🏰🏰McLaren Choose their Star, Newey Goes to Aston

Good morning. Another street circuit to show off the qualifying pace of each team is headed our way and I couldn’t be more excited. Baku could be a pivotal moment in the 2024 season. McLaren is set to take the lead in the Constructor’s championship now that they have set team orders. Ferrari seems to favor the street circuits. Who knows what Red Bull is doing…

One thing you should be looking forward to is Ollie Bearman’s drive in the Haas in Kevin Magnussen’s place after his race ban. We all get a sneak peak into Bearman’s 2025 performance.

Things are heating up!

-Jake Williamson

🏎 Racing in Baku

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has been held in Baku since 2016 and has proven to be a gem of the handful of street circuits that adorn the F1 calendar ever since. Similar to Monaco, this circuit is a true street track with a mixture of long straights and tight corners with walls on either side to punish small mistakes made by drivers. A slight difference from Monaco is the looooong straight that traces along the shoreline. This stretch of tarmac is drafting heaven that allows cars to get a great run at opponents ahead into Turn 1. However, if you don’t get your moves done into turn 1, you may have to wait since, from there, the track enters the medieval city and doesn’t take kindly to running two abreast.

Facts:

• 51 laps

• 6 km circuit

• Lap record 1:43.009 set by Leclerc in 2019

Street circuits pros and cons -

Pros:

• Close, wheel-wheel action

• Narrow margin of error

• Lots of room for strategic victories, or mistakes

Cons:

• Qualifying generally sets the order of events

• Not many opportunities for passing

• Safety cars and cautions can make street tracks a bit of a snooze

My predictions - no scientific backing at all**

• Leclerc - P1

• Norris - P2

• Piastri - P3

• Verstappen - P4

• Hamilton - P5

• Sainz - P6

• Russel - P7

We have seen that the Ferraris like street circuits this year and I see no reason to doubt their qualifying performance with their new floor upgrade. Mercedes and Red Bull struggle in these street circuits and can only be saved by straight line speed along with their strategic choices. This leaves the door open for Norris to take P2 ahead of the newly declared second driver, Oscar Piastri.

🌎 Adrian Newey Chooses Aston

After months of speculation surrounding Newey’s new role, the Brit has finally made his choice. In a joint release event, Adrian Newey was announced as the Managing Technical Partner (or something along those lines) for Aston Martin F1. Let’s break it down.

Leading up to Miami in May, it was announced that Adrian Newey, the Godfather of F1 car design, was leaving team Red Bull for good. The announcement was followed by his immediate departure from F1 projects so he could focus on the Red Bull hypercar (RB17). He was quickly removed from key tech and strategy meetings at Red Bull which has proved to be quite controversial because this is about the time that Red Bull started to implode as a team.

For months after the announcement, rumors and speculation ran wild through the paddock. Was Newey going to stay in F1? Was he planning on travelling the world and retiring?

Frankly, leaving F1 didn’t seem like it was realistic. Not with so many teams gearing up for what is now a real championship fight between the top five teams. A fight that will likely continue into 2025 and beyond. With championships on the line, teams started to line up to call on Newey to help them win races.

The likely candidates were Mercedes and Ferrari. Mercedes didn’t seem to need the help but Ferrari made sense. Hamilton is moving to the Scuderia and Newey would jump at the chance to work with Hamilton, something he hasn’t done yet. However, Ferrari may not have had the coin to pay for Newey let alone give him a piece of the company.

Aston Martin, on the other hand, was spending cash like crazy in their quest to build a championship team. They secured some top level talent, built a brand new HQ in Silverstone, and constructed a shiny new wind tunnel for car development. According to Newey himself, a private tour of Aston’s new HQ was what he needed to make his decision.

To seal the deal, Lawrence Stroll wrote Newey a check and gave him a stake in the company in a deal worth close to $39 million per year. This number may seem to big to fit in the team budget cap, but rest assured that the salaries of the drivers and the top three team employees are not counted toward the cap. So, Stroll was free to spend a fat stack on Newey.

Before you get excited

Adrian Newey will not be directly involved in the development of the 2025 car and will most likely focus his efforts on the new era coming in 2026 along with the integration with Honda Racing, the new power unit supplier for the team.

This means, Fernando Alonso would need to wait until 2026 before he gets a real shot at another title. This doesn’t seem unlikely since the Spanish driver is still quick, but can he handle the mental fatigue of driving into 2027?

🚀Headline Sprint

Door is open for Max at Aston: "Max drives where he can win," said Helmut Marko, speaking to Austrian publication Kleine Zeitung. "Aston Martin has the most modern factory, the wind tunnel will be operational next year and Honda engines will be added to that. Everything fits.

"And if you look at history, it is clear - wherever Newey has gone, there has been an upward trend. I don't know why it should be any different at Aston Martin."

Aston Martin is spending serious cash on their setup for 2025 and beyond. They seem to have the ingredients for a world championship team and with driver salaries left out of the budget cap, we could see the Silverstone base team offer serious money for Max Verstappen to abandon Red Bull prior to his contracted end date of 2028. Every top driver has performance clauses in their contract that would allow Max to leave if Red Bull continues to implode, so this move would not be surprising.

Ferrari is “flying blind” until Austin: Ferrari brought a major upgrade to their floor geometry to Monza along with several track specific upgrades. However, Ferrari is unable to fully assess the effectiveness of their new floor because Monza, Baku, and Singapore all lack the high speed, high downforce corners that could put the scarlet car to the test. It is more likely that we will see the full effects of the Ferrari upgrades at the USGP that takes place in October.

McLaren has decided on team orders: team boss at McLaren, Adrea Stella, has reported that Piastri has agreed to give up a victory to support Norris’s path to the world title. Even though these new rules (amended Papaya rules) will only take effect in certain situations, this is good news from McLaren because they needed to put the team behind their only chance at a world title (Lando). It’s been speculated that Mark Webber (Piastri’s manager) had pushed for a “no number two driver status” clause to be included in the Australian’s contract which is why we may have heard Zak brown wax poetic about their proud “two number one drivers” status. However, having two lead drivers has lead to major problems at the Hungarian and Italian GPs so the team had to decide.

🛞 Red Bull Blames the Wind

It is very likely that Baku is the moment when Red Bull loses it’s lead in the Constructor’s championship to McLaren. A moment that will weigh heavy on the team for the remainder of the season since it is unlikely that they regain dominance by the end of the year.

But how did Red Bull get here? This is what the team has been asking since it won it’s last race at the Spanish Grand Prix. Ever since they started making major upgrades to their floor, side pods, and rear wing structure Red Bull has seemed to have thrown off the balance of their car.

According to Christian Horner, “There’s a balance issue with the car that isn’t allowing the drivers to commit to corner entry.

“So, as soon as you calm down the rear, you do that by compromising the front. So then you end up with understeer, and then you kill your tyre that way.”

So there is a balance disconnect between front and rear that makes the driver’s unable to commit to corners. Furthermore, every time Red Bull brings upgrade packages to fix these issues, their performance degrades more. Perhaps, the RB20 has become too complex?

The silver lining here is that Red Bull may have identified a key issue in the data that the team is collecting. According to Horner, “The wind tunnel has its limitations, which is why we’ve invested in a new tunnel,” he said.

“But it’s what we’ve got, and we have to make use of it, and I think the wind tunnel is perhaps a contributor, but it’s not the reason behind where we are.”

Apparently, team RB is getting conflicting data from simulations, wind tunnel, and track which leads to confusion and lack of direction to move forward.

It seems that Red Bull will be focusing on track data from now on but that is hard to come by with only 8 races left. So, until the wind tunnel is upgraded and more track data is gathered, we may not see improvement at the Austrian team until well into next season.

💨 Hot Laps

Eddie Jordan explains why Newey chose to sign with Aston citing a “position of total control and responsibility”

Lego teamed up with McLaren to build a 1:1 replica of a P1 and Lando got to take it around Silverstone.

Alonso hints that he might have to drive through 2027 to win another world title.

Is this the year of the wind tunnel battle? McLaren’s latest triumph may have something to do with them having the newest wind tunnel.

Hamilton itching to buy a MotoGP team now that Liberty Media owns the commercial rights. Can Liberty replicate what they’ve done for F1?

🛞Marbles

Random links from the authors not always car related

✅Live: use this quiz to help you determine what country you should live in.

✅Taco Bell: Ever wonder how much Taco Bell costs around the US? Me neither, but here is the site to tell you.

✅Read: Esquire wrote an intriguing article on the September 11th “Falling Man”

✅Eat: This salad recipe has caused a shortage of cucumbers in Iceland.

✅Travel: How to enjoy the beautiful island of Japan on a budget!

🤯Brain Food

What year were the V10 engines banned by the FIA?

📖Answer

2006 - otherwise known as the day the music died ☹️ 

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