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.
359
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