The war between the regulatory body and the teams in Formula 1 continues. The FIA has drastically changed the way of carrying out controls in single-seaters, taking a great leap in the fight against tricks and interpretations of the gray areas of the 2022 regulations within the highest category.
Cars with ground effect were born based on regulations that take into account volumes, and not just measurements, which is not easy to read if you are not an engineer with CAD tools (Computer-Aided Design, translated into Spanish as Computer-Aided Design). Computer) in which the “mathematics” that define the F1 2022 have been loaded.
Each F1 team has to update car developments with CAD data, which will be made available to the FIA technical staff led by Nikolas Tombazis . The Greek engineer has already seen all the changes that the teams will make during testing in Bahrain, and has been able to make a judgment call long before a certain solution debuts on the circuit in the final days of pre-season.
That is why the rumor had spread that some of the ideas proposed by the teams were out of the spirit with which the regulations were written. For example, the FIA wants to prevent designers from generating vortices with angles in the shapes, to prevent them from “foiling” the wake with turbulence that could limit the possibility of overtaking when two cars are close to each other.
With more and more modern tools available, the FIA has decided to revolutionize the approach to testing. Those who were at the pre-season tests in Barcelona will have noticed that, except very occasionally, the single-seaters were not pushed by the mechanics towards the International Federation garage, which is the “kingdom” of Jo Bauer .
Checks on Thursdays and those that usually precede a track session for those who have made modifications to the car have been abolished. The reason? It’s very simple: each team has been equipped with a Leica laser reader, identical to the one used by the FIA, which can scan the shape of the car in its pit lane to the millimeter, transmitting all the data to the federation stewards, who can compare them immediately with the “measurements” of the car that they have in their possession in their database.
Not only that, but the FIA will be able to monitor all the data, without notifying the team which data will be subject to verification, as was the case in the past, making it more difficult to take advantage of loopholes in the regulations.
The control procedure has been streamlined and, above all, the quality of verification has increased. Jo Bauer ‘s group will proceed to inspect the cars after the track sessions at a checkpoint that has been greatly simplified compared to previous years, keeping the scales to measure weight.
The car will be placed on the specific supports provided in the background and will be scanned in the FIA box exactly as each team would have done in their own garage. So, as happened with the measurement of the light between the two profiles of the Mercedes rear wing at the Brazilian GP, they should no longer be recorded, because the laser scan data will be authentic, beyond dispute.
