F1 2014 Rule Changes

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The following summarises the changes made to the 2014 Sporting Regulations:

- Further to a request from Mercedes, it will be permitted to supply engines to a maximum of four Formula One teams in 2014.

- A penalty point system for drivers will be introduced. If a driver accumulates more than 12 points he will be banned from the next race. Points will stay on the driver’s licence for 12 months. The amount of points a driver may be given for infringements will vary from one to three depending upon the severity of the offence.

- The procedure for a driver to be given the chance to give back any advantage he may have gained by leaving the track has been adopted.

- A significant reduction in the amount of wind tunnel testing and CFD work has been imposed to help reduce costs and potentially allow two teams to share one wind tunnel.

- Four two-day track tests will be allowed in season in place of the current eight one-day promotional days and the three-day young driver test. These will take place at tracks in Europe on the Tuesday and Wednesday after a race in order to ensure minimal additional resources are necessary.

- Track testing will now also be permitted in January 2014 in order to allow earlier testing of the new power units.

- For safety reasons all team personnel working on a car in a race pit stop will be required to wear head protection.

- Each driver will be provided with one extra set of tyres for use only during the first 30 minutes of the first practice session on Friday, to encourage teams to take to the track at that time without having to worry about using valuable tyre wear.

- A number of new regulations have been confirmed to govern the new, far more complex power units. It is agreed that only five power units may be used by each driver for the whole season. Any use of an additional complete power unit will result in that driver having to start the race from the pit lane. Any changes of individual elements above the permitted five, such as turbocharger, MGU or Energy Store, will result in a 10 grid place penalty.

- No manufacturer will be allowed to homologate more than one power unit during the homologation period from 2014-2020. Changes to the homologated unit will continue to be permitted for installation, reliability or cost saving reasons.

- Drivers must now use a gearbox for six consecutive events, an increase from the current five.

- No car may use more than 100kg of fuel for the race, from the time the lights go out at the start of the race to the chequered flag. This will be monitored by the use of an FIA approved fuel flow meter.

- The pit lane speed limit, which is currently set at 60km/h for the free practice sessions and 100km/h for the qualifying practice and race (60km/h for the whole event in Melbourne, Monaco and Singapore), has been amended so it is set at 80km/h for the whole event (except the three races mentioned which would stay at 60km/h for the whole event). This is for safety reasons, as most accidents happen during the race when the speed limit is higher; drivers also have very little chance to practice stopping from 100km/h until the race.


The following summarises the changes made to the 2014 Technical Regulations:

- Measures have been put in place to ensure that the cars do not incorporate a step in the chassis behind the nose. These changes will also ensure that a genuine low nose, introduced for safety reasons, is always used.

- The minimum weight limit has been raised by 5kg, as the power unit is now likely to weigh more than originally expected. The weight distribution has also been changed accordingly.

- Electronic control of the rear brake circuit is permitted in order to ensure consistent braking whilst energy is being recovered.

- In order to ensure that side impact structures are more useful in an oblique impact and more consistent, they will become standard items made to a strictly laid out manufacturing process and fitted to the cars identically. The impact tests currently carried out will be replaced by static load push-off tests and squeeze tests. This will also help reduce costs as no team will need to develop their own structures.

- In order to ensure that the cockpit rims either side of the driver’s head are stronger, the amount of deflection during the static load tests has been reduced from 20mm to 5mm.
 
Electronic control of the rear brake circuit is permitted in order to ensure consistent braking whilst energy is being recovered.

Expect some trickery here. An electronically controlled version of McLarens third pedal isn't it? :confused:
 
- Measures have been put in place to ensure that the cars do not incorporate a step in the chassis behind the nose. These changes will also ensure that a genuine low nose, introduced for safety reasons, is always used.

- In order to ensure that side impact structures ... they will become standard items made to a strictly laid out manufacturing process and fitted to the cars identically.

Is this a stealth method to gradually make this a one shape formula (a bit like Dallara in F3), bringing in one standard body component at a time :p


- The procedure for a driver to be given the chance to give back any advantage he may have gained by leaving the track has been adopted.

So what exactly is the procedure?
 
Extra set of tyres to be used in the first 30 mins of FP1

Great! But... What type of tyre? Can the team request a certain tyre or is it just handed over? What if it's a wet session and the extra tyre is a slick?

Standard side impact protection across all cars?
A single engine design for 7 years?
Reducing wind tunnel usage and CFD at the same time?

Oh dear...

Penalty points. If a driver hits 12 and serves a ban, will his penalty points get wiped and start from 0 again?

Oh and swapping all the filming and young driver days for 8 days of testing. So even less time in car for the young drivers then. When do the teams do the filming too?

Pit lane speed limit, headwear for pit crew and the chassis height changes are pretty sensible. But I'm still not overly convinced by the 5 'power unit' or part of power unit regs.

[/ButtonWhinge]
 
Expect some trickery here. An electronically controlled version of McLarens third pedal isn't it? :confused:

I expect a lot of trickery here. After just a couple of minutes of thinking about it i came up with a number of possible benefits from it that could worm their way around other regulations

What is to stop this electronic control from acting as an anti lock brake system for the rear tyres?

What is to stop the drivers from riding the brakes ever so slightly on the exit from corners so that the electronic control of the rear brakes can act as traction control? (would they even need to ride the brakes for this electronic system to be allowed to be used)

could this electronic braking system help the car turn while braking by braking one wheel more than the other?

If i can think of these ideas within two minutes then i'm sure the incredibly clever people designing the cars can think of much better ideas than these


Penalty points. If a driver hits 12 and serves a ban, will his penalty points get wiped and start from 0 again?

From what i have read elsewhere the points will be removed if you are banned from a race. However, being banned from a race costs you five points, meaning that you will have less points until your next race ban. Personally I think that if it is implemented correctly this could be a very nice system to weed out the constant offenders
 
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I expect a lot of trickery here. After just a couple of minutes of thinking about it i came up with a number of possible benefits from it that could worm their way around other regulations

What is to stop this electronic control from acting as an anti lock brake system for the rear tyres?

What is to stop the drivers from riding the brakes ever so slightly on the exit from corners so that the electronic control of the rear brakes can act as traction control? (would they even need to ride the brakes for this electronic system to be allowed to be used)

could this electronic braking system help the car turn while braking by braking one wheel more than the other?

If i can think of these ideas within two minutes then i'm sure the incredibly clever people designing the cars can think of much better ideas than these
This is pretty much my point too. It's going to be exploited for traction control purposes "for sure" :(
 
Scarbs said it will be controlled by an FIA ecu type device, so they can't just use it for ABS.
 
Charlie Whiting said:
“I think the efficiency is the key thing,” he added. “Just to be absolutely clear, though, you won’t see cars running out of fuel because there’s no limit on the amount of fuel a team can put in the car. There’s a limit to how much they can use during the race.

“There are significant changes to the wing designs in order to reduce the drag,” said Whiting. “The drag is the thing that had to be reduced to make the fuel consumption work and as you know the cornerstone for this new power unit is only using 100 kilos of fuel for the race.”
Taken from here.

Is it just me or do the two sentences I've highlighted in bold completely contradict each other?
 
Taken from here.

Is it just me or do the two sentences I've highlighted in bold completely contradict each other?

I think what he means is, they could put 1000 gallons into the car, but they can only use 10 gallons, so the extra 990 gallons would just be a weight penalty (values not representative of real values).
 
That's my point, if they can only use 100kgs of fuel according to the rules, then it's pointless them putting any more fuel in the car; hence it's not unlimited.
 
From what i have read elsewhere the points will be removed if you are banned from a race. However, being banned from a race costs you five points, meaning that you will have less points until your next race ban. Personally I think that if it is implemented correctly this could be a very nice system to weed out the constant offenders

It seems extremely soft. If the most serious offense is 3 points, a driver needs to commit FOUR dangerous accidents/mistakes to be banned for only ONE race?
 
It seems extremely soft. If the most serious offense is 3 points, a driver needs to commit FOUR dangerous accidents/mistakes to be banned for only ONE race?

Isn't this supplementary to the existing system? I.e. the stewards can still hand down penaltys ala grid penalties, drivethroughs etc., but this is an infraction system as it were?

So for instance, Rosberg got a reprimand at Silverstone for speeding under yellow flags, but potentially if the same happened next year he would instead get some points which wouldn't immediately punish him, but could add to a penalty via "totting up" as it were.
 
That's my point, if they can only use 100kgs of fuel according to the rules, then it's pointless them putting any more fuel in the car; hence it's not unlimited.
I think this is just a semantic point. The rules are written around what the fia are going to measure. They're going to measure flow rather than the initial volume. Since they're not going to measure tank capacity its not specified anywhere.
 
The penalty points are additional to penalties during the race, so drivers will still get drive thrus or grid drops, but will accumulate points too.

The thing that gets me is we can see a driver gain a final single 12th point for an incredibly minor offence, and given how close F1 can be, we could get to a situation where a driver looses a championship for speeding in the pitlane during practice, or his team releasing him unsafely from the pits.

I worked out that under the points system Schumacher would have been banned from 2 races last year, and started 2013 with a pile of points too. Grosjean on the other hand, the first lap nutcase, would have still only had the 1 ban from the Spa crash that he got anyway.
 
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