F1 News
Date: 13/April/2012
Its protest against the Mercedes rear wing rejected, Lotus F1 technical director James Allison said the British-based squad will ‘die like a man’ over the issue - and promptly look at the possibilities created by the ruling.
Discontent among some teams over the Mercedes F-duct style ‘system’ has been ongoing since before the start of the new season. Lotus finally made such opposition official on the eve of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.
The Mercedes system uses movement of the DRS overtaking device in the rear wing to expose a small duct, which - when open to the airflow - pipes high pressure air to crucial parts of the front wing, increasing the top speed boost.
When DRS is not engaged the duct is covered and therefore inert. The main controversy has been over whether the system is a ‘driver operated aerodynamic device’.
The FIA dismissed the protest, with part of a lengthy explanation stating: “The Mercedes design is not activated by driver movement. It is a consequence of a change of position of the driver adjustable bodywork”.
The judgement also backed up earlier ‘clarification’ provided by the FIA to Mercedes, regarding the legality of the system.
Allison - whose design team were in the process of developing an innovative ‘reactive ride height’ system, only for it to be banned by the FIA before the start of the season - explained:
“It’s been no secret that our team has had some disagreements with what we saw Mercedes to be running. We thought there were strong arguments against such a thing. That’s been rumbling along gently in the background, as everyone knows.
“We made what we hoped were strong arguments both to Mercedes and to the FIA [before filing a protest] but didn’t prevail and so with some regret we decided it was worth bringing it before the stewards to settle the matter one way or the other.”
Asked for how Lotus will react to the FIA ruling, Allison replied: “Just die like a man! Get on with looking at what possibilities are open, having accepted that this is a perfectly OK system to put on the car.”
The difficulty rivals teams face is that they cannot simply ‘bolt on’ their own version of the Mercedes design due to the amount of modifications needed.
Designs chiefs from Ferrari and McLaren admitted they will already considering if they could and should incorporate such a system.
“We’ve been looking at it for a while,” said Fry. “We know what it’s worth in terms of lap time and now we need to weigh it up in terms of cost-performance and the effort needed. We also need to look at what is the ultimate potential of the device.”
McLaren’s Paddy Lowe agreed, adding that the device is only of real benefit during qualifying (when DRS use is unrestricted). In race situations, DRS can only be used at certain predetermined zone(s), and if a car is within one-second of the vehicle in front.
“In these days of really very limited capacity - whether that’s people or time in wind tunnels - to develop aerodynamics, you do have to carefully select where you put your effort to make the most profit in performance,” he said.
“This will fall into that camp. We have to decide how much we can get from it, how it ranks compared to other areas we may work on. It does have the immediate downside that it really is only a qualifying benefit as far as we can see, so immediately it has to earn quite a lot to make that worthwhile.”
Despite that warning, Mercedes driver Michael Schumacher was fastest in Friday practice for the Chinese Grand Prix.
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