Saturday, March 21, 2009

Flavio Briatore’s latest

The Renault boss man is on it again. His latest gripe is about some teams cleverly exploiting the diffuser rules and its associated performance gain. He famously got wound up when his team fell back on horsepower and now it is the diffuser issue. Reportedly, he stops short of saying that Williams and Toyota employ illegal diffusers in their cars.

Without doubt the Renault aerodynamicists are as clever as the others in the paddock. I wonder why then Briatore chooses to go public instead of pushing his engineers to go into the same ‘loophole-exploiting’ mode as the Williams and Toyota men do? Being illegal is operating deliberately outside the regulations which is clearly different from being right on the edge in sticking to the rules.

There’s always going to be two answers to this problem—the diffuser is legal if you go by the wording of the rules (the Williams and Toyota way) and it is illegal if you bring the ‘spirit’ of the regulations into the picture (which seems to be Flavio’s premise). The ‘spirit’ of the regulations is not what the teams have to be concerned with, in my point view. It’s the FIAs job to do that. The FIA Technical Working Group will have (must have) framed the diffuser dimensions to make it work to their target and their target might have been to reduce the downforce. The teams are obliged to design their cars to the rules and not to the effect which the rule change promised to bring.

If, as is reported, the Toyota, Williams and Brawn cars’ diffusers are designed per the wording of the regulations, they are legal. This is how I see this issue.

More Information: Technical Analysis | Diffuser Is Legal

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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Interesting see Flavio's view in this....
But its quite in sports that few people play the blame game, when somebody does well unexpectedly or outperform them... IT happens in all the sports, lets see where this gets us too....

Anonymous said...

I wonder why is this man talking like a scumbag. Even when the FIA president Max Mosley has confirmed that the designs are not below the belt, what's worrying this fellow? Is he begruding the work of other teams? Heck!

S R I R A M said...

People don't want to lose!