Cheating

[Derek Smith]

flemke said:

Explained the rule breaking.

Thanks for that. I think I understand now. So let's see, from what you said, Ferrari behaved despicably. Is that a fair summary?

[Schmalex]

GarrettMacD said:

Lot's of other stuff beforehand........

$400m is a heavy price to pay for no return.

Disagree. I would say that this was one of the best uses of $400m I have seen. McMerc have been in the mainstream media pretty much every day this year with people from all walks of life talking about them, LH and FA.

It is a marketing dream for your brand to unquestionably dominate those other brands who are competing for the same mindshare in both the niche and mainstream media .

I can well imagine that McLaren Group, Santader, Mercedes, Sun etc, etc, etc would consider their investment in this year to have paid off most substantially. So, they didn't win any trophies - big deal. At the end of the day, they have given their sponsors (the real life blood of the organisation) the best return possible - continued exposure to mainstream media, which is what F1 is really about....

Edited by Schmalex on Monday 22 October 20:56

[Bitter'n'Twisted]

Adrian W said:

Starting to get confused with all the threads about who did what but!

Ferrari win in Oz get lots of points for Kimi and the team with an illegal aero part on the car, the FIA choose to turn a blind eye to it and say take it off and dont do it again.

Later in the season Mclaren get given details of what happened and the drawings, the FIA then fine them and take their constructors points away for having the information and decide this constitutes cheating, and still do nothing to Ferrari.

Then in the last race two teams cheat by breaking the fuel rules and the FIA say that's ok, but fine Mclaren for a tyre descrepancy in free practice.

Kimi (who i think is great) wins the WDC by 1 point, mainly due to the points he won in Australia at the biggining of the season.

Can someone please explain

The FIA have been biased towards themselves. ie Tailoring punishments to keep the championship
alive. Not just this year. This has often been against Ferraris interests, and sometimes in
favour of Ferrari.

Nothing was done this year by the FIA to hamper Hamiltons title bid.
Nothing was done to help Ferrari.
In my opinion, McLaren should have faced race bans for using Ferrari information.
They were lucky to get away with a fine.
Alsonso admitted discussing Ferrari information. Yet what punishment did he get?

At the last race McLaren again got away with a meaningless (to them) fine of £10k ish.
How many people on here would have been screaming 'cheats' if Ferrari had used the wrong tyres
in practice? How many people on here would have been demanding Ferrari should be sent to the back of the grid had it been the other way around?

I'm just glad that at the end the best driver won. Which is all you can ask really.
Kimi won the title because (IMO) he's the best driver.
(Even though the McLaren has been the best car).

[Adrian W]

But did the best driver really win (even though i wanted Kimi to win) If FA had'nt been knocked back in Hungary he would be champ whetever the others had achieved. I dont think LH lost any points nor did Kimi.

[waynepixel]

I think someone out there should investigate the FIA.

[tank slapper]

Bitter'n'Twisted said:

The FIA have been biased towards themselves. ie Tailoring punishments to keep the championship
alive. Not just this year. This has often been against Ferraris interests, and sometimes in
favour of Ferrari.

Nothing was done this year by the FIA to hamper Hamiltons title bid.
Nothing was done to help Ferrari.
In my opinion, McLaren should have faced race bans for using Ferrari information.
They were lucky to get away with a fine.
Alsonso admitted discussing Ferrari information. Yet what punishment did he get?

At the last race McLaren again got away with a meaningless (to them) fine of £10k ish.
How many people on here would have been screaming 'cheats' if Ferrari had used the wrong tyres
in practice? How many people on here would have been demanding Ferrari should be sent to the back of the grid had it been the other way around?

I'm just glad that at the end the best driver won. Which is all you can ask really.
Kimi won the title because (IMO) he's the best driver.
(Even though the McLaren has been the best car).

The €15k fine is relatively small because there was no performance gain - it made no practical difference. McLaren were not the only team to make this mistake.

Ferrari were in material breach of the rules and deliberately so, yet they received no punishment despite this being an obvious perfomance gaining modification.

McLaren gained no performance increase due to the posession of Ferrari data - the discussions that took place show that it was all fairly banal stuff that could have been obtained from elsewhere anyway, yet they are smacked with the largest fine in history and thrown out of the championship after what was a seriously flawed hearing.

To say that the FIA did nothing to help Ferrari this year is plainly not accurate. I would not go so far as to say that Kimi is not deserving of the title because he has driven very well this year, but there is very obviously one rule for Ferrari and one for the rest.

[flemke]

Bitter'n'Twisted said:

Nothing was done to help Ferrari.

Cough, cough!

Whew, it's taken me a few moments to stop choking.

Now then, you were saying that nothing has been done to help Ferrari? Perhaps you've forgotten:

- Gifted Constructors' Championship
- FIA President intercedes to grant them extraordinary appeal before ICA, immediately after unanimous WMSC decision against Ferrari
- Main competitor slapped with biggest fine in sport history, on basis of suppositions without a scrap of evidence of having gained advantage
- Race won with illegal floor; no penalty given after illegality was exposed
- Started race on illegal tyres in order to gain advantage; no penalty given
- Main competitor demoted five grid positions for intra-team disagreement that had nothing to do with anyone outside it
- Three other cars found after decisive race to have been fueled illegally. Ferrari Drivers' Championship protected by FIA's ad hoc, retroactive decision that its own long-standing regulations were now invalid.


You have a very unusual definition of "nothing".

[Noger]

And let us not forget that the Concorde Agreement specifically benefits Ferrari financialy.

Whilst it is no doubt beneficial to the sport to have them in there, it is clearly not a level playing field.

[stuttgartmetal]

kevin ritson said:

Indeed, Toyota's 1995 turbo restrictors in the WRC passed the tests but the FIA didn't let them off

There are a few good illustrations of these cleverly designed mechanisms that stand within established parameters under examination using regulatory tests.
Some of them "in your face". The ground air effect cars. at their peak, had a small cylinder of gas plumbed in to the suspension so that ride height could be raised for post race clearance tests. Was that cheating ?
For me, it doesn't have the snide angle of the Toyota Turbo cheat. A device that on examination didn't exist. Even when you opened the airbox to measure Turbo size the secondary mechanism wasn't visible, as the Turbo diameter only opened up once the airbox was locked up and therfore not test-able. A clever design or cheating ? Toyota were excluded that year. And Ive never forgotten it. That cheat must have gone right to the top.
Ferraris floor exercise was also invisible under scrutiny, and no doubt its existence fully appreciated as far up as Todt.
The invisibile dimension to the design paints it,and by association the whole team, an unpalatable hue.

[Derek Smith]

stuttgartmetal said:

There are a few good illustrations of these cleverly designed mechanisms that stand within established parameters under examination using regulatory tests. Some of them "in your face". The ground air effect cars. at their peak, had a small cylinder of gas plumbed in to the suspension so that ride height could be raised for post race clearance tests. Was that cheating?

That's an interesting question. On first thinking about it I reckoned that, as it was obvious and well-known, the powers that be had ample opportunity to ban it but didn't. Their reasoning might have been that everyone was doing it. That, of course, does not make it right but the legislation is there primarily to ensure the provebial level playing field. The ride height was, I believe, brought in for safety reasons so, cheating or no, it is not, perhaps, what responsible team managers should do. It does feel as if the first team to do it were cheating.

Something is illegal when it is punishable in law. It is probably not a bad definition for cheating in sport as well. When the other teams cottoned on and followed suit then they made the device de facto legal, i.e. they could not punish everyone, there's no point. How about moving everyone back on the grid 10 places?

Real cheating is when you break the rules in a manner to give yourself an unfair advantage. I don't want to be a Ferrari knocker so the first team I'll pick on is Tyrell where they tried, and did to up their octane rating by adding lead to the fuel. They were found out. Ferrari used traction control using amethod where it was impossible to detect it using the methods the FIA had at their disposal at the time. The misfire on bends, most notably at Sao Paulo on the run up to the pit straight, was obvious to Senna when he sat out his home race there, but was unprovable. My feeling is that that is cheating despite the fact that it was undectable. It's the same with their floor.

Colin Chapman used card to split the siamesed inlet manfold in 750 days and boasted about it later. He seemed to think that cheating was perfectly ok but it was, by any definition, cheating.

I don't like cheats.

I don't like the fact that the concord agreement is unfairly biased towards Ferrari. This, however, is not cheating. In my opinion it is dishonest but that is unpunishable.

There was, of course, a big challenge to turbo charging on the grounds that there was combustion outside the combustion chambers. This was, quite clearly, correct but the organisers felt that this would cause turbo-charging to be impossible and the public wanted it. I know that it was thrilling to watch, if a bit of a strain on the ears. In the 95 European GP at Brands I was up against the catch-fencing just off the bottom straight and as the cars, most notably the Williams, accelerated onto the long straight the smell, noise and speed was heady. So was turbo-charging illegal? Probably. Was it banned? No. Did anyone care? Yes, of course they did. Manufacturers who could not get a turbo-charged engine were nowhere. The sensible thing to do would be to lower the out-dated 'equivalency' rule of half the normally-aspirated engine size. So give the V8s 4 litres. That might have been fun.

Great days and great racing even if Honda nearly ruined it all by picking a driver and giving him superior engines. If Mansell had the same engines as Piquet what might have happened? But different engines was cheating. It's against the spirit of sport. Yet, even when Honda admitted it - saying that they tuned engines to suit different drivers showing that they felt Mansell needed 5mph less on the straights - nothing was done. When both drivers got equal engines management systems (in theory) we had some of the closest and most exciting racing between the two drivers. Who could forget Silverstone 97?

So when everyone does it, whether it is cheating or not is of no consequence. When one team gains an advantage by bending the rules, it's a bit underhand. When a team deliberately designs a flagrant rule breach into their cars, one that is undectable by the testing methods currently used, then that is beyond the pale and should be punished severely.

But hasn't been.

Ferrari did not, before the British invasion of their team, cheat to any real extent. I liked them then. I despise them now. They are ruining the sport I love.

[Adrian W]

I have always been a Ferrari fan, mainly because they are the only team to make the whole car (subcontractors accepted)it seems that everyone agrees that Ferrari have cheated.

Why can't the FIA see it?

I know the Ferrari issues are now long gone, however I really hope Ron Dennis goes the whole hog and gets the FIA into a courtroom regarding the fuel-temperature fiasco and gets as many issues as he can out in the open.

And I hope it won't be his swansong.

[stuttgartmetal]

Derek Smith said:

Real cheating is when you break the rules in a manner to give yourself an unfair advantage.............my feeling is that that is cheating despite the fact that it was undectable. It's the same with their floor.


When a team deliberately designs a flagrant rule breach into their cars, one that is undectable by the testing methods currently used, then that is beyond the pale and should be punished severely.

But hasn't been.

Colin Chapman certainly used to get around the rules in the innovative way.
The whole ground effect, and the use of under the car aerodynamics was pioneered by Lotus. The whole dimension of the aero package was fathered by him. So its difficult to differentiate sometimes.

Look at what Bernie did with the most successful F1 cars ever produced.
The Brabham Alfa Romeo Fan car.




One outing, and one win.
Bernie insisted the big fan was for cooling. It was however used just to suck the car onto the track. Subsequently banned.
To be fair this parallels the way the Ferrari floor was handled in essence. Once its recognised for what it is by the FIA, they banned it. I don't think they retrospectively penalised Brabham for the fan car at the time, so precedents are there.
Of course flexibility with the design parameters need to be there, to allow some freedom for physicists and engineers to flex their cerebral muscle, as it were.

Nice post Derek. Old guys rule !

Edited by stuttgartmetal on Tuesday 23 October 11:54

[flemke]

stuttgartmetal said:

To be fair this parallels the way the Ferrari floor was handled in essence. Once its recognised for what it is by the FIA, they banned it. I don't think they retrospectively penalised Brabham for the fan car at the time, so precedents are there.

Not sure that I would agree, Stuttgart.

Brabham were not concealing from their competitors and the stewards the fan's design and purpose. Rather, it was obvious to the world what was there, and the issue was whether there was a legitimate interpretation of the semantics of the regulations that would allow it.
One might be able to argue that the fan car did in fact fall within the regulations, but it was so effective that it spoiled the competition, and for this it was banned. That is certainly what happened to the similar Chaparral "sucker" car of a few years earlier.

In contrast, the Ferrari design was always outside the regulations, which explicitly forbid any moving aerodynamic device on the sprung part of the car, with the exception of a floor that acted as particularised in the regulations, but for which there was no discretion or degree of freedom beyond that.

As soon as McLaren submitted to the FIA the details of a floor proposal (the Ferrari design), it was rejected, which act in itself strongly suggests that the device was inherently against the rules.

Cheers.