01/02/2017
NEWS STORY
With teams' own technical bosses helping to shape the rules, loopholes are becoming ever harder to find.
One of the great aspects of the sport over the years has been the way in which teams have discovered the means of gaining an advantage without breaking the rules, merely slightly circumventing them, exploiting them to the nth degree.
Be it mass dampers, the F-duct, the double diffuser or, going right back, the infamous Brabham fan car and Lotus' twin chassis of the late 70s, engineers have always sought to push the envelope just that little bit harder.
Sadly, in almost all cases, the ideas were soon declared illegal, some before they even hit the track, but it was the engineers' duty to look for such loopholes nonetheless.
Sadly, with the teams now helping to write the rule book, Williams Rob Smedley feels the days of the loophole are almost a thing of the past.
"Every time there has been a new set of regulations, at least through my time in F1, those openings have become smaller and smaller," he told Autosport. "The reason for that is that the technical regulations are pretty much written by senior technical people within the teams.
"They are of the mind that we're all looking for a loophole, we are all trying to get the start on our competitors," he continued. "But as these rules get written and because it's a collaborative process and it's written by people who are looking for loopholes, then the loopholes are pretty much closed off in the regulations.
"This set of regulations has been very much at the forefront of that," he said of the new regulations for 2017. "We've tried to close down the loopholes as and when.
"Do loopholes or areas of high exploitation still exist? Of course," he concluded. "Have we or other people found them? That remains to be seen."