Many people, including myself, are excited for this year’s Formula One season thanks to the introduction of new-and-improved cars promising to be five seconds a lap faster.
As we’ve seen from the first few 2017 F1 cars revealed so far, they also look much better than in recent years, especially if you love complex designs aimed at increasing downforce. However, despite all the changes the sport is undergoing, it may not be any more exciting, at least according to Lewis Hamilton.
Speaking to the BBC over the weekend, Hamilton raised his concerns that the increased downforce produced by the cars could make overtaking much more difficult.
“My engineers say it’s going to be a lot harder to overtake. If we see overtaking is worse, it’s going to be worse for the fans, the spectacle will be worse so I’m hoping that’s not the case. For example, I heard tyres might not be as grippy as we’d hoped but the aero downforce is going to be huge because it’s a bigger, wider car so there’s going to be more downforce, so the car behind will be affected even more than it ever was before,” said Hamilton.
Despite this, Hamilton remains optimistic about the season and says that he hopes to see Mercedes rivalled by Red Bull Racing and Ferrari.
“It might be Ferrari at the front, it might be Red Bull, we have no idea. I think the big unknown is Red Bull, I think they always create an amazing car and this is a new area of downforce and they’re amazing at creating downforce so I think it’ll be really interesting to see what they pull out and I’m hoping it’ll be a real mixture of competition.”
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