astracrazy wrote:turbof1 wrote:Merc will walk away from this scott free. They took part in an illegal test, yes. But was lead to believe it was legal - that may be by Charlie saying its ok or/and in trusting pirelli will take the correct steps to comply with the fia guidelines and trusting the fia will make sure those guideline were met before the test took place
I'm not so sure. I would think that the teams have a certain responsability to know the rules. Although, by them getting in touch with Charlie shows that their intent was good. They wanted clarification that, since their 2011 car was not available, if they could use the 2013 car. I believe, from the live-ticker, it was said or implied that this was okay, as long as the test wasn't run by them, but by Pirelli. So, Mercedes probably thought - okay, it's not our test, we are testing for Pirelli.
The problem is now that it wasn't transparent (the other teams weren't invited or informed) and apparently, Mercedes had some knowlege of this. At 10:50 in the AMuS ticker, Mark Howard reads that the Mercedes Engineer Andew Shovlin sais the reason why Mercedes joined in the test, was so that they could help with the delamination problems, that occured 8 times and two with Mercedes cars. One of them caused significant damage to Lewis Hamiltons car in Bahrain and that this from safety-point-of-view, is unacceptable. They maintain that the results gathered in this test would benefit all teams. If Pirelli had invited or informed other teams of this test, it would have likely been vetoed and cancelled. This would have been in direct contradiction to the point that all teams must by the rules be able to garantee the safety on their cars. So who's decision was it to not inform the teams? Pirellis or Mercedes? This is IMO not that clear from the AMuS ticker.
So, in other words, if I am correct in thinking that Mercedes had knowlege that they were doing something that wouldn't be allowed, then this makes it IMO a rather difficult case to defend. You can't do something illegal and justify it by saying you're effectively doing the teams a favor or giving an indication why you were okay to go along with it, knowing that other teams would likely veto it...