FIA plans to implement yellow flag speed limit
The FIA are looking to implement a speed limit under yellow flags to improve track safety on the back of Jules Bianchi's accident at Suzuka. Technical Delegate Charlie Whiting is set to meet with F1 teams this weekend at Sochi to discuss the plans.
Similarly to the "slow zone" that debuted at this year's Le Mans 24 hours race, double yellows would trigger some sort of speed limitation to enforce drivers to go slow, rather than rely on their own judgement on what is safe.
"There are some things to learn and we want to engage with all teams and drivers to make sure we come up with good, sound and well thought through ideas," said Whiting in a press meeting on Friday of the Russian Grand Prix weekend in Sochi.
"One of the most important things for us to learn here is that it is probably better to take the decision to slow down away from drivers. It is better to try to put in place a system where it is much clearer to everybody how much we think cars should slow down in similar circumstances.
"That is what we are working on, starting tomorrow morning, with a meeting with all the teams to discuss exactly that. We want a way of trying to impose a speed limit - it probably won't be a speed limit as such, but there will be a way of controlling speed with complete certainty and complete clarity."
While the target is to improve safety, the exact limitation of the speed limit will be somewhat different to the system in the WEC, simply because races are shorter and drivers attempt to eke out every possible tenth of a second.
"The difficulty of having a speed limit over a certain sector is that it will probably have to be different for certain sectors," he said.
"One thing that would worry me slightly is the fact you can see how engineers and drivers push limits for pit lane speed limit, they would want to be braking at the last possible minute and as hard as possible to get down to the speed limit at the precise place - that is the nature of F1.
"The delta would be the same for everybody. They know what to do, they have same reference map so all have to slow down at the same time."
Basically, such system would also be reasonably easy to build, given that lap deltas are currently already in use in F1 when the safety car is on track, preventing drivers to race around the track when not queuing behind the safety car.
Whiting underlined that while a decision and implementation for the yellow flag limit is not done yet, the race director will be more cautious about the deployment of recovery vehicles.
A meeting earlier in the day also resulted in drivers wanting some kind of skirt around such tractors so that race cars would not be able to go underneath them, as happened with Bianchi.
"We had nearly an hour with the drivers earlier and one of the things that emerged from that and has been discussed, and can be re-discussed, would be some form of skirt. That is something we would need to consider and are going to consider."
