Although Aston Martin had stated in recent weeks that an important revolution was coming, few expected that they would adopt it largely due to the concept that Red Bull had bet on since the beginning of the season.
Despite the fact that the Austrians have admitted that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, and teams have long copied the ideas of rivals in Formula 1, the regulations of the series have become stricter in recent years regarding this behavior.
And ironically it was Aston Martin’s own actions, when racing under the Racing Point name, that caused these issues to be much more heavily policed now. In 2020, the English team caused great controversy when it created a car modeled on the Mercedes W10 of the previous year.
His actions triggered complaints from his rivals and, following a protest from Renault, Racing Point was found guilty of having illegally used Mercedes design intellectual property with its rear brake ducts. The FIA fined the team €400,000 and docked 15 points in the constructors’ championship for its actions.
Beyond the details of the case, Racing Point’s action sparked a much broader debate in the sport about whether F1 risked hurting itself if teams felt their best way to succeed was to copy their rivals. rivals.
The Great Circus was clear that this situation should not occur and the FIA was commissioned to draw up a series of rules to limit the possibility of seeing clone cars on the grid.
As the international federation’s single-seater director, Nikolas Tombazis , said at the time: “This will prevent teams from using the photographs to copy entire parts of other cars as Racing Point has done.”
“We will continue to accept individual components being copied in certain areas, but we don’t want a complete car to be fundamentally a copy of another.”
The new rules prohibit the sharing of any intellectual property between the teams on the grid, as well as the “reverse engineering” of any part of the cars.
While teams could assemble parts “influenced by a competitor’s design or concept,” they could only do so “using information that should potentially be available to everyone.”
This knowledge can only be gained during races or tests, so you can’t work on it off the track. Article 17.3.3 of the 2022 F1 regulations specifically points out when the line is crossed to prevent teams from going too far in trying to copy ideas.
The regulations specifically prohibit the following:
1) The use of photographs or images, combined with software that converts them into point clouds, curves, surfaces, or that allows superimposing or extracting CAD geometry from the photograph or image.
2) The use of stereophotogrammetry, 3D cameras or any 3D stereoscopic technique or any form of surface scanning with or without contact.
3) Any technique that projects points or curves onto a surface to facilitate the reverse engineering process.
Although the exchange of personnel between teams is something that has been going on for years, and Aston Martin for example has taken away some key figures from Red Bull, including its new technical director, Dan Fallows , the FIA rules are also clear as to to the fact that direct information cannot be transferred from rivals when hiring new personnel. This information includes (but is not limited to) data, designs, drawings or any other intellectual property.
However, in F1, there is no way to prevent the ideas that one designer has in his head about the design philosophy of one car from being applied to another team.
However, the regulations say that if there is a time when there are strong similarities between components in different cars, the FIA has the right to investigate and will ask the teams to prove that the design was done independently.
To do so, assemblies will be asked to provide data and information to demonstrate that they have met the standards and that they have designed the components themselves from scratch.
The regulations say: “It will be the responsibility of the FIA to determine whether this resemblance is the result of reverse engineering or legitimate independent work.”
That is exactly what has happened in the case of Aston Martin , as the FIA was alerted to possible similarities between the updates to the AMR22 and Red Bull ‘s RB18.
The FIA was quick to say on Friday that it had investigated the Aston Martin parts and that, after analysis of data from both teams, it was satisfied that no infringement of the regulations had occurred.
For now, Red Bull has limited itself to suggesting that any transfer of intellectual property would be a “serious concern” but that they will recheck the details in the coming days to ensure that no direct information came out of Milton Keynes and ended up at the facility. from his rival at Silverstone .
