In Australia, the FIA had put into practice the first act of the updated TD018, as we anticipated, to monitor rear wings with dedicated cameras and viewfinders.
The FIA has been monitoring of the wing deflections since the end of 2024. The FIA’s, technical office are working hard to clamp down on this issue.
Red Bull’s technical director, Pierre Waché, touched on this issue during Bahrain testing.
“We see that someone still uses the mini-DRS” said the French engineer.
From what was seen in Melbourne via the very high resolution cameras mounted on the single-seaters in Friday’s free practice, the FIA now has no more doubts about that teams have already by-passed the static tests previously
No doubts after rear wing monitoring in Australia – there will be another technical directive immediately in China
From the Australian Grand Prix, the updated articles 3.15.17 and 3.15.12b came into force, relating to the movement of the rear wing-beam wing group with a tightening of the static tests.
The checks on the beam wing did not cause any particular problems for the cars. However, already during the tests in Bahrain, the FIA took action to put a cross on the issue of the Mini-DRS.
The additional cameras that framed the rear wings left no doubts to the men directed by Jan Monchoaux, technical director of the Federation. This morning, the FIA communicated to teams there will be a revision to the technical directive.
This will start from the Chinese GP, to counter the excessive deflection of the rear wings noted in Australia.
Article 3.15.17, related to the slot-gap between the mainplane and the mobile wing, will be updated.
The new regulations will mandate the slot gap cannot be greater than 0.5 mm, when a load of 750N is applied to the ends of the wing.
For reference, this is a major drop compared to the 2 mm allowed up to Australia.
The test is carried out by positioning the vertical load on the left and right, in an area between the mainplane of the rear wing and the mobile flap.
This is a 75% reduction compared to the previous tolerance value. Therefore, there is very little movement to the carbon structure.
In Australia, the DRS effect of the top teams showed a minimal percentage data. There was an average speed increase of 23 km/h (+24 km/h for Mercedes, +23 for McLaren and Red Bull, +22 km/h for Ferrari).
This represents a gain of about 8% compared to the maximum speed.
Apparently the FIA is not targeting a single team with these regulatory changes.
Instead, this is a generalised issue of the abuse of deflections that have angered the FIA technical office, finding itself dealing with the spread of this phenomenon despite the continuous actions they have.
However, it is understood that some teams, more than others, could be negatively impacted by this directive.
