Formula 1 is aiming to stop individual teams exploiting regulatory loopholes by ending the requirement for unanimous votes.
Currently, within a certain time period, the FIA needs the support of all 10 teams to change regulations or ban the use of devices which may be legal but go against the spirit of the regulations.
And as F1 prepares to introduce a new car designed to promote closer racing for 2021, motorsport director Ross Brawn is keen to stop teams undoing the work he has done by finding innovations that the FIA hadn’t considered.
“The governance in the past has been the teams have to all agree to make a change. We’re pushing through governance where we can make changes much more on short notice than at the present time,” Brawn told Formula1.com.
“If you exploit a loophole in the future, you can be shut down at the next race, which you could never do now.”
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While a good idea in theory, this change in approach actually seemed less feasible as the veteran F1 engineer went into more detail.
“So the Brawn diffuser – as it happens, there were three teams that had it, so it would have carried on,” he revealed.
“But if one team stands out there with a solution that has never been conceived, never been imagined and destroys the whole principle of what is trying to be done, the governance would allow, with sufficient support from the other teams, to stop it. This is a whole different philosophy.
“Then what happens is someone who has a loophole thinks, ‘Do I want to use it or do I want to tell the FIA about it as it wasn’t intended?’,” he argued.
“You’ve found a loophole in the regulations and you turn up at the first race and the FIA say, ‘Sorry chap, that wasn’t intended, we’re going to hold a meeting now and if everyone agrees, apart from you, we’ll stop it’.”
The issue is, given the developmental restrictions put in place for 2021, it is very likely that designers will find the same loopholes to exploit and, even if a concept is not introduced by every team at the same time, a second or third team may have their own interpretation already in production and could vote against closing the loophole.
Then there’s the alliances which are already in place usually along engine supplier lines, with Mercedes customers backing Mercedes, Ferrari customers backing Ferrari and if Red Bull found a loophole, then AlphaTauri (Toro Rosso) would back them up also.
Brawn though is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2009 when teams did eventually find ways to undo the progress made to address the turbulent air issue.
“These cars at the moment are terrible aerodynamically when they get close to each other,” he said.
“They have a plethora of bits that fall off as soon as they look at each other. That’s not a racing car, you don’t want a tank but you want something which is robust enough to race properly and we have lost that.”