Cutting aerodynamics not the way to go, insists Brawn

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Ross Brawn, Formula 1's managing director for motorsport, says cutting downforce levels isn't the answer to improving competitiveness in the sport.

Brawn was speaking at a special press conference in Montreal on Friday. Liberty Media's new F1 management team answered questions from the media about the future direction of the sport.

"We know we rely on the aerodynamic performance of the car," he said. "I think there’s a slightly naive view that we should get rid of the aerodynamics and then everything would be wonderful.

"The fact is they won’t be as spectacular. They won’t be as fast as they are if we get rid of the aerodynamics.

"There’s no way of just putting on big tyres and hoping they’re going to go as fast.

"We need to retain the aerodynamics. And we need to do it in a way that makes the cars more raceable.

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"You can’t guess at that, you have to do work to establish it," he added. He explained that he had contracted a number former F1 engineers to study ways of improving the racing.

"We’ve just initiated our aerodynamic programme to look at the design of these cars and see what we can do in the future."

"We’re still starting to understand the behaviour of these cars with regard to how well they can race each other.

"I don’t think we’re taking anything for granted."

Brawn admitted that the sport was lucky at the moment having two evenly matched teams at the head of the field. However, he admitted it was a problem that the rest of the teams are some way behind.

"We’ve got some great racing going on. We need to make sure we can do that more consistently in the future," he said.

"We’ve been very fortunate this year that we’ve had two teams that are battling it out so strongly at the front,” Brawn said. “I wouldn’t like to claim any credit for that. It’s just been good timing.

"[But] there’s a slightly worrying gap between the front and the middle of the field which we need to pay attention to.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.