Mercedes emphasizes that for safety reasons it is very important to adapt the technical regulations before 2023 to avoid possible accidents.
The FIA is going to change the regulations to force championship entrants to change the design of the underside of the car, as some of them had serious problems this season due to intense vertical vibration. Other teams, including Red Bull, are against this kind of change. Andrew Shovlin, chief race engineer at Mercedes, believes the design of the new-generation cars is simply unsafe.
“Some teams want changes, some don’t,” Shovlin said. – I think proposals to find some kind of compromise come from those teams who believe that changes are necessary, but at the same time we want them to be as minimal as possible.
Again, probably all teams will be able to reduce the build-up. But current regulations will always require ground clearance to be very low, and we want to set up the cars differently.
This year there have already been incidents of steering-rod cars grabbing the track surface, and this can lead to the driver losing control of the car, which then flies up the curb. Then she hits the surface of the track, ending everything with a collision with a high-speed barrier.
Therefore, the safety argument must also be taken into account. And we want to be clear: is the FIA going to change the regulations? If so, let’s agree.
Mercedes’ position in dialogue with the FIA is this: our team must find a solution to the problem on its own. We set ourselves such a task at the beginning of the season and we are confident that we will be able to solve it. That is why it is so important for us to have clarity on this matter.
But the reality is that these cars will always have very low ground clearance and they will always cling to the bottom of the track. This phenomenon can be minimized, but if we want to eliminate it completely, we need to adjust the regulations.”
McLaren technical director James Key emphasized that his team’s cars don’t suffer too much from build-up, but he supports the FIA’s desire to change the regulations for safety reasons.
“There is a lot of discussion about the issue of sway and the FIA is concerned about the health implications of this, so the federation is definitely taking the right approach,” Key said. – I know some teams are concerned about this. And while McLaren isn’t too bothered by the build-up, we nevertheless support the desire to change the regulations, as we believe this should be done.
I think the proposed measures are quite serious and will force everyone to do additional research. Therefore, not everything we now know about the aerodynamics of cars can be applied: we will have to revise the layout solutions and the like.
But personally, I think none of this is radical and you don’t have to redo the car from scratch. The concept remains the same as we’re working with this year, but there are some new studies coming up based on the information we’ve already gathered.
In particular, if we are talking about the bottom, and if it needs to be changed in some way, it will generally remain the same bottom, it will just be raised a little higher. This is not to say that we are dealing with something totally unknown.
Source: F1 News
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