Teams Are Being Forced To Remove Paint To Lose Weight

It’s no secret that the 2022 cars have got a pretty major weight problem. F1 cars are the heaviest they’ve overly been and the new technical regulations have seen them proceeds a whopping 46kg since last season. 

Nevertheless, teams have struggled to get their cars anywhere near the minimum 798kg target – with the likes of Red Bull and Mercedes reportedly well over it.

Every gram that their car is overweight financing them vital seconds of lap time and given how tropical the field is this year, that could be the difference between a win and finishing outside the points. 

As a result, teams are taking pretty lattermost measures to slim lanugo their cars – removing their liveries ?

Compare the Williams we saw virtually Imola at the weekend (above) to the one at Bahrain pre-season testing (below). The visionless undecorous and slick woebegone livery has been stripped off the FW44’s front and rear wings, nose tip, sidepods and virtually their engine cover, exposing large sections of stat fibre underneath.

Desperate times undeniability for drastic measures, as Aston Martin and McLaren have once peeled off paint from their engine covers and rear wings too.

Although there’s no official data showing how much each team’s paint scheme weighs, Williams’ throne of vehicle performance Dave Robson said their transpiration was gaining them “quite a lot“, while Aston Martin previously revealed they’d saved virtually 350 grams by removing some of the AMR22’s green-painted panels.

Removing the paint is a simple, unseemly and easy-to-do short-term solution, freeing up teams’ limited upkeep and resources to plan remoter upgrades later in the season.

However, it’s not without risks. From a marketing side, they’ve got to be shielding not to lose the team’s unique identity to distinguish from the others cars on track, or offend a sponsor by axing their logos. 

On the engineering side, stripping off paint might seem like a win-win visualization but it could make overheating a lot worse.

The dark, exposed stat fibre absorbs heat. This can lead to vastly variegated temperatures wideness the car and makes areas, such as the engine, very vulnerable – expressly on tracks like Singapore where the teams are once struggling to alimony the cars cool.

Whilst for the moment you can unmistakably tell your Williams from your McLaren out on track, don’t be surprised if we see a few increasingly teams bringing out the paint remover soon. 

Have F1 cars gotten too heavy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.