The Athletic

The Races

The Races on, and with F1's second ground effect era done and dusted and the new regulations

in 2026 looming interview, we ask how 2022 to 25 will be remembered. Did the rules deliver on

their objectives and what was learned through the four years? I'm Ed Straw and joining me to give

their verdicts are Mark Hughes and John Noble. Well, Mark, we've had four seasons, 92 Grand Prix

in F1's second ground effect era. What will this legacy be?

Yeah, I think it'll be remembered as not quite achieving its aims, which were to make

overtaken a whole lot easier and to have a lot more wheel-wheel action. It did improve that

slightly, and it created a completely new technical challenge and quite a

different one to what had been expected when the rules were configured.

And it's brought some interesting patterns,

but I think, you know, the law of unintended consequences

is what this regulation set will be remembered for. Yeah, John, it's obviously been successful

in some ways, not so successful in others, but right from the start, and we'll get into this

in a bit more detail later on, it was a little bit different to what was expected, which in itself is a good thing, because actually you want some unexpected in Formula One,

don't you? Yeah, I think the expectations are potentially set too high, because it's very easy to

talk about, we'll make the cars follow each other, there'll be tons of overtaking, the action will be

brilliant, and the popularity of F1 will be, you know, fantastic and we'll

forever climb up. But things are not quite that simple. As Mark said, there are unintended,

we're unintended consequences. And I think what the four years have shown is that delivering a

perfect Formula One is actually quite complicated and full of contradictions,

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