🏁 Christian Horner Under Investigation

PLP Season 2 Edition 6

20 Days Until the 2024 Season Opening Weekend

If you’re not quite over last week’s news and want to have your mind blown again: Hamilton’s Ferrari contract is reported to be worth $100M per year. That’s good for at least a few more high fashion outfits. Also playing a role in the move was Ferrari’s willingness to invest in their new driver’s charitable efforts, Mission 44, as well as support him as an ambassador for the brand - two items to which Mercedes would not commit.

Since the story of Lewis’s red threads will undoubtedly wind throughout the entire 2024 campaign, it has many fans eagerly asking: Is it 2025 yet? However, I cannot stress this enough - we musn’t wish our time away. There’s still plenty of great racing (not to mention life) action to be had in 2024. It’s critical we enjoy the moment and not always look to skip forward. Adam Sandler warned us about this in Click.

Quick Quiz!

Answer revealed at the bottom ⬇

Last Week: 2/3 got the correct non-Ferrari driver of Ayrton Senna. Thankfully no one picked Schumacher… the most legendary driver in a team that’s full of them.

Christian Horner Under Investigation

News broke early this week that team principal Christian Horner was under investigation by Red Bull (the full parent company, not just the F1 team) over allegations of “inappropriate behavior”. The rumor mill ran wild (as it tends to do) with speculation on the exact nature of the conduct. The latest sources are saying that the allegations do not involve sexual impropriety but center on a female employee’s concerns about Horner’s strict management style and “controlling” behavior.

A hearing is scheduled for today (give it a quick google, there may be updates available now) to determine his future with the team. He’s remained at his post this week even among rumors that he has been urged to resign due to this issue the Red Bull higher ups consider “extremely serious”. Horner himself issued a brief statement simply saying “I completely deny these claims”.

The result of this matter could have far reaching effects: a mutual protection contract clause with Adrian Newey means the elite car designer may also leave in the wake of a Horner departure. Cue Fred Vasseur smiling and nodding menacingly.

Another twist in this incredible off season.. one that is obviously on the more serious side. It’s still not clear exactly what event prompted this to blow up - so we’ll have to see what further details emerge today. More conspiracy minded folks have been pointing to a power struggle at Red Bull ever since co-founder and Horner ally Dietrich Mateschitz’s death in 2022. Stories of Christian clashing with the outspoken Helmut Marko and even Jos Verstappen have fueled speculation.

Launch SZN: Part 1

Here they are - the first look at 2024 builds 4 out of 10 of the teams on the grid. While it’s usually tough to pick out all of the technical changes from the team releases, the new liverys are an easy one to see and judge. The internet was abuzz about the new paint jobs selected by the launchers this week.. mostly because there wasn’t a whole lot of it. So far teams are opting for more carbon fiber and less color in the name of saving weight on the car. Can you believe that? Saving weight through less paint? Hard to believe but every detail matters when you’re trying to squeeze out tenths of a second.

While some argue the car launches are anti-climactic and don’t reveal a ton about the new cars, let’s see if we can pick out some of the differences (aside from the lack of color of course). Here’s some visuals from the great @FDataAnalysis on what to look for, using Haas and Alpine as examples:

Haas

• Raised and heavily-shaped sidepod to separate airflow around radiator and floor (moving away from the bulky out-washing type), new chassis to relocate radiator further up car, lowered side impact protection bar

• Ferrari supplied suspension remains push-rod front/pull-rod rear, indicating the Scuderia may have stayed with this layout as well. Push vs pull changes how the wheel pulls on the torsion spring when traversing a bump. Yes, I googled.

Stake F1 Kick Sauber

Yea I’m still seeing a bunch of variations of this name used. Sigh.

• The C44 moved towards Red Bull design philosophy with pull-rod front suspension, similar radiator inlet, and heavy undercut and ramped sidepods

• Maintains Ferrari power unit and gearbox internals within Sauber’s own casing, more conventional “A” shape halo design to account for load increase on roll hoop as a result of Zhou’s 2022 crash

• Pull-rod front suspension allows for tighter aerodynamic control and makes it easier to incorporate anti-drive (ratio between height of where tire force vector crosses center of gravity plane. Yea I’m gonna need like 10 more googles to understand this one)

Williams

• Keeping tech details under wraps for now - only launched the new livery

• Albon says they have more of an “all around” car vs the straight-line beast from last year, and James Vowles says they have attempted to make the car more predictable and less “peaky” by adding downforce and a new aerodynamic angle

• Changed development approach from prior years - started early after not upgrading 2023 car after race 8 in Canada last year

Alpine

• New geometry for the pushrod rear suspension, reconfigured sidepod cooling with deeper undercut, reduced chassis weight, more attention on brake thermal management to optimize tire performance

• The Renault power unit will still suffer a small power deficit, and will attempt to be addressed via the motor duty cycle (refers to sequence and duration in time of all aspects of typical motor operation such as stop/start/braking/load/no load/rest. No google this time! [It was a YouTube video])

• Floor differentiation, front wing and nose updates to manage airflow

Visa Cash App RB (still hurts to type) launches 10:30pm PST but I ain’t stayin up for that on the East Coast.. we’ll see what they got next week.

Red Bull: Year in Review

TLDR: They won everything. Well, almost everything - Carlos Sainz will forever be the answer to a trivia question.

21/22 race wins, P1 in the Constructors’ clinched in race 16 at Suzuka, with Max clinching the Driver’s Championship a week later in the Qatar Sprint. Name a record, Max broke it this year. The list is just ridiculous, and includes season records most wins (19), most points (575), most laps led (1,003), and here’s a fun one - most pitstops made by winning driver in one race (6) at the wet and wild Dutch GP. There’s not much more to say about the champ that we haven’t said already. An absolute masterclass in professional sports dominance.

4 races into 2023 and we thought there actually might be a fight between the RBR drivers for the top spot - but that dream quickly unraveled and seems down right silly looking back at where were ended up. It’s been beaten into the ground but must be acknowledged - Perez struggled mightily for a large portion of the year. He seemed to not be able to get out of his own head with many mistake riddled weekends, only moving onto Q3 in half of them. And despite all of this he still cleared Hamilton by 51 points to take P2 in the Drivers’. The power of the RB19 ladies and gentlemen.

Red Bull is still the obvious favorite this year, though the competition should (let’s hope) be tighter as teams have another year developing their car under the same rule set. Any one of Mercedes, Ferrari, or McLaren should be able to take some races from the champs - though it would be a significant upset if it’s not RBR and Max at the top again.

• Highs: Take your pick for Max. He named Miami, Zandvoort, and Suzuka as his best of 2023. For Checo, 2 wins in the first 4 races.

• Lows: Take your pick for Sergio. Mexico was brutal with his lap 1 collision - though I respected the all or nothing play. The only low you could point to for Max was Singapore, and that was just a matter of the car not suiting a track for once.

• “A big thank you to Red Bull, it’s just been an incredible year. It will be hard to do something similar again, but we definitely enjoyed this year” - VER

• “I’m not the type of guy that at this stage of my career will be giving up and be willing to finish my career like that. It’s not something that I ever considered doing.” - PER

Down the Grid

Tech Talk

• Sprint Race format changes have been announced. Friday will see FP1 followed by the Sprint Shootout (sprint quali). Saturday will be the sprint race, followed by Grand Prix qualifying - with the main race remaining on Sunday.

  • This has some fans saying driver’s won’t be taking risks in the Sprint, knowing that a crash out could ruin their race qualifying later that day. A valid point. However, a criticism of last year’s schedule was that after GP quali, parc ferme rules prevented set up changes on the car and the Sprint would reveal team performance limits that weekend - basically giving away who would be strong in the race. This seems to be a tough one to get right - but I do like the Sprints in general and it’s encouraging they are trying something new.

• Some additional rule changes announced for 2024 include: 1) DRS can now be activated on lap 2 instead of 3, 2) DRS can be activated 1 lap after safety car restarts, down from 2 (maybe max won’t be able to shoot ahead out of DRS range as easy now), and 3) 4 power units will be available per driver, up from 3 and reflecting the necessity for more in a 24 race calendar

Off the Grid

• British GP extended through 2034

• Stake F1 has found itself in the sous-vide (hot water.. get it? Sorry). Stake does not have a license to operate in the team’s home country of Switzerland, and concerns have been raised about unauthorized advertising. The Swiss Federal Gaming Board is currently scrutinizing the matter, which may result in a fine. Sure feels like they didn’t think this one through. I guess a $140M AU ($91M USD) sponsorship deal will do that.

• Former AlphaTauri driver Nyck DeVries loses court case over a contract clause attached to a loan he received in 2018. The terms stated if he became an active F1 driver by 2022 - the year he subbed for Albon at Monza - he would owe back the 250K euro loan plus half of his salary and sponsorship income earned. Insult to injury for Nyck. Demonstrates the deals that are sometimes necessary to get a shot, though nailing him on that substitute drive is a tough one. He can’t be happy with Alex’s appendix at the moment.

• New F1 Lego sets coming in March 2024: An Ayrton Senna McLaren, a Lego Technic Mercedes W14, and 2 budget friendly builds - a Mercedes W14 pull-back and a 2023 McLaren. Also came across a Lego Lewis in Fortnite this week - looking fashionable as always.

See ya next Friday for Launch SZN: Part Deux. The past few weeks, summarized:

Questions? Comments? Did we get something wrong (never 😁)? Let us know ▶ [email protected]