Formula 1’s ecosystem of pundits and commenters have recently latched on to “concepts” as a major topic of discussion. That’s important, because these concepts separate the sport’s successful cars (currently the Red Bulls) from title pretenders. Ergo, understanding the concept is important to understanding the sport itself.
If like many of our readers, you’re new to Formula 1, it’s a good idea to get a handle on this idea. The more you learn about the sport's intricacies, the more interesting F1 gets. Even if you’re not an F1 novice, the sudden influx of stories and punditry about concepts will have likely caught you off guard.
So, what is a concept? Why do concepts matter? And most importantly, where do they come from? We offer a quick primer.
While the term is a relatively recent addition to Formula 1’s ocean of jargon, neither seen nor heard very often in the writing or broadcasts from just a decade ago, the idea of a concept has always existed in Formula 1.
Put simply, a concept is an ethos, one which dictates the design, construction, and development of every F1 car on the grid. Pick a good concept for your F1 car; you’re immediately competitive, one of few teams able to fight for a championship. Pick a bad concept—even for a single year—and it’s enough to torpedo your season. In some cases, when a huge rule change shakes up the known formula for success in F1, a bad concept can bring about dramatic failure. This failure can become generational, with enough fallout to take down an entire F1 team.
As such, finding and executing your concept becomes a high-stakes decision.
Though concepts weren’t always worthy of their own entry in Webster’s F1 Dictionary, we’re now applying the term retroactively. Thankfully, that allows us to easily define F1 chassis concepts by some standout cars from years past: Take, for example, the infamous Tyrrell Project 34 (called P34), the six-wheeled wonder.
Its ingenious concept becomes obvious from a single glance, and its story is beautifully detailed on F1’s own website.
The idea sprouted from the mind of Derek Gardner, Tyrrell’s technical director, who believed that if his design could limit the lift generated by the front wheels’ surface area, he could then decrease the amount of front wing needed to counterbalance that lift. That decreased frontal area would in turn reduce drag on the car. Optimizing that relationship between drag and downforce remains the central challenge for F1 designers.
So Gardner tucked four smaller front wheels behind the P34’s front bodywork. This allowed P34 roughly the same amount of rubber to contact the ground for turning and stopping, but cleverly chopped the frontal area of the car. In an interview with Autosport, Gardner said the aerodynamic gains made by switching to four smaller front wheels equated to roughly 40 horsepower.
In just its fourth race, the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix Jody Sheckter put the P34 on pole and led a Tyrrell one-two finish. The concept appeared in the middle of that 1976 season, but was ingenious enough to snatch almost immediate success; Sheckter piloted the car to third in the world championship that year.
In modernity, we might refer to that as "The P34 Concept" or "Tyrrell's Six-Wheeled Concept," and those terms would be parroted so often in F1 media that they’d become shorthand for this idea in general, no matter which team used it.
Not all concepts are so striking, or immediate to understand.
Take, for example, the concept concerning most modern pundits: Mercedes’s “Zero Pod” design, which premiered on last year's W13 chassis. Motorsport wrote a great primer on the concept ahead of the 2022 season, check that out here.
Effectively, this Mercedes concept traded the airflow benefits created by the bulbous “sidepods” that wrap around the midsection of most modern F1 cars for a tailored approach. Drastically shrunken sidepods created room for an ultra-wide floor on the car, leveraging far more surface area on the top side of the aero package than any other design on the grid. The concept was a gamble from the beginning—as all good concepts are—but one with unintended effects. You’ll recall the porpoising drama from the beginning of last season, which stemmed from a lack of rigidity along that ultra-wide floor section. It became an abject failure for Mercedes.
But that’s exactly why concepts are so interesting to us in the first place. While they can be validated by testing, and refined by computer simulation, concepts are borne from human ideas. That means they’re sometimes genius, but often flawed.
Mercedes’s Zero-Pod concept is an example of the latter. But rather than give up entirely on the concept, Mercedes doubled down for this year's W14, mitigating porpoising with a reinforced floor section and hedging the extreme aero approach with slightly more bulbous sidepods, in hopes that the long-term vision would come good. It cost them a shot at the title , and may have done so again this season; Mercedes bought a revised zero pod concept to the first race of 2023, then announced it would ditch the concept altogether.
Remember: Tyrrell also abandoned the imaginative P34. With tiny front wheels came tiny front brakes, and while the team figured out how the make the P34 turn and reaped the benefits of that low frontal area, it was so unreliable under braking that all P34 drivers, Sheckter included, expressed their hatred for the car at one time or another.
The important thing to understand is that with any concept, there’s no free lunch. Every design concept, no matter how brilliant, is flawed from conception. So concepts become an arms race between F1 teams to establish a daring baseline, then develop the car around that concept, with total faith that the ideas behind that concept will come good.
In short, we love concepts because they’re sometimes brilliant, often fragile, but always human. It’s that humanity which makes F1, from its drivers to its bleeding-edge engineering, so very entertaining.
The only member of staff to flip a grain truck on its roof, Kyle Kinard is R&T's senior editor and resident malcontent. He lives near Seattle and enjoys the rain. His column, Kinardi Line, runs when it runs.
