Normally Formula 1’s silly season is during the summer break when everyone is speculating which drivers are going to be in their seats or elsewhere but the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) apparently decided to really drop a deuce on the championship right at the end of the testing sessions at Catalunya.
For those who are not dyed-in-the-wool petrolheads that seriously miss the sound of the engines before the turbo-hybrid era and wonder how many driver’s titles Ayrton Senna would have won had he not died at Imola…the whole furore concerns suspicions that the Scuderia Ferrari might have been playing a bit fast and loose with the technical regulations during the 2019 World Championship.
Their car seemed to have an inordinate gain in engine performance, particularly on long straight sections of the track with a half second advantage or more at a time where everyone else is at best getting another tenth of a second here or there.
To be fair, the technical regulations that govern F1 cars are quite complex and it takes a whole squadron of boffins on your typical F1 team to sort them all out and find loopholes that they can exploit. It’s not uncommon for the FIA to have to issue rules clarifications in-season because of the teams nit-picking already nit-picky regulations to their competitive advantage.
So after a few races of this inexplicable performance gain, Red Bull ask the FIA to clarify the regulations governing the FIA mandated and supplied fuel-flow sensor and whether fooling about with it to increase fuel-flow (and thus available power) was permissible. The FIA said that messing round with this sensor was strictly forbidden.
Soon after that technical directive came out, all of a sudden Ferrari’s performance gain seems to go away.
Fast forward to last week where the FIA issued a statement literally at the close of pre-season testing indicating that they had been investigating Ferrari’s 2019 power unit and had come to a confidential settlement with the team and considered the matter closed.
As you can imagine, the seven teams that aren’t Ferrari or supplied by them howled in protest! In a very rare show of solidarity, they issued a joint statement to the FIA expressing their “surprise and shock” that the FIA (the governing body of Formula 1, amongst others) with conduct such an examination and refuse to disclose the results publicly and transparently and they end it with a threat to pursue all legal avenues of redress, including in the courts. I don’t know what was more shocking…seven teams telling the FIA in essence to go bugger themselves or the fact that seven teams actually agreed on anything! 🙂
The bottom line is that the one question all the teams want the answer to is “was Ferrari’s 2019 power unit legal according to the technical regulations…or not?”
And that led to the FIA doubling down on their position this morning with an even more insane statement this morning where they concluded that after months of investigating Ferrari’s power unit, they were not fully satisfied by Ferrari’s answers and compliance with the rules but the FIA could not provide “unequivocal evidence of a breach” and thus decided long and drawn-out litigation was not in their interest or the sport’s.
Soooooooo…the non-Ferrari teams have to be wondering who has got whom by the short and curlies! Essentially, they’re going to conclude that the FIA strongly believed Ferrari were cheating but couldn’t prove it and given that the Scuderia has a special standing in Formula 1 that no one else enjoys (such as extra prize money for merely being Ferrari!), they really don’t want to piss off Ferrari lest they threaten to leave F1. Again. As they’ve done several times before when they’ve not gotten their way.
Why is this sturm und drang so important? If Ferrari were found to have been using an illegal power unit in 2019 and docked points if not disqualified for the races they were suspected of cheating, that could have definitely affected the points standings for the constructors with each place meaning millions of dollars in additional funds to be ploughed into the R&D for their car.
For Red Bull, that could mean promotion into second in the constructor’s classification and a step up for the mid-field and backmarker teams. That’s a huge deal.
Whilst it’s not quite the bribery scandal that rocked FIFA a few years ago, the FIA’s handling of the whole sorry mess has been ham-handed and clumsy at best. I suspect their latest reply to the seven teams will get an even pithier response…perhaps three words and a raised middle digit in the direction of the FIA offices in Paris!
Erik Williams
5 Mar 2020(David Falwell)
Ferrari will never leave F1, even if they were humiliated in all this. It’s part of their brand.
Had they won the championship, it would be a bigger story. Without the enhancement, they would have still likely finished where they did – so I think this is a tempest in a teacup.
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I suspect that we’ve not heard the last of this.
One team strongly suspected of circumventing the FIA’s fuel flow meter against the technical regs and two teams complicit in their silence knowing exactly what they were sourcing from the Scuderia (because there is no way the FIA could hope to convince me that the engineers at Alfa or Haas had no clue about the hanky panky…not when their standing in the championship depends on knowing what spec they are running down to the last bolt).
The fact that seven teams protested the FIA taking a pass on this is monumental…rarely do you get more than two of them to agree on anything! Look at how ugly and protracted the 2021 specs process has been.
Imagine if it were one of the back markers gaming that sensor…do you have any doubt the FIA would have had a much more forceful response and meted out some serious smiting?
There are very definitely haves and have nots. Merc got away with their dodgy ductwork for brake cooling a few years ago and they’re getting to run their dynamic toe adjustments this season even though it will be banned the next.
The point that I was trying to make was that far from Ferrari being humiliated, it is the FIA itself with its exceptionally over complicated formula, hypocritical governance, and sheer incompetence put on display in these statements that should make the FIA feel humiliated.