A look into the older times reveals that F1 doesn’t change when it comes to implementing rules and regulations and affected the likes of Ross Brawn, Anderson, and more.
Red Bull boss Christian Horner is unhappy with the change of regulations coming after the summer break and some next season. The flex-floor drama has led to FIA clamping down on the team leading to some changes in ride heights and floor planks coming in.
Horner is specifically not happy with this and said:
“there’s no such thing as the intent of the regulations. It’s a binary thing.”
Nevertheless, it’s not the first time FIA has brought some tweaks mid-season.
Ross Brawn – currently F1’s managing director of motorsports – became entangled in a very similar quarrel back in 1996. Back then, he was the technical director of the Benetton team.
Sudden regulation changes made Brawn furious
Coming from behind in the 1995 Constructors Championship, the Benetton team of Brawn was caught off by regulations that mandated higher cockpit sides for the 1996 season. The regulation was implemented for better safety following the tragic accident of Ayrton Senna two years earlier.
Nevertheless, Brawn was specifically furious with the rivals Jordan and Williams. He was not pleased by the approach both the outfits took. Their design let them ride a lower cockpit side and gain more aerodynamical advantage than the rest of the field.
Gary Anderson reveals how they achieved the ingenious design
In a recent podcast, Gary Anderson – Jordan’s then technical director – revealed how they achieved the design letting them gain more aerodynamic efficiency.
“What we did was reverse the roll hoop. In other words the front leg of the roll hoop normally comes up fairly vertically and the rear leg that goes to the back of the chassis is sort of angled,”
Anderson explains.
“The way the regulations were written, you had to have a straight line between the forward roll hoop, which is just out of the monocoque really, in front of the steering wheel, to the rear roll hoop – and it had to clear the driver’s helmet.”
“The definition of where the roll hoop is, is where they put the load test on the roll hoop. So the team defines where that position is. And from there you were allowed 50mm of deflection. That happens on both the forward roll hoop and the rear roll hoop,”
added Anderson.
“We reversed the rear roll hoop, defined the position to be further back. But in theory it’s still the front of the roll hoop – and the load test goes still in the same direction from the forward point. So the roll hoop is just further back.”
“Then to make the line between the rear roll hoop and the front roll hoop pass the driver’s helmet, we raised the spike on the front of the chassis – so it was 45mm higher – because again you’re allowed that 50mm deflection.”
“Because we had a shallower [angle of] line, we had a shallower headrest area – which meant it didn’t look like a rubbish skip. Which is what the Ferrari, for example, did look like.”
Ferrari with its bulky and less efficient design
Ferrari engineer and designer John Barnard has admitted that their team designed something that was much bulkier and less efficient.
“It was the result of me leaving my aero guy alone to go and do the windtunnel testing,” Barnard explains. “Following the rules exactly as they were written, and producing this headrest thing alongside the driver, he did that on the model in the tunnel and he phoned me up and said ‘do you know what, this is making it better – this is giving us better numbers!’.
“I said ‘are you sure?’ and he said ‘yeah, we’ve tried it a couple of times and it’s improved the numbers’. I said, ‘it doesn’t look right; it looks wrong somehow’.
“What happened was, we went with that result but he hadn’t looked at the airflow into the airbox. It screwed up the airflow into the airbox.”
“To be fair, it had a fair bit of downforce that car. It won Spain in the wet. Schumacher was sailing away from everybody and I think that’s because it had really good downforce. What it didn’t have was good straightline speed, that was probably its biggest downfall.”
At the time, the Brawn team had also designed something similar to Ferrari. So, the team publicly criticized Jordan’s solution:
“the top of the roll hoop is the top of the roll hoop, and you can’t use two different positions to measure it.”
Adrian Newey with a new loophole
Nevertheless, the headrest of Williams’ was even lower than that of Jordan’s. This was of course because Adrian Newey had found a loophole in the regulations allowing the team to do so.
The regulations only specified the height of the chassis beside the driver’s head. But, the rules didn’t specifically say that the height of the headrest has to be the same.
The headrest was only meant to have a total minimum area and Newey gave it that, placing it as low as possible. Then, he placed a tiny fin on top of the headrests. This satisfied the chassis regulations and the car was good to go.
Nevertheless, Brawn was not at all happy with this and when the car was first unveiled in the 1996 Australian Grand Prix, Brawn said:
“when the rules were made, the intention was clear and I’m not sure the intention has been met. They comply with the letter of the rules, it’s just a question of whether we need to re-write the rules. It’s up to the authorities to decide whether it complies with the spirit.”
Anderson was impressed by Newey’s approach
The design might seem unethical but as Newey said in his autobiography:
“rules are rules and there’s no clause about intent of the regulation”.
This is something Anderson agrees with. He believes the way of approach was unique and something they never thought of.
“It’s another way of looking at it, getting the headrest lower down than the top of the chassis,” Anderson says. “At that point in time we never read that solution.
“We sat in the Technical Working Group with the FIA when these regulations were all being changed, and there was a technical representative from each team.
“I was the one from Jordan, and after Ayrton Senna’s accident we were coming up with stuff to try to protect the driver better – make it into a survival cell instead of a monocoque – and at each meeting some of these things were being opposed, so you were sitting there thinking about it as you were signing up to it, or debating it, so you always try to find the solutions and our first solution was turning the rollover bar the other way around.
“It’s the same old deal, there is no rule that says ‘this is the intent’. It’s all about the numbers – the numbers are black and white and that’s what you’ve got to abide by.”
Engineers and designers work a lot to make a car that is more aerodynamically efficient than others. In this particular instance these two designs – Jordan and Williams worked out the best and by the 1997 season, most teams had adapted to the same.
The engineers are the backbone of Formula 1 and keep pushing the regulations to the limit to find the maximum performance.
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