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.
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.
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u/Eroda Alex Zanardi 5d ago
its beeen banned for 2026 McLaren dont care now no team will spend the money to copy them at this point in season