Mercedes tested a clever loophole before putting it on the car

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:04

   And one of the things that's interesting is that there are the rules, there are things that are clearly against the rules, there are things that are permitted, and then there's a spectrum between those of the gray areas. And one of the challenges is you defend something that you think is great and clearly allowed, but then it's banned mid-season or it's banned in the next season. And so was it really worth all that effort to get a trivial advantage?

2. 12:28

   Maybe, maybe not. And I think the lesson we've learned is that it needs to dialogue with the governing body. If you feel you have an innovation that passed the first red face test within the organization, that means the leading engineers, sometimes myself on the table, we're having a mock trial. The people that have invented the loophole or the opportunity play the prosecutor. and so they need to fight their own argument and then on the other side there is the ones engineers that defend the innovation and then is our general counsel carrie and myself who are the judges and you try to see how uh how convincing the defense is yeah exactly how convincing is the defense and how can you destroy the argument that is actually legal yes so that would be an extreme case where there's something that we we we struggle within the engineering community to

3. 13:24

   define but obviously um the dialogue with the fa is important and bring them on very early but so will you if you have a very secret proprietary improvement that you don't want to unveil it will be totally top secret within mercedes but you will also bring the fia into it if we think it's 100 defendable okay well crystal clear defendable yes then we will deploy it on the car and then we will make the argument why it's right and normally the fa will say we don't like it yes they could say we like it but it circumvents the principle of the regulation so we're going to ban it because the principle of regulation is most equal competition yes so if they're fair they're going to say ban it next year if they believe it's really very powerful and it's not what they wanted to see or intended to define then it could be banned much earlier this is where the

4. 14:14

   politics come into play so basically if they think it's a fair loophole they'll give you one season of advantage i would say this is call it the kind of experience that we have yes because they are you know with innovators and engineers too and they will respect if something comes up like this you know one example what was the system that we call das which was you know you have the various dimension how you off the steering wheel what you do i don't know if you've heard about it you can steer to the left and you can steer to the right that part i know i'm with you so far yeah so far yeah there's like an airplane no in an airplane you can also go forward exactly there's actually nothing like and here because it becomes interesting so what we did we created another dimension with the steering wheel actually to push and to pull the steering wheel in a formula one car

5. 14:59

   and what it did it changed yes i do remember this yeah yeah uh it changed the way the front wheels were operating in terms of its toe effect what it did is we were able to turn the the we created a toe effect which helped us to heat up the surfaces of the tires by basically dragging them you're running them inefficiently yeah and they respected the innovation i remember the first test sky had it on board and said what's happening here they're pushing and pulling the steering wheel and when it was shown to me four or five months before we actually produced it they called me to a rig in in test and development and there was a steering wheel and they said now turn to the left and turn to the right you know i was a driver so and then i said now push it and pull it and i said but that doesn't go it's like you know i'm used to it in order to fix the steering wheel to the way i

6. 15:53

   wanted to have it but it feels deeply uncomfortable actually to have this additional motion in the steering wheel and then the formula driver got in and said no we'd like to try it and and it really worked so come back i think if you want to be you want to have the the exchange with the faa to make sure that you're not on the wrong side of the argument but so with that did they end up banning it or they ended up permitting it they banned it after a year so why did they ban it after a year why didn't they say okay this is one of the things that f1 cards can do now i don't know maybe we lost the political argument that it was good um other teams said it would cost so much to replicate it and they could but is that really the intention of the of the regulations why did you do it as a push pull rather than a

7. 16:36

   button on the steering wheel or you know why was the push pull the control mechanism i think there was a regulations that allowed to have it like a mechanical system that was you know the the rule is the driver must drive the car yes so it needed to be deployed for the driver through a mechanical system is i believe that was the reason i see so that was the best way to have it defensible yeah