“Lap one was just chaos with the energy usage,” said McLaren’s Oscar Piastri after finishing seventh in Saturday’s sprint race at Silverstone.
“Pretty dangerous at some points, to be honest, but that’s what we’ve got… Then after that the following [other cars] was just very, very difficult in terms of staying on top of the car.
“Some things to look at, for sure, but at least we know what to expect tomorrow – which is chaos.”
The competitors have known for almost two years that the first race at Silverstone under Formula 1’s new technical rules would be one of the most problematic tests of this format, given the layout of the track. And this prediction came to pass in the form of a harum-scarum series of opening laps dictated by different energy deployment strategies.
As with the season-opening Australian Grand Prix back in March, the action-packed nature of those opening laps pleased the paying spectators in the grandstands, but the drivers themselves were frustrated that so much of it was dictated by battery charge levels rather than skill and bravery. It also made for some sketchy moments caused by sudden changes in speed.
The FIA had acted to mitigate this after Oliver Bearman’s accident in Suzuka, where the Haas driver crashed heavily while trying to avoid Franco Colapinto’s Alpine, which was deploying far less electrical boost at that point of the lap. But the package of changes, which included amendments to boost levels and the option to cut how much energy could be harvested each lap, was essentially a sticking-plaster solution.
Silverstone’s layout, where much of the lap consists of straights and fast corners in which cars need more energy than they can harvest, was always going to expose the fundamental limitations of hardware which cannot be changed. Hence Piastri’s complaint that he spent most of his opening lap “trying to avoid crashing into the back of people”.
This problem has been largely absent from the past four grand prix weekends because the track layouts in Canada, Monaco, Barcelona and Austria are more deterministic in terms of electrical strategy. The ratio of straights to corners, and the nature of those corners, tends to push teams and drivers towards the same approach to harvesting and deployment.
“The pace wasn't too bad,” said Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who started fourth but lost ground at the start, then got the better of Max Verstappen and Piastri in the yo-yo battle to finish fifth.
“The tricky thing is that when you were in a fight, we were very vulnerable because we have a very different deployment than others. And so it was very difficult for me to overtake.
“On my way to Turn 15 [the Hangar Straight towards Copse], I was very, very slow compared with the cars around. Max was even slower, to be honest.
“But there was just huge differences, and it’s been quite a few races where we haven't seen this amount of differences between cars, which makes the fighting a bit tricky.”
Part of the concern derives from differences in closing speeds, such as when Verstappen made an early move on George Russell on the front straight and appeared to catch the Mercedes much quicker than expected, requiring a reflexive swerve. He and Piastri then almost tripped over one another later in the lap.
The contra-argument put forward by some observers is that these are the best drivers in the world, and having quick reactions is a prerequisite for racing at this level. Likewise there is a point of view – memorably espoused by F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali earlier this year when he said “overtaking is overtaking” – that action-packed racing entertains the crowd and looks good in a highlights package, so it is axiomatically a good thing.
But this is partly a factor of the electrical deployment being largely invisible to the naked eye. Racing purists and the drivers themselves view passing manoeuvres dictated by different battery levels as fundamentally unearned and superficial. As to the safety factor, risk is an element best judged by the competitors themselves rather than the armchair-expert opinionati.
Interestingly, those who emerged from the hurly-burly of the opening laps in a good position took a slightly more nuanced view. Lando Norris, who had a relatively lonely race to third place, said the racing was “better than I expected”.
Given that the hardware cannot change this year, but will be revised over the following seasons to step down the level of electrical contribution, many of the drivers have reached the stage where they have given up complaining. Max Verstappen is one of these.
“I’ve decided for myself to not say anything about that anymore,” he said.
