COOPER: Business Unusual

Formula 1

COOPER: Business Unusual

This season has barely started, and yet already it seems that we’ve had as much action off the track as on it...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted April 16, 2009 Shanghai (CHN)

The Brawn GP team garage with Chinese sign at Shanghai International Circuit, Shanghai, China. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

This season has barely started, and yet already it seems that we’ve had as much action off the track as on it. On Wednesday came confirmation from the FIA Court of Appeal the original decision on the double diffusers still stands, and thus there will be no tinkering with past results.

The diffuser decision was announced a couple of hours before my flight left London for Shanghai, and it was good to get on the plane knowing that we’d had the least disruptive outcome. I wasn’t the only one on-board who was relieved to get a sensible decision.

Having traveled at the sharp end of the aircraft (it was Virgin after all), Ross Brawn was about 50 places ahead of me as we snaked through the interminable queue at Chinese immigration. Traveling on his own and out of uniform, he looked about as tired as I felt. A 12 hour flight is not what you need after the stress of dashing to and from Paris for a hearing that could turn your world upside down.

In the end it didn’t, and the results from the first two races stand, which can only be a good thing. After the fuss over the McLaren lies scandal the worst case scenario would have been an outcome that changed the results of those two events, and which would have made the sport look very silly indeed in the eyes of the world.

In reality, the outcome was never going to be any different. The Court of Appeal is independent and can do what it wants, but there was no reason to suppose that it would overrule earlier FIA decisions, even if the other teams presented compelling cases for their own interpretation of the relevant wording.

I do have some sympathy with the gang of seven. It’s tempting to view the situation as sour grapes as those who didn’t pursue that route blow a smokescreen to explain their lack of competitiveness. I don’t think everyone who’s been making a big noise had genuinely looked at and rejected the double diffuser (never mind checked it out with the FIA as several claim), but certainly some teams were aware of the possibility of exploiting that loophole, and chose not to.

Significantly they included Ferrari, McLaren and Renault, three teams that made up the FIA Overtaking Working Group. They knew what the intention of the rules was when the FIA agreed to cut downforce by 50% (it’s actually nearer 15-20% after a year of R&D), and they can rightly argue that the double diffusers increase cornering speeds and also reduce the chances of overtaking, which is what the whole 2009 package was all about.

But the fact is from the start the FIA, in the form of Charlie Whiting, has given its approval to those teams who asked.

‘Inevitably when you write what amounts to a completely new set of rules, as hard as you try, there will be lots of questions,’ he told me before the season. ‘And there have been some interesting interpretations, most of which I think are legal. But some people don’t agree with me. So there is a little bit of discussion still to go on there. We can only give an opinion, and we’re talking about something that’s entirely new. It’s not as a straightforward as it normally is.’

For Brawn, Toyota and Williams its business as usual; and it’s the other seven teams who now face a lot of investment in terms of time and money in order to catch up.

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Adam Cooper

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