F1: FIA Gave Us Fair Hearing On Merc DRS, Says Lotus’ Allison

Formula 1

F1: FIA Gave Us Fair Hearing On Merc DRS, Says Lotus’ Allison

Lotus technical director James Allison is OK with the FIA's ruling on Mercedes' controversial DRS/F-Duct system...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted April 13, 2012 Shanghai (CHN)

Lotus technical director James Allison says the team will hold off on running its new Double DRS for now. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Lotus technical director James Allison says that the team accepts the FIA’s decision to pronounce the Mercedes DRS/F-Duct system legal, and says that he was happy with the way the FIA dealt with the matter.

He added that the team is now looking at its own version, although it’s not clear whether it makes sense in terms of performance relative to the cost of developing it.

“It’s been no secret that our team has had some disagreements with what we saw Mercedes to be running,” said Allison. “We thought there were strong arguments against such a thing. That’s been rumbling along gently in the background, as everyone knows.

“We made what we hoped were strong arguments both to Mercedes and to the FIA but didn’t prevail and so with some regret we decided it was worth bringing it before the stewards to settle the matter one way or the other.

“I have to say we got a very fair hearing yesterday. The stewards took a lot of time to listen to our arguments, and what I hoped were very strong arguments didn’t prevail – but that’s the process and it’s fair enough. Just get on with it and accept that we were wrong in our earlier view.”

Allison said all teams would have to think hard before committing to developing their own version: “It’s not so much expense, the opportunity-cost of doing that system is higher than developing the things they had in mind otherwise. And that’s exactly the same choice we’ll face in our team.”

Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.