Mercedes’ technical director James Allison has revealed that Mercedes wanted to introduce their innovative dual-axis steering (DAS) system in 2019, but it was rejected by the governing body, the FIA.
The DAS system allows the driver to adjust the toe-in and toe-out of the front wheels, providing multiple benefits such as better straight-line speed and reduced tyre wear.
It was uncovered during pre-season testing in February, but Mercedes first approached the FIA over the system last year, only for it to be rejected because it was operated by a lever on the steering wheel.
“We first wanted to introduce this in 2019,” Allison said in a Mercedes video. “We took our ideas to the FIA, showed them, explained why we thought it was legal.
“They begrudgingly agreed the dual axis steering was actually legal. But they didn’t much like the way we’d done it because the second axis we were getting from a lever on the wheel rather than that whole wheel movement. They said ‘no, you’re going to have to move the whole wheel in and out’.”
Allison believes the FIA thought that would be the end of the matter as it would have been too difficult to achieve, adding: “I think when they said that, they were hoping that would be too difficult and that we would go and cause them no more problems.”
However the system uncovered in February achieved just that, by allowing the driver to control it by pushing and pulling the steering wheel, which was given the green-light by the FIA to be used in season.
Allison gave credit to chief designer John Owen, who took the challenge on.
“He’s got a really, really good gut feel for whether something is do-able or not. And that’s a really helpful characteristic because it allows us to be quite brave spending money when most people would feel the outcome was quite uncertain.
“So John took that challenge on, reckoned he could do it, put it out to our very talented group of mechanical designers and between them they cooked up two or three ways in which it might be done.
“We picked the most likely of those three and about a year after that, out popped the DAS system that you saw at the beginning of this season.”
DAS has already been outlawed by the FIA for 2021.
