Following a comment made by Lewis Hamilton at the weekend, the FIA has confirmed that it is to act on “bendy” wings.
Speaking to Sky Sports in the aftermath of Saturday’s qualifying session, when he out-qualified Max Verstappen by just 0.036s, eventual race winner, Lewis Hamilton said that his rivals had a “bendy (rear) wing”, which he believed could account for some of the RBR16B’s speed.
“The Red Bulls are really fast on the straights,” said the Briton. “They have this bendy wing on the back of their car which they put on today and they gained at least three tenths from this wing.
“So they will be quicker down the straights than us, and it will be hard to keep them behind. But that doesn’t mean it will be impossible.”
“I saw the comments,” responded Christian Horner when asked about Hamilton’s comment. “Of course the cars are scrutineered thoroughly and there’s pull back tests, there’s all kinds of different tests it has to pass.
“The FIA are completely happy with the car, that it has passed all of those tests that are pretty stringent,” he insisted.
“So I was surprised to see his comments on that. But it’s something that Toto has mentioned to me previously. I doubt it was Lewis’ opinion, so probably came from elsewhere.”
While on Friday the Austrian team had been running a high downforce wing with an eye on the forthcoming race in Monaco, for Saturday it switched back to the lower drag version used previously.
Article 3.8 of the sport’s technical regulations states that those components that influence a car’s aerodynamic performance must be “rigidly secured to the entirely sprung part of the car” – where rigidly secured means not having any degree of freedom – and “remain immobile in relation to the sprung part of the car”.
On Tuesday, the FIA’s single seater technical head, Nikolas Tombazis wrote to all the teams advising that new load deflection tests will be introduced from 15 June.
“We have become aware of some cases whereby rear designs which comply with the requirements of articles 3.9.3 and 3.9.4 nonetheless exhibit excessive deflections while the cars are in motion,” he wrote.
“We believe that such deformations can have a significant influence on a car’s aerodynamic performance and hence could be deemed to contravene the provisions of article 3.8.
“We will be looking out for any anomalous behaviour of the deformation of the rear wing,” he added. “In particular we will not tolerate any persistent out of plane deformation that may be contrived to circumvent the symmetrical loading applied in the load deflection tests.
“Should we observe any characteristics that indicate exploitation of this area, we will introduce further load deflection tests as necessary.”
The 15 June deadline gives the teams – whoever they might be – until just ahead of the French Grand Prix to make the necessary changes.
