GPR-A wrote: ↑29 Feb 2020, 14:22
Ringleheim wrote: ↑29 Feb 2020, 13:14
This is actually quite a big news story that has been buried by being released late in the day on a Friday. Long story short: Ferrari was obviously oil burning and/or leaking fuel through the intercooler, or they somehow used more fuel than is allowed by bypassing the fuel flow sensor.
The FIA has figured this out and has made Ferrari stop whatever they were doing. Ferrari seems to have avoided a penalty by working with the FIA so that others can't "cheat" in the same ways.
The upshot is that Ferrari is clearly down on power relative to last year, barring legal advancements that may have been made in the off-season. Makes sense that they are are slow in a straight line, especially given drag-inducing aero additions that weren't on the car last year.
That is loads of nonsense. FIA simply said, they have "reached a settlement with the team" doesn't mean "Ferrari was cheating and we caught them"! You only read it that way because YOU WANT TO. FIA has often managed to leave loop holes in their regulations and many teams over the decades, have exploited it. It doesn't make that exploitation ILLEGAL. Some people, including Adrian Newey are crying that Mercedes' DAS system is Illegal. Does it make it Illegal or cheating? Whatever FIA understands about the system, is like Michael Masi said, they can't reveal the details to anyone outside of the parties involved. If you want to go ahead and believe it is CHEATING and ILLEGAL, you are free to do so, but it won't become universal truth for everyone.
And once again, you do not settle and cover up with all reputation damages that come from that if there is nothing illegal, or at least very, very shady. They only do this if the damage from opening up is expected to be larger than the damage from covering up. If all was legal, they'd come out with that. If it was some creative interpretation of the rules, they'd probably explain what was the case too. This is not a case of "innocent until proven guilty" - they settled and with that admit guilt to something, we just don't know what. You can pretend that isn't the case, but that is only because YOU WANT TO. Now, we can speculate a lot about what the exact issue is, but we won't know that until someone speaks out. Which will happen, sooner or later. I'm anyway putting my bet on that it was either outright illegal, or perhaps in accordance with the letter of the regulations but so obviously against the spirit of it, that they chose for reputation damage from coverup over damage from admittance. Time will tell.