Lowe questions downforce increase for 2017

Dec.18 - Mercedes is among those who are worried about F1's expected new rules for 2017.

The sport basically agrees that the cars must be more spectacular and faster for the future, but there is disagreement about how that should be achieved.

World champion Lewis Hamilton, for one, worries that plans to speed up cornering speeds by adding downforce is the wrong move if the aim is also to promote overtaking.

Indeed, Germany's Auto Motor und Sport reports that it has seen the outline of the 2017 rules, with the cars to have "massively" bigger diffusers and wings.

Force India's technical boss Andy Green said: "Due to the rake of the cars I expect the bigger and more flexible wings might touch the ground quite heavily in fast corners like Eau Rouge."

Auto Motor und Sport said the 2017 blueprint is for 100 additional 'points' of downforce, or 30 per cent more than the current cars.

Correspondent Michael Schmidt said that the FIA's graphics depicting an example 2017 car is in Red Bull livery, as the former quadruple world champion team devised the concept.

Paddy Lowe, Mercedes' executive director, warned: "We have to be careful about putting on more downforce.

"We have never done that before," he told the January edition of F1 Racing magazine. "All previous rule changes have been about keeping it in check."

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Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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