Ross Brawn has revealed that the 2021 cars will lose just a fraction of their downforce when following another car closely and that they will be "noisier and even more powerful".
Whilst work was done to cut the downforce loss for this season, following cars still lose roughly 50 per cent of their downforce due to the dirty air coming off the car ahead, but that will be dramatically cut to around just 5 per cent thanks to the reintroduction of ground effect, which is where the floor is used to generate downforce, rather than the surfaces of the car.
"At the moment, we have a car running in CFD and windtunnels which when they are behind another car loses 5% of its downforce," Brawn told Sky Sports F1. "That is pretty small. At the moment, when they get nose-to-tail, the car behind loses 50% of the downforce.
“It’s no surprise, we’ve done that with ground effect. We are using the underside of the car a lot more and it gives us smoother wake behind the car. It’s a dramatic difference, but it’s not the only thing we need to change to get close racing. If we don’t get them together, it doesn’t matter how well they can race each other."
Whilst the power units are set to remain largely the same due to the huge amounts of money invested in them by Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault and Honda, they will be tweaked to be louder and even more powerful, despite currently producing just short of 1,000 bhp.
“They will be noisier in 2021 and they will be more powerful,” added Brawn.
"We are also putting more emphasis on drivers to control some parameters of the engine such as energy recovery, which comes from battery and hybrid motors, more of that will be under the control of drivers. So you can do things strategically to overtake.
"Everyone is on same page now, we have agreements with manufacturers."
