ATLAS F1   Volume 6, Issue 47		Email to Friend   Printable Version
		Back in Control
		by Roger Horton, England

Officially, Ayrton Senna was the last driver to win a Formula One race in a car that was fitted with traction control. He did this when he drove his McLaren MP4/8 to victory in the 1993 Australian Grand Prix at Adelaide. But, according to a letter handed out by the FIA's technical delegate Jo Bauer at a recent meeting of the teams' Technical Working Group, at least one team had been using traction control right through until the end of the 1998 season. Faced with this opinion, the teams voted unanimously to allow the reintroduction of the system for next season, and it now looks likely to be approved at the upcoming meeting of the Formula One Commission, to be held at Monaco on December 7th. The issue of illegal electronics has bedevilled F1 racing ever since traction control, along with other 'driver aids', was officially banned at the end of the 1993 season. During the 1994 season, the Benetton team were found to still have some outlawed systems in their software, although the FIA stopped short of actually stating that they had used it in a race. Since then, there has been a steady stream of innuendo and veiled accusations that not all the teams have been playing by the rules. At the season-ending Malaysian Grand Prix, BMW motor sport boss Gerhard Berger summed up succinctly the opinions of most in the paddock as to whether the FIA should allow the return of traction control: "For myself I can look at this from two sides, one side is the driving side: I remember back when we had traction control, it takes away something where a good driver can do something better than another driver, controlling the throttle by himself, getting a nice power oversteer without losing time and things like this. "But as a challenge - as an engine manufacturer, especially working in the area of electronics - we would love to work on this area and to give the driver the best equipment to get the best lap time. But at the end of the day, I don't really care which way it goes, but it is very important that the FIA is sure, and is always able to be very sure, that everyone is using the same gun." Clearly it now appears that both the teams and the FIA are no longer confident that the genie can be kept inside the bottle,and that everyone is firing with the same 'gun'. Indeed, it seems to be increasingly common knowledge that the skill of the software engineers has outstripped the ability of the FIA's experts to police the rules, hence the change in attitude from the FIA. Max Mosley, president of the FIA, has been the most ardent critic of traction control in particular, and driver aids in general. He has often stated his opinion that if we are to have a Drivers' Championship, then it should be a test of driver skills, one against the other, and not a contest where the computer takes over the hard parts and the driver is just left to turn the steering wheel and push the pedals. Mosley is not a man to shy away from difficult issues, and increasingly the sport is getting so technical that it's becoming impossible to draw up regulations that can cover every eventuality. Increasingly, therefore, the FIA under Mosley's leadership is adopting a 'principle' to define the purpose of its regulations, a 'catch all' approach that allows the FIA enforcers to decide whether something is illegal, even if it has not actually broken any written rule. This approach has now been found to be less effective in policing the murky area of illegal software but is still appropriate when dealing with things that can actually be measured. Earlier this year at Indianapolis, Mosley restated his case with all the eloquence and firmness that the F1 press corps has come to expect, when defending his position against criticism levelled at him and his views. "All the teams say 'we want completely clear rules', and I can understand this - I had to build cars once myself. They want to know, 'are we legal or are we illegal'. Well, the fundamental difficulty there is you are trying to prohibit things that have not yet been invented. So it's very difficult to clearly and concisely prohibit a device which no one has yet thought of, because obviously, we have not thought of it by definition. "So really, the best we have been able to come up with is a principle, like for example, no electronic driver aids. Then someone says, what's a driver aid? And we say, well, when we see it we will tell you whether it is or not. Really, that's the best we can do. "But we have said to the teams: you draw up an absolutely clear set of regulations, and unless there is some fundamental problem with them, we'll be happy to adopt them. The problem is that it is not as easy as it sounds. It's easy to say what's wrong, not so easy to put it right." Back in August, the teams, along with Mosley and F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, held a meeting in London to review, among others issues, the whole question of electronics in Formula One. At the time, the fact that some team owners tried to force the resignation of Mosley from the presidency of the FIA overshadowed most of the other topics that were discussed. But at that meeting, Mosley offered to enter into discussions on liberalising all electronic systems that were banned at the end of '93 - an offer that failed to find the unanimous support required for it to come under serious consideration. One team did, however, suggest that traction control alone be approved, and it appears that this is the direction in which the sport will now move. By late September at Indy, Mosley went to some lengths to explain just what measures were in place to keep everyone honest, but he was clearly preparing the ground for a rethink in the rules. "The teams have an (engine) control programme. We look very carefully to make sure that there is nothing hidden in it that shouldn't be there. We then have an encoded version, so that we can upload their programme at any time and compare it with the master version that we've got and make sure that nothing's changed. "We then physically seal the box, and we also put in an electronic seal, a password, and without that password you can't get in and change the programme, so theoretically we have got them, but... we've thought each year we had all this under control and it has emerged that in the past it hasn't always been the case, and now I think we have to look very carefully about weighing up the degree of freedom that the teams have, versus the absolute necessity to be sure that everyone is racing under the same rules. "If it is a choice between technical freedom and technical equity, then equity has to win every time. So I think we will be asking ourselves very carefully whether we are absolutely sure we know what's going on, and if we are not, then I think that we are going to have to do something." So clearly the question has been asked, and the answer seems to be that at last it's time for the FIA to give up their struggle and to reluctantly allow traction control to return. It has taken a while, but the cost of trying to hold the line against the electronic cheats is now just too high. As Sir Frank Williams observed recently: "There is no easy solution, that's why the argument has been dragging on for such a long time. There is a lot of talk about what is going on out on the track, and it's not helping." If the dispute concerning some aspects of electronic controls is soon to be settled, it's possible that another area of dissension could occur next year, when Michelin's return to the circuits sees a full blown tyre war erupt between the French company and the current monopoly supplier - Bridgestone. Earlier this year, Michelin motor racing boss Pierre Dupasquier warned that Formula One faced tyre chaos next year, unless the sport's governing body clarified the regulations with regard to the depth of grooves that must be left on the tyres at the end of a race. Challenged once again, as to why the FIA has refused to specify the depth of grooves that should be left on the tyres at the end of the race, Mosley calmly turns the argument on its head with his own brand of logic: "We don't actually care if they run the grooves down (to slicks) if the tyre is slower. What we don't want is for someone to run the grooves right out and to have a faster car, because we don't want slicks for safety reasons. Now currently, provided the rubber at the base of the groove is not thicker than a certain amount, the tyre will just be a lot slower if you run it right down and that's what our experience has been so far." Nonetheless, Mosley soon added: "We say in the rules that we will introduce new rules without notice, if that ceases to be the case." With every lap that each car covers throughout the race weekend timed down to three decimal places, Mosley contends that there is no way a car could improve its lap time by running on 'slicks' and escape detection. "The only time we could be embarrassed, even slightly, is if the only time they ran the tyre down to slick was in the last section of the race, so it finished on a slick tyre, and even then we would look at it and say, sorry - that's a slick - and they would only do it once." What a pity, then, that the software cheats can't be defeated in such a straight forward manner, and the awful sounds of 'misfiring' engines will almost certainly once again be heard at Grand Prix races. In the early nineties, in-car TV shots of Senna manhandling his manual gear-change McLaren around the racetracks of the world captivated all who witnessed them. His skill was obvious to even a casual observer, and it is little wonder that the Brazilian detested the introduction of all the 'driver aids' that diluted the opportunity for him to profit from his talent. But unfortunately, technical advancements can't be un-invented. Surely it's better to have clever legal winners, than clever unscrupulous ones.

Roger Horton	© 2000 Kaizar.Com, Incorporated.
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