Sunday 4 April 1982, in the columns of the Turin newspaper The print, a paragraph entitled ‘Ferrari surprise yesterday in Long Beach’ said: “Pironi’s 126 C2 showed up on the circuit with a huge rear wing. The regulation states that the same can only be 1.10 m. Ferrari then placed two 1.10 m ailerons side by side, staggering them, so that it cannot be said that they are a single piece. It is obviously a provocative action “. It was then Gilles Villeneuve to bring in the race the doubled wing, and from the seventh square of the starting grid, he finished third under the checkered flag, behind Niki Lauda in McLaren Ford and Keke Rosberg in Williams Ford. The car from Maranello had been made to participate in the grand prix by the Commissioners, considered sub judice. At the claim presented on arrival by Ken Tyrrell, Gilles Villeneuve came disqualified from the Long Beach race, since the solution adopted by Ferrari, while exploiting a gray area of the regulation, did not respect its philosophy.
The one conceived by Mauro Forghieri was a real one provocation, created to exaggerate the need for a serious and severe application of the regulation. It was all too interpretable, and if the width of the rear wing didn’t have to “exceed that of the car body“, Nothing was specified on the number and arrangement of the airfoils. In those days the “weight war “: in the previous Brazilian GP Piquet’s Brabham and Rosberg’s Williams had in fact raced underweight, filling the water tanks at the end of the race to return to the minimum measurement, with the motivation of the need to cool the braking system. In protest, Renault announced its intention to race underweight in Long Beach, and so did Ligier. The complaint presented by Ferrari at the end of the race against McLaren and Williams, who arrived first and second with this ploy, was not welcomed by the Federation bodies: the Commissioners rejected the protest and confirmed the final result.
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