Formula 1

This piece of jargon decides F1's winners and losers, but the meaning behind the term is surprisingly human.

So concepts become an arms race between F1 teams to establish a daring baseline, then develop the car around that concept, with total faith that the ideas behind that concept will come good. But rather than give up entirely on the concept, Mercedes doubled down for this year's W14, mitigating porpoising with a reinforced floor section and hedging the extreme aero approach with slightly more bulbous sidepods, in hopes that the long-term vision would come good. Mercedes’s Zero-Pod concept is an example of the latter. Drastically shrunken sidepods created room for an ultra-wide floor on the car, leveraging far more surface area on the top side of the aero package than any other design on the grid. Take, for example, the concept concerning most modern pundits: Mercedes’s “Zero Pod” design, which premiered on last year's W13 chassis. In just its fourth race, the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix Jody Sheckter put the P34 on pole and led a Tyrrell one-two finish. Optimizing that relationship between drag and downforce remains the central challenge for F1 designers. Pick a bad concept—even for a single year—and it’s enough to torpedo your season. Pick a good concept for your F1 car; you’re immediately competitive, one of few teams able to fight for a championship. In some cases, when a huge rule change shakes up the known formula for success in F1, a bad concept can bring about dramatic failure. That decreased frontal area would in turn reduce drag on the car. Formula 1’s ecosystem of pundits and commenters have recently latched on to “concepts” as a major topic of discussion.