15 replies to this topic

[Ursus]

I was checking up on DC's DQ, and I can't seem to find any support for a 5mm tolerance in the front wing area. The regulation his car was violating was:
3.7 Front bodywork height :

All bodywork situated forward of a point lying 33cm behind the front wheel centre line, and more than 25cm from the centre line of the car, must be no less than 5cm and no more than 25cm above the reference plane.

There are no mention of a tolerance in this regulation and there is no need for one as you can mount the wing higher if needed.

Reg 3.12 says (we all know this one don't we ;))
[snipped 3.12.1-3.12.5 telling us about the flat bottom rule]
3.12.6) To help overcome any possible manufacturing problems, a tolerance of +/- 5mm is permissible across these surfaces.

3.12.7) All sprung parts of the car situated behind a point lying 33cm forward of the rear wheel centre line, which are visible from underneath and are more than 25cm from the centre line of the car, must be at least 50mm above the reference plane.

3.12.7 also applies to the front wing but 3.12.6 wich speaks of the 5mm tolerance can hardly be interpreted as applying to 3.12.7.

The big question is now: Where do the +-5mm, that everybody is talking about, come from?



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Ursus
Trust me, send money.

[slc]

Can't answer your question, but somehow I have a feeling that the FIA has been patching things up for so long that even they are not sure which rules can be applied to which areas...

[MrAerodynamicist]

It's a direct result of of the Malaysia ruling. There were several quotes from top designers at the time about this fact.

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MrA
Ferrari Fans are just lost sheep following the pack
BREADnet

[RaggedEdge]

I agree with everybody above - there probably is no universal 5mm rule, as the only 5mm rule was supposed to apply only to the flat bottom of the car.

In order to clear Ferrari, FIA just interpreted the 5mm rule to apply to all surfaces of the car, and even allowed re-angling of the questionable parts to make the 10mm missing bodywork in Ferrari's barge board to comply with this redefined rule.

What is new here, is that before one could not be sure whether the 5mm tolerance would only apply to flat bottom and barge boards, but to all surfaces of the car. Now we know that every part of the car can have 5mm tolerance.

If FIA allows DC to keep his 6 points, we also know that the angled millimeter rule of Malaysia also applies, completely blurring what is tolerable and what is not.

[Laphroaig]

*evil-grin* Lucky for McLaren if that's te case... now they're only 2mm off, otherwise they would b th full 7mm off ;)

[RaggedEdge]

Laphroaig, absolutely.

It is pathetic, now as far as I can tell, the cars can be 5mm wider, the height of the cars can be 5mm lower, and so forth.

Sad, really sad.

[Mellon]

In the rules there are two kinds of dimension rules:

1. Rules saying that a part of the car must be exactly x mm wide (width of the skid block etc.) or flat (e.g. skid block and step plane). However nothing can be flat nor exactly x mm. Using a more exact measuring method one will always find a bump or scratch in the surface. Therefor a tolerance must be applied to allow some 'unsmoothness'. In hte case of the step plane the tolerance is +-5mm and for the skid block (=plank) it is -1mm.

2. Rules stating that a dimension of the car can be no more(/less) than x mm (width of the car). In this case the car must be within the rule, or it is not legal.

All bodywork situated forward of a point lying 33cm behind the front wheel centre line, and more than 25cm from the centre line of the car, must be no less than 5cm and no more than 25cm above the reference plane.

This is clearly a rule of the second kind which means that the front wing must be at least 50mm above the refernce plane. So NO tolerance here.

[JaqFan]

I totally agree, RaggedEdge, it is pathetic.

I mean, I know it's hard to draw the line...if we let 2mm slip, why not 10, then why not 30...

But 2mm...it makes almost no difference...it really frustrates me. Even after Ferrari's thing last year at Malaysia (and I am by no means a Ferrari or MS fan) I was slightly annoyed at this 10mm discrepancy, and all the controversy. But 2mm...pretty petty and measly. It would give like another 2cm^2 (or thereabouts) extra surface area for the entire front wing...

Anyway, I bet McLaren will lost the appeal, I can just feel it. That FIA is pretty biased, IMO. Then there's gonna be a thread on here about the FIA allowing 10mm, and not allowing McLaren 2mm, because Adrian Newey can't suddenly get the discrepancy to 'disappear' using a magically 'straight' ruler .

[Yelnats]

A tolerance in engineering is not ment to allow the object to vary in dimensions but rather to accomodate basic innacuracies involved in measuring something as irregular and varying in dimensions as an F1 car. Ride height, lengths and widths are all effected by temperauture and measurement techniques so that the same group of persons measuring a car could get a whole spread of results varing by a couple of mm.

A tolerance has to be large enough to accomodate this type of variation. Otherwise the cars would have to be manufactured undersized (in some dimensions) to accomodate these measuring variations and this would involve guesswork byt the teams as to what the "tolerance" was.

[BuzzingHornet]

Yeah but +/-5mm means that there could be a variation of up to 10 MILLIMETRES... a piece of bodywork might be 5mm less or 5mm more; these are not hard and fast rules; imagine giving Rory Byrne and Adrian Newey a 10mm flexibility zone...

[Laphroaig]

Not really, to make things a bit more difficult, the FIA had positive and negative tolerances.

This means that an object X with a regulated with of, lets say, 10 cm with a tolerance of -5mm has to be between 10cm and 9.5cm... 10.5cm is illegal cause this tolerance only specifies the negative side.
What irritates me is that some news items claim it's the wing, others claim it's the wing-end-plate and then there is also a difference weather it was too high or to low (4 versions!)
The FIA quote states that it is the wing-end-plate, McLaren states that it rotated about it's axis (which seems weird, why secure earodynamical components by using 1 pivot?)
This wing end-plate supposedly rotated up or down (NOT specified in the statement) a couple of millimeters due to bottoming and structural dammage.

I honostly don't know what to make of all this ... The rotating seems a bit bizar for an earodynamical component (maybe it IS one screw, and they didn't screw it tight enough ;) )
I get the feeling that this was just a silly mistake when they uilt the wing, just like Ferrari's... What we'll have to wait for now is wether RD's team of lawyers is inventive enough to find a way out of this (I hope so for Coulthard)

[Laphroaig]

(Exuse my spelling mistakes and other stuff... I'm using Lynx as a browser thru a slow telnet session, so it's quite hard to check ;))

[RaggedEdge]

What is sad about Malaysian GP is that Ferrari also accepted that there was a 10mm violation of barge board rules when physically inspected in the GP.

However, I understand they never shipped their car to Paris either, but just took a damaged barge board with them and re-fitted it to a demonstration plane to comcluded that the real tolerance with angled re-fitting was 5mm, not 10mm.

Now, McLaren cannot do the same, i.e. only take their front wing and re-fit it in some imagenary plane to get 5mm tolerance. Clearly they do not believe that shipping the whole car to demonstrate their case would help either but as far as I can tell they are pretty much in similar situation that Ferrari was in Malaysia, but without the benefit of being reattach the offending component in a way which, looked favourably, be loosely interpreted to fit the creatively interpreted rules.

I am not so much complaining that, just that the original Malaysia ruling was so incredibly unfair, and with having a just little bit of integrity back then, FIA would have very high integrity now.

Now they are just commercial fools with no credibility.

The logical thing would be not to give the points back to McLaren but then again the logical thing would have been to exclude everybody who broke the flat bottom rule in Interlagos and also exclude Ferrari in Malaysia.


[This message has been edited by RaggedEdge (edited 03-28-2000).]

[magnum]

Whilst being a ferrari fan, i must agree with ragged edge ... but, and there is always a but, while there is such a thing as a rule is a rule, manafacturing errors do take place and if, as ferrari proved, there was absolutely no performance enhacement from the error, then it is clear that it was, indeed, an error, and not a way of finding more speed.

I think McLaren havce a tough case because any significant or insignificant change in the front wing will undoubtedly improve the performance. At the same time, I'd like to see McLaren cleared and a statement then issued by the FIA stating that this tolerance thing will no longer be an excuse for ANY team from here on in. But that's hoping for too much from such a political body.

[RaggedEdge]

Maybe FIA should give Sauber's point back as well...

[RaggedEdge]

FIA president, Max Mosley also commented on
Tuesday on the disqualification and said: "We
agreed with the teams at the start of the season
precisely what the terms of infringements will be.
All these rules are in place to constrain
performance. If team benefits by going over then
that can't be allowed".

Hmm. It is possible that FIA got smart and did actually define very rigorously what is allowed what is not.

Shame that they did not define how to define plank wear. In retrospect, Schumacher might have been screwed by FIA in 1994 and this is a gesture towards that.

I hope they will "unscrew" Mika for Silverstone 1998 and Malaysia 1999 as well during this season.