Yeah sure, maybe it's the radio that suddenly needs massive cooling, or some other piece of hardware that used to be on the sidepod floor, repositioned due to the larger fuel cell, needs some airflow over it ... but right now i am not buying it.
You don't design and build at least five seperate and distinct designs of inlet in four test session just to keep a box of electronics a little bit nearer ambient. And if that really was a pitot tube built into one of them, then game-over for cooling.
The big problem is that whole FIA movable-aero thing, those rules managed to ban tuned-mass dampers, a pedal squashing an airline would be easy pickings for the stewards.(As written, they could probably be used to ban steering wheels), so you are gonna have to play it real smart to get round that one.
Here's a nice patent from the 70s, it's basically the pneumatic equivalent of a transistor amplifier.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3724476.pdf
The control input from the snorkel could actively control the fin output, the nice thing about this design, is there are NO moving parts. I'd guess there is something equivalent behind the Mobil M access panel. (It used to be the Mobil b panel, but they moved the stickers when they added the camera blank).
The last problem is therefore how do you modulate that control input, from the cockpit, without using any moving parts, the line firmly fixed, and having zero degrees of freedom.
What we really need is an old-school pneumatics engineer to show us how to throttle a line without moving anything. (In the 60s they were building computers out of pneumatics before it all went silicon, there must be something clever that suits our needs here).
