Tech Inspections

[Scott]

We were having a discussion involving CART on another thread and a thought occured to me.  Why on earth don't they do tech inspections on the cars in the FIA garage on the Thursday of each race weekend?  We used to do this at CART, and it worked just fine.  It was a long day for both us and the teams, but the cars were approved for the race by the end of the day, and some even had to come back the next morning before Friday warm-up to finalize things.  I know there would still be ways for the teams to get around it, but I think it would have ended things like the Brawn saga at the beginning of the season right then and there.  Why wait until after the race is over (we used to do the top three and a lottery of another three after the race)?

[Jericoke]

That works if the cars are in a parc ferme situation.

Are they still doing that, or are they allowed to alter the cars between quali and the race?

Also, with latter day CART, IRL and NASCAR, it's a spec series, so it's much more cut and dried to see if the car is legal or not.   I don't know how much time the FIA takes compared with CART to inspect each car.

[lkjohnson1950]

The top finishers in nearly every series are reinspected post race. I'm fuzzy on the details, but a CART winner was almost disqualified once because his sidepod was too low. He got a pass because someone clearly stepped on the pod on the way to victory lane and it was only off a couple of mm, so it was agreed that the person stepping on it could have caused it to be too low. F1 years ago used to do pre and post race inspections, but I don't know what the situation is today.

Lonny

[Jericoke]

The top finishers in nearly every series are reinspected post race. I'm fuzzy on the details, but a CART winner was almost disqualified once because his sidepod was too low. He got a pass because someone clearly stepped on the pod on the way to victory lane and it was only off a couple of mm, so it was agreed that the person stepping on it could have caused it to be too low. F1 years ago used to do pre and post race inspections, but I don't know what the situation is today.

Lonny

From a cost point of view, it makes sense to only one inspection, and it's far easier to catch cheaters after they cheat than before.  While it would be nice to know each car was legal BEFORE the race, it's probably much more effective to know if the winning cars cheated after the fact.

[Scott]

That works if the cars are in a parc ferme situation.

Are they still doing that, or are they allowed to alter the cars between quali and the race?

Also, with latter day CART, IRL and NASCAR, it's a spec series, so it's much more cut and dried to see if the car is legal or not.   I don't know how much time the FIA takes compared with CART to inspect each car.

It doesn't have to be parc ferme - it certainly wasn't in CART.  My main point was that they should do something to remove situations where there are potentially illegal items on the car, such as Renault's dampers, Ferrari's movable floor, and put an end to the diffuser issue before it had even started.  Wings are easy because they have set maximum dimensions and angles, so templates are simple for them along with stress/weight tests for flexibility.  Lasers were used even back in the early 90's when we were testing the CART cars for all sorts of dimensions on other parts of the car.  The allowable deviance was something like 2mm.

Any time there was a dispute on a post race inspection on a top three car, all the top officials, a few mechanics and the team principal were called in to observe the tests and decisions were based on those re-done tests.  If a winner was DQ'd or almost DQ'd, then they probably were cheating.  I think I heard about the situation you were talking about Lonny.  At least clear heads prevailed (did they use video or something to see the guy step on the sidepod?).  Can you imagine if it was a Mclaren in F1 (granted, you don't have mechanics pushing F1 cars to parc ferme or podium ceremonies, but still)?

Anyhow, my ramblings were just to say that the FIA could be doing a much better job than they are doing, and that is just in one small area.  Considering the cost of post race appeals taking place in Paris between Asian races (like the diffuser saga), I think they could justify the cost, which wouldn't be much since it is just labour (they have all the equipment from the post race inspection).

[lkjohnson1950]

The race was televised and ABC had coverage of the guy jumping on the side pod to hug the driver or something. Because it would be easy to do in F1 and make sense, it will never happen. I believe that the protests of the double diffuser, or anything else can only be made after it's actually used in competition. Then of course the appeal must be heard in Paris. Dumb.

Lonny

[Alianora La Canta]

Why on earth don't they do tech inspections on the cars in the FIA garage on the Thursday of each race weekend?  {ScottyD - 4 posts ago}

They already do. It's called "pre-weekend scrutineering", generally happens between 10am and 4pm on Thursdays and every car has to pass in order to be allowed on track on Friday mornings. It doesn't catch everything, but as a deterrent it seems pretty effective.

[Scott]

I'm surprised we had the saga with the diffusers then.  Also with the moveable floor (how couldn't they spot that?  The internal damper that Renault used would have been harder to spot, but they could have peeked in the footwell of the Renault and asked about it.  The wing flex issues they had a couple of years ago should have been caught by a simple wing stress test though.

I'm glad they have the pre-practice scrutineering.

[cosworth151]

The problem wasn't not seeing that the cars didn't meet the rules. It was the unclear rules themselves. Take the Renault mass dampers. Who would have thought that something completely out of the air stream could be a moving areo device?  But then, if the rules were more straightforward, they couldn't be interpreted in favor of the red cars.