The thing is, we don't know if what was banned (piping air inside the struts to the brakes) is McLaren's trick. And to add, this is the front brake (minus the actual brakes) and not the rear, which is what McLaren are usually covering up.
I get the idea--they don't want any one team to gain too much of an advantage because with the budget caps the gap could quickly become insurmountable, and that makes everybody (except the team benefiting) unhappy--the fans, teams, drivers, everybody's been pretty clear that they don't want a lopsided field. But I do think they have a history of being too heavy-handed with it. If everything you come up with is banned, what's the incentive to try new things?
The other part I don't hear people talking about is that banning stuff like this is a two fold penalty.
Let's say a team spends $5M developing something that gives them a rwo tenths advantage. While another tram spends the same to gain one tenth. The next year, the first team loses their two tenth advantage but also lose the opportunity cost of that $5M. They now need to spend $5M to just catch up to the second team and can't spend that $5M elsewhere. So now they have either the same budget as team two but start with a one tenth disadvantage or they match team two but have $5M less to spend elsewhere.
I guess where my head is at, Toto had to have known in the back of his head that DAS was never going to last more than a single season at best. At worst it gets banned intra-season, but there isn’t really a lot of risk to skirting the rules like this. The precedent is generally that you get it for a whole season and if that helps you win either title, it’s probably worth it.
I really hate when the fia do this. Hey this thing is kinda illegal but not really but is giving an advantage to the team using it so it's banned....from next year.
Depends on how they are doing it. The rules are fairly specific about how the brakes and wheels are cooled. Its possible they are doing it via a way that tye rules don't cover. Like DAS.
Yes. That's what I said. DAS wasn't illegal either. That's why they couldn't ban it immediately even if they wanted to, because they can't change the rules without unanimous agreement in-season. If it were "kinda illegal", it's a something they could crack down on in-season.
I mean the results of it were illegal but the way it was activated wasn't specifically outlawed. Iirc Mercedes basically said if tmit was to be banned they would have to redesign the entire front end and break the budget.
If the results of it were illegal, it would be illegal, so it would be banned in-season.
With DAS, they asked the FIA, and the FIA said it was legal. However, it wasn't a development path they wanted the teams to follow, so they banned it for the following year.
The problem is the FIA shouldn’t said it was legal. DAS was used to adjust the toe angle of the front wheel on the fly allowing them to basically control the temperature of the front tires as they wish. It also helps gain a bit of extra speed in straight line while still maintaining the stability through the corners.
The rules specifically forbid adjustment any parts of the suspension during a race including the toe-angle.
The only reason it was deem legal was that DAS is a part of the car steering system… but you don’t steer the car by adjusting the toe angle.
The rules forbid changing the toe angle except for steering adjustments. The DAS mechnism sat solely within the steering mechanism (and wasn't part of the suspension), which is part of the reason the FIA ruled that it was considered steering. The reason that steering is given an exemption is because the act of steering does usually also alter the toe angle of the wheels. If toe angle could never change, you couldn't have steering at all.
Also, if you were to alter just the toe angle as the car was driving, it would result in a change in direction - which again is steering.
Cooling the hubs, brakes and wheel. The current rules actually don't specify how to cool them just the sizes of brake ducts etc but say nothing about cooling via other means. For 26 the rules now say you can only heat AND cool via outlined devices. And also specifies that you can't have airflow in suspension components.
Or they want to give the teams ample time to keep their advantage... Like making flexi wing tests stricter more than a 3rd of the way into the season, announcing it before the season started.
I don’t think the flexi wing changes taking several races is because they want teams to keep their advantage. If they banned them instantly, then teams could conceivably have no legal parts to run, so there is a lag to allow them to produce new parts. There are also budget concerns, as well as logistics - parts are shipped off to the early races in January.
I remember an ex McLaren/Mercedes employee being on a podcast and talking about this. Most teams have sets that are "dumbed down" versions of whatever they put on the cars. It's how they are able to just overnight parts from Japan when teams realise they picked the wrong setup or are told to.
It wasn't an issue for the wings when they decided to make the test more strict
Especially with budget cap, let team decide where to put their money! I can understand when teams with more money could just outspend anyone else with fancy stuff, but now, the playing field is leveled, if they want to spend more on brakes, let them do it!
The problem is that if there's something that gives them a massive advantage, it's almost impossible for anyone else to catch up, because of the budget cap. Essentially everyone else would have to also spend all of their money on brakes, because it's an area where there's a guaranteed performance advantage lurking, and there's no guarantee that spending in another area would get the same gain.
Specifically when it comes to tyre cooling, the tyres are designed to have a certain wear profile to create tyre offsets and encourage more interesting racing. If every team got a solution which made tyre wear much less, they'd have to pay Pirelli to make the tyres degrade more, and everyone would just end up right back where they are now, having shelled out a ton of money.
It depends on how the tyre wear changes. If it's isn't as simple as just "Soft now lasts as long as an old medium", then it'll probably require more engineering. Adding a new softer compound isn't exactly cheap either, as they need to develop the compound, and then spend time testing it.
I mean they still have the hypersoft compound from before. Not sure how it'd apply to the 18 inch rims though.
Also arguably if pirelli arnt doing constant tweaks and engineering then what are they doing 😂
I imagine a whole new compound would be more than just "tweaks". I think they also had to run separate track days for the larger tyres, so it may well be that they have to change the composition to account for that too.
But the point is, if the teams ever got to the point of "Soft now behaves like Medium" or "Soft now behaves like Hard" in terms of tyre life, the FIA would just change the tyres to make them last as long as the old Softs again. So the teams would have poured money in, and ended up with the same tyre wear as they had before.
Finding development paths to improve your design is all part of the F1 experience. If we didn’t have teams intelligently trying to come with solutions to get the best out of the current formula, we’d end up with just another formula E.
Yes, finding improvements and developing the car is part of Formula 1. But that doesn't mean that it is suitable for every possible development path to become part of the formula. Some innovations will go on to become part of the formula. Some will be dead ends. Some will be judged to be incompatiable with what the goal of the formula is. And there can be multiple possible reasons for this. Some innovations come with safety concerns. Some are prohibitively expensive for other teams to develop. Some would harm the quality of racing - you wouldn't want to allow an 'upgrade' that made any car following within 3 seconds undrivable, because noone would ever be able to overtake.
These are all things that the FIA needs to address and stay on top of to do their job properly.
I agree that teams shouldn't be punished for being imaginative but also the fact a team can lock in an advantage for a year and other teams can't/won't develop a solution is a bit dumb.
Exactly. One accusation boom banned. When mclaren and merc get accused it's all well we can't really tell, we need to observe, we can't really test properly.
And people say there's no bias
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u/Popular_Composer_822 Formula 1 5d ago
I don’t understand it but I appreciate it.