Sometimes the decisions of the FIA seem totally illogical to me. Take the matter of wheel fairings for instance. It is quite clear that they were accepted as legal because Ferrari were the first to run them and had the unlikely excuse of "brake cooling" to back up the idea. But we all know that their primary function is aerodynamic; this is openly admitted by Toyota's Pascal Vasselon in an Autosport article on the subject today.
"You are playing with the front wheel wake, it's not only a drag reduction item," he said. "It's not just something that you put on the car."
So why does the FIA turn a blind eye on the innovation, in total contrast to their dubious decision that mass dampers serve an aerodynamic function? Is it really just that Ferrari are the originators? I can see no other possible explanation.
But it is not only the the apparently blatant contravention of F1 regulations that concerns me about wheel fairings. In another Autosport article today, Max Mosley attempts to justify his ten year engine freeze with arguments of cost saving and relevance to road technology. It does not seem to have struck him that the cost of developing wheel fairings gives the lie to such concerns. Since Ferrari and other teams are developing the fairings, everyone has to, and the result is money spent on a tweak that should have been banned under the moveable aerodynamic device rule. Autosport explains the complications involved in using fairings effectively:
Only three teams were able to get a grip on the impact of the fairings during the 2007 season and run them. With changes needed to aero and front uprights, it was no easy matter getting from concept to track.
Williams, for example, had to make a big push to get their version on track. The team's technical director Sam Michael said: "You can imagine it's a bit complicated to keep something still while everything around it is moving.
"We had problems with it before we could take it to a race. So we had a revised design at Barcelona (testing last month)."
Remember that the only possible justification for these things is the brake cooling excuse. Never mind that there is nothing wrong with existing arrangements for cooling the brakes and none of the teams have experienced problems in that area. The thing is only worth doing because it gives an appreciable aerodynamic advantage - and that means more time and money spent on designing something that is unneccessary, irrelevant to road use and ugly to boot - and because everyone else is doing it.
It is not even as if there were anything new about wheel fairings either. Le Mans cars have used them for decades, except that they turn with the wheel since there is no need to hide their aerodynamic intent. Does the FIA seriously expect that road cars will be designed in future with non-rotating wheel inserts?
Clearly, this is yet another blind alley of development that the FIA allows for political reasons while banning genuine advances in technology on spurious and illogical grounds. Max can talk about his brave new world of F1 until he is blue in the face but it means nothing while he continues to ignore counter-productive developments when it does not suit him that they be brought into line with his stated agenda.
Not that his agenda remains constant, of course. Where now are the smaller turbo-charged engines running on bio-fuels that he was talking about less than a year ago? That was a stupid idea too but at least it made more sense than continuing for ten years with the gas guzzlers of the present. And if he thinks KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems) will make up for continuing to burn fossil fuels, he really doesn't know the environmental movement at all.
No wonder they call him Mad Max...
"You are playing with the front wheel wake, it's not only a drag reduction item," he said. "It's not just something that you put on the car."
So why does the FIA turn a blind eye on the innovation, in total contrast to their dubious decision that mass dampers serve an aerodynamic function? Is it really just that Ferrari are the originators? I can see no other possible explanation.
But it is not only the the apparently blatant contravention of F1 regulations that concerns me about wheel fairings. In another Autosport article today, Max Mosley attempts to justify his ten year engine freeze with arguments of cost saving and relevance to road technology. It does not seem to have struck him that the cost of developing wheel fairings gives the lie to such concerns. Since Ferrari and other teams are developing the fairings, everyone has to, and the result is money spent on a tweak that should have been banned under the moveable aerodynamic device rule. Autosport explains the complications involved in using fairings effectively:
Only three teams were able to get a grip on the impact of the fairings during the 2007 season and run them. With changes needed to aero and front uprights, it was no easy matter getting from concept to track.
Williams, for example, had to make a big push to get their version on track. The team's technical director Sam Michael said: "You can imagine it's a bit complicated to keep something still while everything around it is moving.
"We had problems with it before we could take it to a race. So we had a revised design at Barcelona (testing last month)."
Remember that the only possible justification for these things is the brake cooling excuse. Never mind that there is nothing wrong with existing arrangements for cooling the brakes and none of the teams have experienced problems in that area. The thing is only worth doing because it gives an appreciable aerodynamic advantage - and that means more time and money spent on designing something that is unneccessary, irrelevant to road use and ugly to boot - and because everyone else is doing it.
It is not even as if there were anything new about wheel fairings either. Le Mans cars have used them for decades, except that they turn with the wheel since there is no need to hide their aerodynamic intent. Does the FIA seriously expect that road cars will be designed in future with non-rotating wheel inserts?
Clearly, this is yet another blind alley of development that the FIA allows for political reasons while banning genuine advances in technology on spurious and illogical grounds. Max can talk about his brave new world of F1 until he is blue in the face but it means nothing while he continues to ignore counter-productive developments when it does not suit him that they be brought into line with his stated agenda.
Not that his agenda remains constant, of course. Where now are the smaller turbo-charged engines running on bio-fuels that he was talking about less than a year ago? That was a stupid idea too but at least it made more sense than continuing for ten years with the gas guzzlers of the present. And if he thinks KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems) will make up for continuing to burn fossil fuels, he really doesn't know the environmental movement at all.
No wonder they call him Mad Max...