What’s behind F1’s car balance problems?

In a year when so many Formula 1 teams have hit different upgrade problems, there is one common theme among them: car balance headaches.

From Max Verstappen complaining his RB20 has turned into a ‘monster’, to Ferrari’s return of high-speed bouncing, to the Mercedes becoming nervous in qualifying and Aston Martin losing its way for a bit.

Each team has experienced a near identical scenario of delivering a car upgrade that brings with it extra downforce but with it the side-effect of an altered car handling to make it feel worse from the cockpit.

That so many teams have been struck down by this is no coincidence, because the extra performance being added this year has exposed some inherent technical challenges with the current ground effect cars.

And central to it all is the way that two performance factors dominate handling. This is the varying downforce levels produced at different speeds as the car is pushed the car closer to the ground, allied to how the tyre temperatures are impacted throughout the lap.

Both of these elements are dynamic and are forcing teams to chase the least worst compromise, rather than seek a perfect solution.

This is something that has been known for a while, with Mercedes technical director James Allison opening up at the end of last year about the problems teams were having to wrestle in getting the current cars to produce the downforce when it was needed the most.

“There’s a sort of fundamental difficulty in these rules which is that the car will generate more and more downforce the lower it goes,” he said.

“That’s not without limit, because you don’t want it to just magnet itself onto the ground at the end of the straight, because at the end of the straight you generally are not going around the corner.

“If that’s where your best downforce is, it’s just generating drag for you. So in order to cope with the load that that creates at the end of the straight, you’re going to have to have stiff springs or higher ride heights.

“If you’ve got higher ride heights, then that means that you’re not going to be where the downforce is. So that means stiff springs. And so with these cars, there is this sort of treasure of downforce to be had near the ground, and you can find lots of it there. But you also have to survive the end of the straight.

“So there is a sort of a little bit of a limit that this end of…