Copy, paste
With significantly smaller R&D budgets, why wouldn’t F1’s customer teams look to their suppliers for an advantage?
People in Formula One have long memories. Particularly when it comes to perceived insults. The new F1 cars for 2020 had barely turned a wheel at the
rst pre-season test in Barcelona when one team was making critical comments about another.
Racing Point came under immediate scrutiny when its latest offering, the RP20, carried design hallmarks of the 2019 championship-winning Mercedes … and then went very quickly on the second day of testing.
This should have been no surprise. Racing Point (formerly Force India and due to become Aston Martin in 2021; see page 102) has a technical liaison with Mercedes that goes beyond the supply of engines. Sharing the same wind tunnel is the most super cial element of a partnership that was bound to lead to downloading aerodynamic thoughts that clearly worked, the most obvious being a at nose and bodywork treatment around the front suspension pick-up points. If that’s what was visible, then we could only guess what lay beneath the surface.
“Our inspiration came from the quickest car of 2019,” admitted Andrew Green, technical director at Racing Point. “Why wouldn’t we? We’re in a position where we’re using its [2019] gearbox, we’ve got the same power unit and the transmission is designed for suspension to go with a certain aerodynamic philosophy. We had a car that was seventh in the championship last year. We’ve got one more year of these regulations and the development that we were seeing with our car to me just wasn’t going to deliver. It was worth taking a risk. And it is a big risk.
“Having torn up what we did before, where were we going to start? Well, you aren’t going to start looking at the slowest car on the grid, are you? You’re going to start looking at the fastest car. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we’ve lost one year, but I don’t think we would have lost anything relative to not doing it. The downside of not doing it was much greater.”
Watching from the sidelines in Barcelona, Guenther Steiner could barely contain a wry smile as Racing Point came under re for this direct copy. As boss of Haas, he had experienced much the same thing when the American team received stick for heavy use of Ferrari parts and design philosophy. The fact that many of the comments had come from Force India (the forerunner of Racing Point) brought “pot calling kettle black” to mind. Green immediately refuted such irony, insisting Haas had gone much further than allowed by the regulations governing part exchange. Green took the opportunity to explain the process, as permitted by the rules, when sharing part of the rear suspension developed by Mercedes.
“Our suspension is mainly Racing Point,” he said. “Like last year, we did utilise some Mercedes suspension bits outboard, so it’s no change. Some of them are delivered from Mercedes, some of the mechanical bits, but the rest of it is designed by Racing Point. This is permitted. The bit that really upset, and still upsets, us about what goes on is the transfer of information that can and does happen between big teams and the small teams that, in some cases, is circumventing the regulation.”
Such a thinly veiled comment about Haas and Ferrari invoked this response from Steiner: “Sometimes you have to think before you talk because maybe one day it’s your turn and then you cannot go against [it],” said Steiner about criticism of Racing Point. “As we all know, they complained quite heavily a few years ago, so now it is going full circle. It is up to them. I don’t really care. I would put it like this: they use a lot of Mercedes parts on their car, so why would they go and copy a Red Bull? It’s the same with us. We buy a lot of parts from Ferrari. So which car are we going to copy? I guess a Ferrari. I mean, if we copied a Toro Rosso or a Red Bull, we would be pretty stupid because we would try to invent something that is not there.
“So, I think they [Racing Point] are just doing what we are doing: just trying to get the best out of it and use that model.”
This may have been a preliminary spat but you can be sure that, once the season really gets going, the slower of the two will be shouting the loudest. Game on!