News On F1 Forums - Talk Formula 1

Give it your best.

Good stuff T-K. You have our support. Always!

Thanks a lot

Need all the support I can get

Anyway.....about these rumours?

Ah, getting back on topic

Latest and greatest:
Marco Andretti could land a drive with Honda soon. He's endorsed by his granddad.

Berger reckons Torro Rosso will be able to legally use Newey's new chassis.....seems they have found a loophole in the regs.
Should be some good feedback from four chassis

Julian Mayo wrote:Berger reckons Torro Rosso will be able to legally use Newey's new chassis.....seems they have found a loophole in the regs.
Should be some good feedback from four chassis

If they indeed can, with Newey on board, RBR and STR will become forces to be reckoned with quite soon. Maybe no wins yet but a few podiums? More competition... Like it!

gkaytaz wrote:

Julian Mayo wrote:Berger reckons Torro Rosso will be able to legally use Newey's new chassis.....seems they have found a loophole in the regs.
Should be some good feedback from four chassis

If they indeed can, with Newey on board, RBR and STR will become forces to be reckoned with quite soon. Maybe no wins yet but a few podiums? More competition... Like it!

Also an excellent way to compare engines, Renault vs Ferrari in the same chassis

GhoGho wrote:

gkaytaz wrote:

Julian Mayo wrote:Berger reckons Torro Rosso will be able to legally use Newey's new chassis.....seems they have found a loophole in the regs.
Should be some good feedback from four chassis

If they indeed can, with Newey on board, RBR and STR will become forces to be reckoned with quite soon. Maybe no wins yet but a few podiums? More competition... Like it!

Also an excellent way to compare engines, Renault vs Ferrari in the same chassis

Good point!

Just out of curiosity, how would the FIA know exactly if 2 chassis are identical and where is the limit as copying designs is no offense?

Thanks for info

F1greyhound wrote:Just out of curiosity, how would the FIA know exactly if 2 chassis are identical and where is the limit as copying designs is no offense?

Thanks for info

Copying designs is an offense F1greyhound. And that isn't just in Formula 1!

With the exception of engines and gearboxes, teams are not allowed to incorporate any part designed or manufactured by another constructor.

Now the loophole that both Toro Rosso/Red Bull and Super Aguri/Honda are planning to take advantage of is transferring the intellectual property from the constructor to the parent company.

From what we are hearing (not confirmed), the new Red Bull Racing chassis and the new Toro Rosso chassis will be both built by Red Bull GmbH, each will have a different backend to cater for the different engines.

Honda Racing as said to have transferred the intellectual property of the 2006 Honda chassis to Honda Motor Corporation who in turn will provide it to Super Aguri.

Obviously a number of teams are protesting this, particularly the private/small teams.

This is the clause from the 1997 Concorde Agreement:

A constructor is a person (including any corporate or unincorporated body) who owns the intellectual property rights to the rolling chassis it currently races and does not incorporate in such chassis any part designed or manufactured by any other constructor of Formula One racing cars except for standard items of safety equipment.
Provided always that nothing in this Schedule 3 shall prevent the use of an engine or gearbox manufactured by a person other than the constructor of the chassis.

Note: It is believed that the 2008 Concorde agreement doesn't have this clause so from 2008 it will be legal to share different parts of a car or the whole car!

If copying a design is an offense, many designers would have had to be fined in the past.....

What rule does the FIA apply if one team suddenly uses an identical design of e.g. a front wing? I firmly believe that nothing can be done as the team can always claim to have come to the same design by their own research without copying anybody. Everytime something radical and successfull had been introduced the competition tends to copy the design.

In the case of the 2 teams in question now they have to use the loophole because they want to use the same chassis officially, however I wonder if the FIA had a chance to find out if the teams simply did it without giving notice....

F1greyhound,

I guess it is what you define as copying and that is why there are IP, patents and trademark rules and regulations.

But I don't want to stray away from the topic. I understood you were discussing the customer chassis issue which Toro Rosso and Super Aguri seem to be exploiting.
Getting an idea from another and then building on it, well that is hardly called copying. The human evolution is built on this concept!
In F1 and in particular the top teams, they cannot afford to wait to copy what they think is a good design. By the time they do that, the other team would have made a step or two further.
They all take ideas from each other yes but they don't all necessarily adopt one design concept. Look at the keel design for example, there is the classis single keel, then came the twin keel and the V keel and the zero keel. A number of teams have adopted the zero keel while Ferrari for example still use the single keel.
Of course there are other examples where all the teams adopted a certain design (exhaust outlet for example) but we have seen many designs that were dropped too (Williams walrus wing comes to mind).

To win a title requires not just the car or just the driver but a whole team. Indivdual components whilst crucial to the overall success become a smaller factor.

Good posts Ed and F1

I would like to add that copying designs (or sharing components) has always been a no no in F1, however studying an idea and refining it is a whole different avenue.

Idea copying is nothing new and has always ben around, thats one of the reasons I have always enjoyed F1, even in the so called boring years. Who will think of the next brillianty thing. Who will jump on the idea and take it to the next level? Who will figure out something else?
The introduction of wings was an idea that was copied by every team almost as soon as they were first spotted. then the idea of raising them into clean air, then lowering them again.
Think lotus when the first true ground effect cars (with brooms attached) were introduced. Others soon followed and the brooms were replaced with solid moveable plates with ceramics which were more effective than the bristles lotus first used.
Babham followed with a mechanical device (vacuum cleaner style) to improve the effect and promptly had the "moveable aerodynamic devices" outlawed.

F1 has always been about pushing the design envelope and looking for loopholes, so Super Aguri and STR's move shouldn't surprise anyone.
Sauber tried unsuccessfully with what was reportedly a previous seasons Ferrari but were forced to make enough changes to the design to get the F1 scrutineers approval.
I think that SA and STR deserve a round of applause if they succeed, and I for one hope they do as it will almost certainly improve the competion and after all thats what we would all like to see.

What I haven't heard (unsurprisingly) is loud howls of protest amidst crys of cheating, only some mild objection. Now if the move had been made by Ferrari, well then.................block your ears

Ferrari engines are involved

Just reading through the Sporting Regulations in detail as I am preparing a summary of the changes, I came across this under 'use of tyres':

Unless he has used wet or extreme-weather tyres during the race, each driver must use at least one set of each specification of dry-weather tyres during the race

This means that it is already a rule for 2007 that a driver will have to use the 'soft' and 'hard' compounds during the race!

Personally I don't like this but I can see it adding a factor of unpredictabilty to races.