept, there's generally a lot of learning to do to understand if, particularly on the aero side, if it's behaving as expected. Some change in concept require a different set-up, different heave stiffness platforms, different mechanical balance, weight distribution to optimise the aerodynamics, and how you can get the tyres working. So yeah, the first thing then we do at the track is the correlation work to validate all of our pre-event and simulator work, and then take that feed that back into the models and see how to adapt the set-up to extract the most from that change in concept," Eddolls continued.