BARCELONA, Spain -- The FIA has revealed more information about the 2019 aerodynamic regulations, which are designed to improve overtaking.
The new rules will see changes to front wings, brake ducts and the Drag Reduction System after securing a majority vote at a meeting of the F1 Commission last month. The idea is to minimise the loss of downforce a car experiences when following a rival, which has been pinpointed as the main limiting factor preventing wheel-to-wheel racing.
The exact wording of the regulations is due to be discussed with teams on Sunday in the hope of eliminating any loopholes, but the FIA's head of technical Nikolas Tombazis believes the change should improve racing.
"It's not a matter of black and white and whether you can follow [another car] or you can't -- we hope to make an improvement in close racing and to be able to allow cars to follow more closely.
"The end plate [of the front wing] is significantly simplified, all the top furniture -- the little winglets that you can see and various vertical fins that produce a range of vortices that are intended to control the front wheel wake -- these are being eliminated. And the wing profiles themselves, they have to follow certain rules that makes them simpler and hence less able to control the wheel wake.
"In our studies the wheel wake is what then affects the following car, and [the teams] losing control of that, we feel, is what is going to make a big step in improvement. But as I say, I am not expecting cars to be bumping each other like touring cars, it is just going to make a step forward.
"I would also add that the way the development is going in current racing, one of the key tasks of aerodynamicists in a Formula One team is to move the wheel wake further outboard for the benefit of their own car. The more outboard it is, the less it affects the diffuser and rear wing, and again performance. So that is the key objective.
"That key objective is also bad for the following car, so our expectation is that if we didn't do a rule change, the next two years in '19 and '20 would gradually be getting worse. Part of the rule change was to stop that trend and make a step change. We feel that these performance characteristics would actually be worse for '19 and '20 if we did nothing."
Tombazis stressed that the 2019 changes are a separate project to the rules overhaul planned for 2021, but said the FIA and F1 would still learn lessons from 2019 that it can apply to 2021. A selection of teams have completed simulations based on the 2019 rules and Tombazis said the overall results suggest an improvement.
According to the FIA's simulations, if a 2018 car loses a certain level of downforce when it is 1.0s behind the car in front, the 2019 rules should allow drivers to get within 0.8s before losing the same level of downforce next year.
Combined with a more powerful DRS, the FIA hopes the new front wings will open up overtaking opportunities at tracks where, historically, passing has been difficult. However, it will also trim the length of DRS zones at other tracks to ensure overtaking does not become too easy.
One side-effect of the changes is that the 2019 cars will be slower than this season's, which is at odds with the last major regulation change in 2017 that was designed to make the cars five seconds per lap faster.
"We expect to about lose 1.5s per lap maybe -- that sort of order," Tombazis said. "But it is a bit difficult to predict exactly the amount of development the teams will put on, but we certainly expect to lose performance, but that sort of magnitude."