Tommy Cookers wrote:a short time window will act against performance enhancement in qualifying (eg 'stealing fuel from the next lap')
Now we finally start talking. So lets have a look at possible manipulations for "short time". You would actually have to steal the fuel from the previous lap and have to store it away in an accumulator to use that strategy. There are a number of obstacles to such a cheat.
- an accumulator is illegal and if found would make the car illegal
- an accumulator must be loaded by the control system, such a program would not be available and would require illegal software manipulations
- regardless of the measuring interval the FiA would discover that the low pressure fuel flow and the high pressure fuel flow would not match
So there are at least three reasons why it would be dumb to try such a cheat.
Tommy Cookers wrote:a longer time window for the race avoids leaning the mixture as rpm exceeds 10500 (surely such leaning is not intended ?)
because it allows eg 1.5cc of fuel saved at around 10500 rpm to be used 1 second later around 11500 rpm
both windows are possible and desirable
Looking at the second cheat during the race you would immediately have the same obstacles. You need an illegal fuel stashing device, you need a control program to accumulate and expend the content of the fuel reservoir and you need to fool the redundant flow control between low and high pressure check points. Our hypothetical cheater is in a very bad position there. I would not want the job. And if someone comes up with a way to do it it will be 100% illegal and no grey exploit of a loop hole.