The war between guards and thieves in F1 continues: the FIA has drastically changed how to carry out checks on single-seaters, making a great leap in quality in the fight against cunning and interpretations of the gray areas of the 2022 regulation.
We have already said it previously, the ground effect cars were born on the basis of a legislation that takes into account volumes and radii and not simple measures, whose reading is not easy if you are not an engineer with CAD tools available in the what the “mathematics” that define F1 2022 have been uploaded.
Each F1 team must update the evolutions of the car with CAD data to be made available to the FIA technical staff headed by Nikolas Tombazis. The Greek engineer, in fact, has already had the opportunity to see all the changes that the teams will bring to the tests in Bahrain, expressing a judgment of conformity well before a certain solution makes its debut on the track.
It is for this reason that rumors had spread that some ideas proposed by the teams were going off the rails of the spirit with which the regulation was written: for example, the FIA wants to prevent the designers from being able to generate whirlpools with the angularity of the shapes, in order to avoid that they can “dirty” the wake with turbulence that can limit the possibility of overtaking when two cars are close to each other.
FIA scrutineering box in Barcelona
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
Having more and more modern tools at its disposal, the FIA has decided to revolutionize the approach to checks. Those who were at the pre-season tests in Barcelona will have noticed that, if not very occasionally, the cars on the trolleys were not pushed by the mechanics towards the box of the International Federation which is the “kingdom” of Jo Bauer.
The Leica laser scanner in the FIA verification box
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
The Thursday checks and those that usually precede a session on the track for those who have made changes to the car have been abolished. The reason? It is very simple: each team is equipped with a Leica laser reader, identical to the one supplied by the FIA, which in its box is able to scan the shapes of the car to the millimeter, then transmitting all data to the federal commissioners who can proceed immediately. compared with the “mathematics” of the car in their possession.
Not only that, but the FIA will be able to monitor all the data, without informing the team what the verification menus will be, as happened in the past, which is why it will be more difficult to pass a … trick.
The control procedure has been streamlined and, above all, the quality of the verification is increasing. Jo Bauer’s men will proceed to carry out inspections on the machines after the sessions on the track on a control bench that has been much simplified compared to last year: in essence, the scales to measure the weight are left.
The new FIA technical checks template equipped with scales
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
The car will be placed on specific supports provided in the bottom and will be scanned in the FIA box in exactly the same way that each team will have adopted in their garage. The disputed cases, such as the measurement of the light between the two profiles of the Mercedes rear wing at the Brazilian GP, should no longer be registered, because the laser scan data will be authentic, without the possibility of discussion …
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