Moore77 wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020, 19:01
hurril wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020, 18:49
Moore77 wrote: ↑15 Sep 2020, 18:42
Oh, so that's the confusion for you here. SO you did not read what I have been writing. My take is, neither Mercedes cheated, nor did Ferrari! They simply exploited grey areas and you can't call that as CHEATING.
Is it the word cheating that you take offence to now? Tricking a sensor is not exploiting a grey area, it's evading control. And judging by the extent to which Ferrari has lost performance, their exploit (let's call it that so that you can calm down) has to have had a huge impact. So their exploit gained a huge advantage. Call it what you will: it has to go and stop whining about it.
I don't take offence of anything! Taking your definition of, "ticking a sensor...." I can translate it to, "pushing oil in the combustion chamber, is not a grey area, it's breaking rules of fuel restriction". Whether ones advantage is big or small, doesn't matter. They belong to the same offensive category.
If you can't continue debating, feel free to stop debating. Telling me to "stop whining about it", will not do the job for you. Nope.
I'm sorry I had to get involved, and do not read me wrong in any of my arguments, I do not want to be coming onto this conversation as one sided, or influenced, not even as a fan of a team. Let's have this discussion as a sport consumer. I unfortunately do not posses that much technical prowess, not as much as I would like. But please read me out here. There are a lot of arguments to be made.
I would like to start with this. It is pretty much, supposed, if not low-key confirmed the engine shenanigans have started with the 2018 season, or at least during that period. It was then when if you remember, Lauda himself was scandalised by the performance gains. ( My sweet guess is that Mercedes knew was what going on pretty early, but chose to stay silent and deploy any information tactically. Using RBR a season later as an "attack dog" does seem to confirm this.) We must look now at how long it actually takes to develop an engine, and the overall development plans, which from my understanding takes years. ( One example is DAS - started in 2018 - implemented in 2020). I am also set to assume that the engine "plan" would have had to be an older idea, and judging by the way Ferrari's power transpired onto the seasons 2018-2019 it seems like again I am right. They were on the rise, both in results, qualifying pace, race pace, not necessarily on reliability, or strategy. We might as well speak about Vettel the should be champion of 2018 if not for the poor aero upgrades ( I believe brought in Russia 18 with correlation issues ) and the enormous mistakes that he made. Now, going onto 2019 what truly staggered me, ( and this is where I might need a "clarification"), was this. Following the summer brake, SF90 goes from a low drag car, with a jet-engine on the back, with clear aero correlation issues, and tyre issues, to SF90 still a low drag car, but with the Apollo 11 thrusters at the back, in fact so powerful it defied all the other issues. This is where it goes even more weird for me as a fan, and a spectator. My ELI5 understanding is that in 2019 we were on year 6 in the current engine formula. 4 engine manufacturers, billions invested, probably hundreds of thousands if not million of hours of research, including the brightest engineers, and the biggest names of them all, and still there was not one soul on the grid that can explain the sudden performance gain. We are talking 8 tenths on a single straight here, not 2 tenths at the end of the lap. I still remember watching the battle between a Merc at full chat with DRS, against Charles in Monza, and it was like watching lapped cars trying to un-lap themselves.
There are many such occasions on why I thought the entire experience was off putting, most notable was the one I have mentioned. In all my recent years, I have never seen anything like it, so to classify this as a grey-area is for me personally highly unlikely. A grey area is the DAS, even the oil-burning, with the incremental performance gain. But I cannot think of a single grey area which had this much of an impact. Another very important bit of "evidence" would be the agreement, the way it was handled and most notably and the one I am getting to is the performance drop.
If the difference was not evident enough, such as statements from Mattia regarding the redesign of the entire engine, ( not necessarily needed if it is just a loop in the rules they exploited ) but to go from breath-taking dominance to 2016 power levels with two TD's emitted is simply unheard of in Formula 1. I defended Ferrari all the time last year, but I cannot for the life of me accept that this is the case anymore. There must have been something severely out of line, with that PU in order to see such a drop in such short notice. The truth is that most likely we will never know the real truth. There are many speculations, spies, lies, cheating, secrets etc. Typical of the unknown in the high stakes of a billion dollar business. What we know is certain, every team renders these grey areas, and incorporates them in a car. 5/10 they get caught, some red handed like Renault with the brakes, some a bit too clever for the FIA themselves such as the DAS, but removing these loopholes only causes small blips, small dips in what is normal and naturally an increasing curve in development. While the Ferrari saga created an Everest in gains, followed by a Mariana Trench in losses. There is no loop-hole that big in the current state of the "game". Keep in mind, I am not saying they were cheating, but it's incredibly difficult, day by day, to say no they weren't.
