The FIA says it will implement amendments to the regulations in order to avoid teams carrying out “whole copies” of rivals’ Formula 1 cars.
Racing Point’s RP20 was designed on the basis of Mercedes’ title-winning W10 from 2019, though the team had stressed that it had designed all Listed parts on the car.
However that was countered by Renault, which protested the brake ducts of the RP20, and on Friday stewards determined that Racing Point had been in contravention of the Sporting Regulations.
Racing Point’s brake ducts are legal, under the Technical Regulations, but a year-on-year change in the classification of brake ducts as Listed, rather than Non-Listed, meant the team was deemed to have flouted the Sporting Regulations.
The FIA will now move to avoid a repeat going forward, stressing that while it expects teams to copy components from rivals, it does not want entire designs to be adopted.
“First of all copying has been taking place in Formula 1 for a long time, taking photos, and sometimes reverse-engineering them and making similar concepts or in some areas even identical concepts or close to identical as other teams,” said the FIA’s Head of Single Seater Technical Matters Nikolas Tombazis.
“We do not think this can stop in the future completely.
“But what we do think is Racing Point took this to another level. They clearly decided to adopt this philosophy for the whole car for what I would call a paradigm shift.
“They actually used a disruption in the process that has been the norm in designing a Formula 1 car for the last 40 years.
“One should not penalised [for] that as they have been original in deciding to follow this approach.
“However we do not think this is what F1 should become. We don’t want next year to have eight or 10 Mercedes, or copies of Mercedes, on the grid, where the main skill becomes how you do this process.
“We don’t want this to become the norm of Formula 1.
“We do plan, in the very short notice, to introduce some amendment to the 2021 Sporting Regulations that will prevent this becoming the norm.
“It will prevent [teams] from using extensive parts of photos to copy whole portions of other cars in the way Racing Point has done.
“We will still accept individual components to be copied, and local areas, but we don’t want the whole car to be a fundamental copy of another car.”
About bloody time.
The problem is that only teams with the Mercedes engine, gearbox and suspension parts can copy the Mercedes design. They don’t get the inside engineering, just the visible surfaces. And they get it from a year ago. So they are always going to be behind the times. Plus when the 2022 season starts the cars will be totally different, so they can’t even copy the 2021 car. What Racing Point did was reset their aero package to match the Mercedes philosophy because they use the Mercedes rear end, which is based on that philosophy. Now that they have reset the philosophy they don’t need to copy Mercedes. They can develop that philosophy on their own. In fact they need to do this to get to the level of Mercedes. A simple copy of the outside aero surfaces of the car won’t win races. They need to do a lot more. Plus Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren Renault and Williams will never make a copy of another car. So there is half the teams that won’t have a Mercedes car next year. It’s just because this year Racing Point moved so far in one go. That was because of the money that Stroll put into Racing Point compared to VJ at Force India. Otherwise it would not have been so obvious and no one would have got upset.