How far would a Formula 1 team go to find performance gain? The simple answer is: as far as it takes. The car upgrades that find tenths of a second are vast, seismic improvements, but that doesn’t stop everyone from chasing down the marginal advantages. In a new series, 0.1% Solutions, we'll be exploring the minute details that keep F1 at the forefront of modern technology.

For every major upgrade, there are many more minor developments that find thousandths, rather than hundredths of a second in car performance. They might improve reliability by a fraction of a per cent, or simply just make it easier for the garage crew to perform a pit-stop or to understand the data on a display. The gain from these tasks may not even be measurable – but string a lot of them together, and it starts to make a big difference…

One of the most reassuring sights in the pre-session garage is a mechanic applying clear tape to the bodywork seams of the cars. It’s the final stage of the process and a sign that everything is going to plan.

It's not essential to tape-up the car, and when the team is racing through prep at top speed, they'll fire-up and go the moment the final fastener is in place. So, if you're seeing the crew carefully running their hands along the joins with a roll of tape and a pair of scissors to hand, it's a sign of preparation well under control and time to spare. The only sight more reassuring is when the polish and dusters come out.

But why apply the tape at all?

How much of a gain is there? Really not very much – but enough to justify a couple of grams of tape. Ask any racing engineer and they will tell you that taping-up the bodywork is a small gain – but non-zero.

Any leakage through there pushes away the boundary layer: effectively, it generates more drag from that piece of bodywork, which ultimately can cost some downforce.

The gains by taping the bodywork are all aerodynamic – it isn’t a measure to keep out the ingress of dirt – but there is a secondary benefit beyond downforce. Preventing leaks from the bodywork has a positive – albeit tiny – impact on cooling. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the fewer exits from which air can leak, the more effective the cooling package becomes.

You’d think leaks would provide more airflow, but actually, it can mean less air flowing out the back of the car, which is what draws air through the car. So generally, taping the bodywork makes all of the aerodynamics perform just that little bit better. We don’t measure the impact, but we just know adding the tape takes us in the right direction.

How much of a gain is ‘non-zero’? F1 measures lap-time to the thousandth of a second. Over a typical 5km race track, with a typical spread of 1.5s between the front and the back of the grid, that should provide ample differentiation between 20 cars – so it’s surprising how often cars record the same time to that 1000th of a second.

The most famous example came 25 years ago, when the season-finale 1997 European Grand Prix at Jerez had Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve both setting a 1:21.072 in qualifying. Far more bizarre was that the tie at the top of the leaderboard was a three-way affair, with Heinz-Harold Frentzen also recording 1:21.072.

But it’s not fear of an equal time that makes F1 teams look for these microscopic gains: it’s the fear of just missing out. At the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix, Lando squeaked into Q3 by a margin of just two-thousandths of a second ahead of Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari. And in the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, Daniel missed out on Q3 by three-thousandths (oddly, to Vettel again).

It’s the metaphorical hair’s breadth – which makes searching for these marginal gains ever so worthwhile.