FIA says no F1 team deliberately cheated with flexi floors, but concedes 'trickery' was possible

The governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations believes that there was no Formula 1 team which intentionally cheated with flexi floors in the 2022 championship, but at the same time the FIA did admit that some ‘trickery’ was in fact possible.

The first part of the 2022 season was marked by porpoising for some teams, which urged the FIA to take action on this matter. This led to the controversial Technical Directive 39/22 that was introduced starting with the Belgian Grand Orix with the goal of reducing the impact porpoising had on cars for safety reasons.

The governing body therefore introduced an aerodynamic oscillation metric to reduce the bouncing, while at the same time making sure that checks on flexible floors were done more thoroughly given the suspicions that teams may have tried to bend the rules by using some intelligent tricks to be able to run with a lower ride height.

There were even rumours that indicated some teams may have been using disappearing skid blocks that were allowed them to move up into the car when hitting the ground so as not to damage them due to the impact. Such a behaviour would have complied with the post-race measurement checks.

When asked about the 2022 Formula 1 championship and the porpoising problem, ex-Ferrari man Nikolas Tombazis, currently working a FIA’s single seater technical director, replied that no team attempted to deliberately break the flexi floors rules, but that there was a grey area which could have been exploited with some ingenious solutions

“Teams clearly always tend to work on the edge of the regulations, and we didn’t think anybody was cheating back then,” – Nikolas Tombazis pointed out, when asked if he felt teams did in fact try to cheat and gain an advantage from how the skid block was used – “But the way the regulations were written permitted a bit of trickery, let’s say, that was unintended. That’s why we clarified the regulations by a technical directive and put some changes in the regulations. There’s two areas of the regulations where we can act unilaterally without F1 Commission approval. The one is to do with stiffness, Article 3.15, and the other one is to do with safety. That gave us the necessary ability to act on that front.” – he explained.

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The porpoising aerodynamic phenomenon did in fact become incredibly political, because the teams that were less affected by this issue felt it was not necessary of the FIA to take action and impose limitations on all cars.

The FIA wanted to take things even further and intended to raise the floor edges by 25mm for the 2023 Formula 1 championship, but this immediately led to strong opposition from some teams and after several rounds of discussions a final on compromise deal was reached that will see them lifted by just 15mm.

Nikolas Tombazis knows very well that most of the teams it is difficult to deal with competitive teams who are empowered by vested interests.

“It’s normally a predicament, because in Formula 1, almost everything is presumed to be benefitting somebody more than somebody else, because ultimately somebody has to win and somebody will not win. So with the exception of some things like safety, where generally speaking most people tend to agree, there’s huge difficulty in getting people to agree on almost anything else. And I know that, because I’ve been on the other side of the fence. It’s so intense for them that they always forget very quickly things they’ve benefitted from occasionally, and always remember the ones that have penalised them. We try to be as even-handed as we can, and we definitely don’t look at benefitting one more than the other or anything like that. But inevitably, the psychology of being in a competition is such that it makes you think always that somebody is out to get you.” – he continued.

The former Ferrari Chief Designer confirmed that he was mostly happy with the way in which the FIA implemented the 2022 rules and regulations, while at the same time admitting that he would have liked the governing body to be stricter with the floor edge designs:

“I probably would have been a bit stricter with the floor edges. The rest, I thought was not so bad.” – Nikolas Tombazis concluded.