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"Mass Distraction: Interview with Pat Symonds
No one in the F1 One paddock advocated the legality of mass dampers as passionately as Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds. However, since the FIA's Court of Appeal ruled the device illegal, Symonds and his peers at Renault have maintained media silence. Now, for the first time, Symonds talks to autosport.com's Jonathan Noble about the whole affair, his reaction to the verdict, and how Renault plan to bounce back with a vengeance
Ataturk Airport, Istanbul. It is probably the last place in the world that anyone would have expected a significant chapter in the 2006 Formula One World Championship to be played out.
As the flights ferrying Formula One personnel unloaded last Wednesday afternoon, shifting their excited cargo on to immigration, everyone was desperately phoning back to base to hear if the verdict from the FIA's Court of Appeal Court on mass dampers had been forthcoming
Perhaps the man keenest to know was Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds, who had fought so hard to convince the governing body that the mass damper system fitted to the R26 was as legal as it had been when it was first introduced in last year's Brazilian Grand Prix.
"I've not heard anything," he said, his mobile phone tightly clutched in his hand.
Through immigration all was quiet but then, as people patiently queued at baggage belts, the sound of SMS message tones rang through the hall. Huddles developed around people's phones and sure enough, autosport.com's own text message delivered the news: "The FIA's Court of Appeal has ruled that Renault's mass damper system is illegal."
That short line was enough to deliver a clear blow to Renault's title hopes. While Fernando Alonso would go on to insist it made no difference, the very fact Renault had fought so hard to keep the device showed just how valuable it was.
Worse than the loss to Renault too, the mass damper affair had obviously left the door open for the conspiracy theorists. There were plenty of people in the Istanbul paddock keen to suggest that the controversy was nothing more than a blatant attempt at keeping the world championship fight open.
Indeed, Renault F1 team boss Flavio Briatore kept suggesting to Italian journalists over the Turkish Grand Prix weekend that the whole matter had much to do with helping Ferrari.
"I wonder who will be advantaged by this situation... certainly someone will be advantaged... I wonder who?" he said. "When you change the rules mid-way through a season, it's obvious you're distorting the situation."
Following those comments early in the weekend, however, Renault then pulled down the shutters and deliberately moved to try and not get involved in a slanging match with the FIA. They were quite right to believe that such a move would serve no purpose other than grab a few headlines.
Briatore duly kept a low profile (despite a few choice words here and there over Ferrari's rear wheel fairings) and Symonds himself focused his efforts not on looking back at what had happened, but in working out how best to take Renault on from here in their world championship fight.
But with the matter not dying away completely over the Turkey weekend, especially when Ferrari suggested Renault should have originally sought explicit permission from the FIA to run the mass damper last September, Symonds took time out from his busy schedule to give Renault's side of the affair.
A 'Massive' Issue
There is little doubt that the banning of 'mass dampers' has been the technological talking point of the season - even more so than the flexi-wing issues that marred the start of the campaign.
To the casual onlooker, it was not too hard to link the loss of form that Renault suffered after the French Grand Prix with the banning of mass dampers. That lineage has turned mass dampers, a technology that would normally excite only the more technically minded, into a subject that everyone involved in the sport has an opinion about.
And although some believe that interest in the ban has been blown out of all proportion, Symonds for one is well aware about the affect it has had on his team.
JN: Has too much been made of the mass damper affair in terms of the championship fight?
Pat Symonds: "I don't think so. You mean if you separate out the technical arguments, has it had too much focus from the point of view of the championship?"
JN: Yes?
Symonds: "Well, they are sort of linked. It is a technology that we developed initially that adds performance to the car. It is a very innocuous technology. It is a very simple technology, so it is rather a shame - irrespective of the ultimate good or bad of it - it is rather a shame that it gets banned during the season. So, I don't think too much had been made of it. I don't know...I've kept myself out of it really, to be honest."
JN: When news of the ban first surfaced on autosport.com, we suggested that the damper was worth around three-tenths of a second per lap. Was that accurate?
Symonds: "Yes, that is a pretty average figure."
JN: Was there also an impact in terms of the longevity of the tyres over a race distance, and therefore did it have an impact on tyre choice?
Symonds: "For sure, although probably not as far as affecting tyre choice. But the whole thing about it is to reduce the variation of contact patch forces, so anything you do like that helps your tyres last better. There is no doubt about it. So it is not of a magnitude that you would have to use a different tyre, but for any given tyre it will perform better and longer with the mass damper fitted than with it removed."
The Change of Heart
One of the more interesting aspects that came out of the appeal hearing was the slight shift in focus away from it being a pure ban on the device because of its principle purpose being aerodynamic, to the fact that Renault never specifically asked for permission about whether they could run the system.
Indeed, Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn was only too keen to point out over the weekend that Article 2.4 of Formula One's technical regulations, which was referred to in the appeal verdict, was not acted upon.
Article 2.4 of the 2006 Formula One Technical Regulations states: "Automobiles must comply with these regulations in their entirety at all times during an Event...Should a competitor feel that any aspect of these regulations is unclear, clarification may be sought from the FIA Formula One Technical Department."
Speaking about his reaction to the outcome of the mass damper verdict, Brawn focused on a team's responsibility under Article 2.4.
"It is the competitor's responsibility to ensure the car is legal, not the FIA's," he said during his regular Friday evening briefing. "It's our job to make sure the car is legal at all times.
"I don't know how much the FIA knew of the Renault system and how much Renault informed the FIA of how it works. I understand a team went to the FIA and said 'we understand Renault have this system and for the following reasons we think that it is illegal'. Faced with that argument, the FIA then looked to the system and came to a conclusion."
Brawn's comments certainly did not go down well with Symonds. He is angry on two parts.
Firstly, he counters, because Renault did write to the FIA. Symonds wrote a memo to Charlie Whiting on September 13 last year asking whether they needed to re-crash test the nose of the R25 again prior to them fitting the mass damper for the Brazilian Grand Prix.
And secondly, because there was no need for the team to ask permission from the FIA to run a device they had no doubts was legal. Under Article 2.4, they would only need to go to the FIA if they were 'unclear' about the situation.
JN: Given that the mass damper was passed legal, and not tested or questioned, for the best part of nine months, what do you believe motivated the change of heart, or the reinterpretation of the mass damper regulations?
Symonds: "You changed what you said there....in TD20 (Technical Directive No. 20, the letter sent to the teams after the French Grand Prix) the FIA do actually state that they considered it legal until July 17. So what made them change their mind?
"Well, that is quite difficult to determine, because in TD20 it says they changed their mind because they had evidence that the primary purpose was aerodynamic. The mass damper's primary purpose was not aerodynamic and any aerodynamic improvement you get is incidental.
"The strange thing is that after TD20, the argument shifted and then it became a question of not whether or not the primary purpose was aerodynamic, but whether it was part of the suspension? And whether it was a forerunner of evil things like twin chassis, or what have you.
"So it has been a little bit of a moving target to determine where the argument was lying. Even in the defence documents there was a little bit about movable ballast, which they didn't even try and justify in court because it was such a weak argument."
JN: What did you make of the claims from Ferrari, that you should have gone to the FIA if you had any doubts?
Symonds: "It wasn't an issue to me. Correct me if I am wrong, but Ferrari ran the dampers - and did they use Article 2.4? Ferrari are not being very pleasant over this whole episode. If you had just landed from Mars and you were just reading some of the magazines, you would think that Ferrari had been hard done by. That (the claim) is absolutely ridiculous.
"Article 2.4 is very clear. It is to allow you to ask questions if you have doubts about the legality of the system. We had no doubts about the legality of the system, and neither did Ross because he would not have put it on his car. So the statements they made - 'We always ask if we have doubts' - well QED, because he fitted it to his car without asking, then he obviously didn't have any doubts. So, he is stirring things a little bit."
JN: "There were suggestions that Honda Racing's former technical director Geoff Willis was going to introduce mass dampers but was not sure about their legality, so did ask the FIA. Had you heard that?
Symonds: "What I do know, because it came up in the court hearing, is that people asked for clarifications in May. And Charlie replied to them. I don't know who 'they' were, but Charlie replied to them and said it was legal."
JN: Do you think the FIA was motivated by the twin chassis issue, that it wanted to ban this because of the fear of what it might turn into?
Symonds: "No. Why would you ban it for that reason? We had made it very clear from even when I spoke to Charlie about it at Silverstone in July, that if he wasn't happy with it then we could talk about limiting it or banning it at the end of the season.
"We have got three test sessions left, we have got less than two months of the season left, no one is going to say: '---, Renault have got a good idea, let's turn that into a twin chassis by Brazil.' It just wasn't going to happen. So if that fear was genuine, then it could have been handled very, very easily."
JN: A bit like the Front Torque Transfer system on the Honda from 2004?
Symonds: "Precisely. This is the interesting thing, I think. There is actually past precedent and a peculiar thing called future precedent. The past precedent is Honda's FTT, where everyone said, 'good luck to you but end of the season let's stop it'.
"But the interesting thing is that there is now future precedent in that the 2008 rules cover this sort of thing - but it is precedent because the 2008 rules were published in 2005. It very clearly states that you get a year to use something, you disclose it and then it gets banned if it is not for the good of F1.
"We are in this strange little no-man's land between these two events where they said: 'Let's just stop this now.'"
JN: Do you feel victimised?
Symonds: "I think if you worry too much about things like that, then you are not going to perform. So it is just a question of trying even harder."
Fighting On from Here
One thing is clear: however disappointed he is with what has happened, Symonds is thinking of only one thing - how to ensure Renault are quick enough to win both championships again this year.
Interestingly, he claims that the team were so 'convinced' that they would help the Hockenheim race stewards win the FIA appeal that they had not put any effort into finding alternative solutions to help them out if mass dampers were banned.
JN: The loss of pace, the three tenths that has been talked about, can any of that be recovered by knowledge you have learnt from mass dampers, or is it purely a case of finding the time from elsewhere?
Symonds: "I am not sure of the answer to that. I always say to people that you cannot unlearn things. We were completely convinced that we were going to win the appeal so we had not spent a great deal of time thinking about life after TMDs (Tunable Mass Dampers, their correct term).
"Having lost the appeal, we are now starting to think about life after TMDs. What have we learned from it? And how do we focus our thoughts now on where it will go? That work has only just started, really. So it is early days to say.
"But it is like so many of these things. There is a logical engineering answer to things, and if the regulations do not allow you to do it that way, so you do it in a much more complicated around the houses sort of way. The lovely thing about the TMD was in its simplicity. An engineering undergraduate could have designed it. It was that simple."
JN: It was on the Citroen 2CV originally, wasn't it?
Symonds: "No. It was on a 1933 Alvis. The first reference we found to it was in Autocar magazine, in the early 1930s. There was a British company who had worked with Rover on these things, so they have been around for ages.
"It is very basic mathematics. In the defence document, I put the maths of it down there. It was something I did during a telephone conversation while I was talking to someone. I was doing that at the same time, it was that simple. So it is a shame when nice, simple things go.
"The one thing I hope, though, is that we have reawakened interest in TMDs for the motor industry. There are TMDs in use now, the Ford Explorer uses them in the modern days, but I hope people will start looking at them again, because they are such a simple solution."
JN: You said you were completely confident before the hearing. So presumably when you heard the verdict you must have been shell-shocked or disappointed?
Symonds: "I was very disappointed. The FIA had taken TD27 (one of the clarification sent around the Hungarian GP regarding mass damper) and added a page of argument to it. My witness statement, on the other hand, was getting on for 30 pages and the attachment to it, the exhibit, I think was a further 50 pages. There was so much argument in there that was just so logical. I really was surprised we lost it."
JN: What is the feeling now, in terms of the world championship fight? Is it still as finely poised as it was a few races ago?
Symonds: "Well, the obvious answer to that is that it is more finely poised. But it has turned very much into a tyre championship and therefore it can swing so quickly. No one could have looked in their crystal ball and predicted Hungary, could they? So it is very finely balanced."
JN: And can shift around quickly?
Symonds: "Yeah, absolutely. You have to remember that last year we got to a point where we were second in the constructors' championship and came back and won it."
* * *
When Formula One sits back at the end of this year and reviews the mass damper affair there will be little doubt that it will have played a significant role in the outcome of the championship.
But rather than definitely having helped Ferrari in their bid to recover ground mid-season, maybe the affair will have served to galvanise Renault and make them even more determined to win the championship.
Sitting back with a cigarette in his hands, Symonds does not shy away from the impact of what has happened.
"Yes, it is a bit like kicking a dog in the balls, isn't it?" he smiles. "It will turn around and bite you." "
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