I was very surprised by the revelation that a Red Bull Formula 1 team member attempted to remove a strip of tape on the pitwall as a marker to help McLaren's Lando Norris line up on the grid.
Even more surprising, and a little unconvincing to me at least, was Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies claiming the pre-race breach was “probably a bit” of a misunderstanding. After all, these kinds of fun and games can and will go on and usually everybody knows about it in the team.
It struck me as similar to when Benetton had its pitlane fire while refuelling Jos Verstappen’s car at Hockenheim in 1994. That was blamed on a junior employee removing a filter in the refuelling rig, apparently with permission from the manufacturer.
Considering how much time could be gained or lost by refuelling and the endless practice to reduce the stoppage time, it would be unlikely a senior engineer wouldn’t have known about that. But thinking that and proving it are two different things and 'plausible deniability' is always very valuable.
As my colleague Jon Noble said in his column, there is a bit of common courtesy between the team to make sure that no team blatantly leaves pit equipment in the way of another car entering or leaving the pit boxes and the like. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that in a busy pitlane, some team or other won’t hang around fractionally longer than entirely necessary!
Tales of past tricks
This type of skulduggery has always gone on. Not that it’s something I would ever do…
I once found that our radio supplier, who came to races with us, was planning on using a frequency scrambler on other teams when it came around to pitstop time, especially the teams we were racing against. He thought it was just a bit of fun, but I put a stop to it before he was able to optimise it.
We also had a senior member of the design team who liked to push the limits further than I thought was acceptable. His excuse was that ‘well they don’t check those things’, but they were all actually performance-related so again, I put a stop to that very quickly.
After I had finished with my direct involvement with a team, I was asked to look at some drawings someone had acquired. They wanted to use it to prove that a certain team was cheating. In the drawing description it actually said medium flexible front flap, I managed to convince them that everything flexes so I didn’t hear any more about it.
So it’s actually very difficult to really know who is really up to what.
There are lots of examples that need attention like partly blocking on track, leaving the pitlane slower than you need to, pulling out in front of another driver in the pitlane, ranting on the radio about another driver in the hope of convincing officials to penalise them, and not driving to a safe place to pull up when you have a problem. All of these things could be argued to be against the spirit of the regulations, even if they aren’t done to the degree that in reality are dangerous.
How to stop the tricks
The big question is how do you stop it? Well one thing that won’t stop it is fining a team €50,000 because with the budgets they have that kind of money won’t stop you doing anything, especially for Red Bull. Points are the only currency that matters, so if it’s a team problem take away constructors’ championship points and if it’s the driver take away drivers’ championship points. That would get everybody’s attention.
As for the problem for Norris in positioning his car in the start box, yes he is smaller than most so his side vision from the cockpit would be compromised more than for say Nico Hulkenberg. But for any driver in these cars it is very difficult to see the front wheel. It’s no wonder we have so many ‘small’ incidents, but they are what they are so how do we fix it?
There is a sensor in the track surface and on the car that detects a jump start, so surely it wouldn’t be impossible for a signal to be sent to each car when they are in the correct position? It could be within a radius of 10cm or whatever of that sensor and a light on the dash would come on. The same tolerance could be used for a jump start.
As for my pet hate, cars stopping in the fast lane of the pitlane, if I was involved with a team this would be something I wouldn’t put up with. It can interfere with all your plans, so again a minimum speed in the fast lane could be introduced just the same as the maximum speed we currently have. It doesn’t have to be fast, perhaps 20km/h would be enough to start with, simply enough to stop any driver actually coming to a stop. It would also stop these huge queues at the start or restart of a session and the difficulty that some of the teams having actually getting into that queue.
With any problems there are solutions. You just have to react as each one rears its ugly head.
But what you can be certain of is that with teams full of competitive people desperate to win, there will be those who search for every possible advantage no matter how small. The Red Bull ‘tape’ incident is just another example of what’s been going for as long as motor racing has existed.
