After the FIA revealed its plans to make changes to Formula 1’s soil-related regulations to alleviate porpoising problems faced by several teams, they have been drawn into an argument with opposing views.
The governing body announced last week that it planned to modify the 2023 technical regulations by raising the edges of the floor and the diffuser area for safety reasons, but some teams took a position against this measure.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said there was “a lot of pressure to change the regulations significantly going into next year so that a certain team can run their lower car and benefit from it”, hinting that it was Mercedes. .
But the German team’s engineering director, Andrew Shovlin , said there was really no guarantee that any of these changes would benefit the whole, but that they were necessary to address safety issues stemming from porpoising .
“The reality is that we’re working on solving our problems on our own, and I think we’ve come a long way on this front,” Shovlin said.
“We can understand the teams that don’t want the regulation to change. We, like Mercedes , don’t know if a regulation change is in our interests.”
“If you think about what happened between 2020 and 2021, we didn’t know that the regulation change was going to hurt us more than other teams,” he continued. “So I think we are not in a clear position to say whether the rule changes are going to favor Mercedes or not.
“When that change came in 2020 for safety reasons, Red Bull and Ferrari didn’t object, but the most important thing is that Mercedes didn’t either. In the end it happened, and it didn’t suit us, but it happened,” Shovlin added.
The current FIA proposal for the 2023 regulations is about increasing the edges of the ground by 25mm, but it is believed that some teams would be willing to compromise and could accept a smaller increase.
However, Shovlin believes that this commitment “has the teams that think there will be a change yes or yes, so they want it to be the minimum possible”, and that Formula 1 cannot be influenced on an issue related to safety. .
“Like we said, as a team we can all work on this for sure, but if you really want the cars to run in a different way, with these rules you’re always going to need a car that’s very flat,” Shovlin said.
“There have already been some big accidents this year, where a car has hit the ground a lot and a driver loses control, or they go over a curb and it’s something like that.
“So the safety argument is as much about that as it is about comfort,” the Mercedes man concluded.
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