FOTA “studied very little” about rear wing

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Ferrari technical director Aldo Costa admitted the Formula One Teams Association’s plan for an adjustable rear wing next year was at an early stage and could be dropped if it is deemed unsuccessful.

Speaking in the FIA press conference Costa said:

We will have the introduction of the new adjustable rear wing. I have the same mixed feeling like Mr Sauber.

It is a completely new element. We have not tested it. We have studied very, very little about it. We are going with it next year, so we will see after a few races. Anyway it is a movable option, so the FIA and the teams can always decide to stop it in case it is not good enough or not good for some reason.
Aldo Costa

Peter Sauber said the wing was “maybe… a good idea for overtaking, but I think we have different opinions from the technicians.”

Several drivers have voiced doubts over the adjustable rear wing, which drivers will be able to use only if they’re one second behind another car. The plan has also been strongly criticised by F1 Fanatic readers.

Costa also explained changes to next year’s technical rules aimed at making the cars safer:

The FIA as usual and the teams have looked at last year and this year’s crashes and, as usual, reacted on that making the chassis safer.

We will have the front part of the chassis more robust, the roll loop more robust, the side protection of the chassis more robust. Underneath the chassis in the driver area. The driver will be more protected, so all very positive aspects.
Aldo Costa

He added that he was happy with Ferrari’s performance in practice today after revising the layout at the rear of the F10:

Not only the back of the car but also the bodywork itself, so we have got a new radiator system in terms of the shape and concept, so there’s new bodywork. And the exhaust layout is completely different and the back of the car, as you said – floor, suspension – there are improvements as well in the middle part of the car.

Today was a very intense day because we had to do a massive amount of checks and a lot of kilometres. We solved some issues in free practice one, very, very quickly and in free practice two we were running OK. Felipe spun but this is the game. So everything in FP2 was OK.
Aldo Costa

Read more: F1 fans reject FOTA’s ‘Mario Kart’ wings

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Keith Collantine
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15 comments on “FOTA “studied very little” about rear wing”

  1. Compared with the Mosley years, the Todt team is very lacking in focus and discipline. This movable wing business is not being approached in a serious way.

    1. Just mandate smaller steel brakes to lengthen braking distances 50% and the overtaking problem is 50% solved.
      This is the cheapest way.

      1. that,
        or let Pirelli make harder tyres.

        Say what’s currently the hardest compound will become the softest, so what we now call hard will be rock hard.

        Then the cars will be a lot harder to drive and mistakes create opportunities for overtaking.

        As a bonus, we don’t have marbles on the track, meaning more lines are possible, meaning more overtakes and more fights like the legend (which we all saw often, but never often enough:)
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sDtn8QnpFg

        1. That does seem like the common sense approach and I have always said that. However the teams are selfish enough to want their millions upon millions of dollars and around the clock development to be the aspect the determines the pecking order, not the driver and/or the the scope for human error.

      2. Or dont ruin technichal developements like that in the vain hope of more overtaking and leave it alone. Formula one is not an entertainment extravaganza, you take the good with the bad. Please, leave the rules alone.

  2. Great. So FOTA are going down the Mosley route. Come up with an utterly moronic idea, and then quietly drop it when they realise nobody likes it and it doesn’t work anyway.

    1. My thoughts exactly. One of the hopes we might have hadwith Mosely gone is that brainless knee-jerkery might be a thing of the past. However, this seems to be as much of a FOTA idea as an FIA one, so maybe in the new egalitarian three-pillar state of F1, it’s a case of the stupidity of one branch infecting the others.

  3. lets hope it is never added, so they dont have to even consider removing it.

  4. Robert McKay
    25th June 2010, 19:34

    The tail is wagging the dog again, eh?

    They’re creating a general “rule”-philosophy to add to the rulebook, and then working backwards to fill in the gaps.

    For such a professional sport sometimes they don’t half go about their business in a daft way.

  5. Prisoner Monkeys
    26th June 2010, 2:27

    I still reckon that it’s going to be absolutely impossible to say with any certainty whether or not a pass was solely the result of a conditional wing.

    1. Thas’s why i proposed to go with the SWIFT ideas for Indycar and put LED lights on the car that light up in different places and colours when KERS is being loadad / used or adjustable bodywork lights up when activated.

      It would at least give the viewers some feed back as to what is happening if we go for gimmicks.

      Actually, i am starting to understand the thinking of FOTA on allowing these adjustable bodywork parts. If we remember the amounts of trouble everybody got in to have flex wings and now the fluidic switching F-duct, maybe the time is ripe to allow for movable aero parts instead (like spoilers popping up/down etc on road cars). Not something they argreed on doing for next year, but a somewhat defined playing field for aerodynamists for the next year.

      Just so it does not get too much out of hand, they decided to limit it, i.e. be driver activated and only usable when to counter closely following a car.

      It might also be something actually pursued by the likes of Red Bull and maybe Brawn’s mercedes GP instead of going for KERS, a system they are not so fond of.

      It seems Kolles is looking forward to having a go at it, something i would like to see.

      Still i do not like the artificial part of it being activated only when following and i am really curious how to activate and police this as well as the safety aspects of deactivating it with first braking.

      1. Prisoner Monkeys
        26th June 2010, 9:46

        There are plenty of ways it could be implemented. Proximity sensors, for one; after all, we use them in parking on road cars. Or a GPS tracking device embedded in the nosecone of each car. It wouldn’t be too difficult to calculate how far apart two cars are based on their relative positions (it would have to be done via computer, of course). Or how about sensors around the circuit that measure the difference between two drivers and sends a signal to the cars when they are close enough together? That’s at least three that I’ve come up with on the spot.

        1. HounslowBusGarage
          26th June 2010, 12:26

          But ‘one second apart’ is a different distance at different speeds.
          Proximity sensor would have to use speed to calculate as well.

  6. Other racing series operate without placing a handicap on the defending driver, such as there will be with this movable wing thing.

    One must wonder what the drivers will say/do/feel when someone notes that they may no longer actually be the best in the world, since the overtaking is artificial.

    With egos as large as F1 drivers must necessarily have, I think the wing thing will fly away soon as the drivers click to this point.

  7. HounslowBusGarage
    26th June 2010, 12:35

    Mr Costa’s comments here really worry me.

    We will have the introduction of the new adjustable rear wing. I have the same mixed feeling like Mr Sauber.

    It is a completely new element. We have not tested it. We have studied very, very little about it. We are going with it next year, so we will see after a few races.

    So they are going to introduce a completely new, untried, untested system, without any telemetry data and which will require the teams to design and build for a radical new element and set of variables in car behavious/performance.
    In nine months time.
    And if it doesn’t work, they’ll chuck it out. Where’s the “keeping-down-development-costs” bit on that?

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