Why Williams wing-footage breach exposes a fundamental problem

Aero-elasticity continues to be a hot topic in Formula 1 in the wake of the FIA announcing more stringent tests on rear wings to detect if they are flexing under load. So naturally there has been an immediate presumption of guilt when the governing body circulated a report from technical delegate Jo Bauer that he was referring Williams to the stewards for failing to supply camera footage of its wings within an hour of practice ending in China.

The team has yet to explain this failure.

It’s easy to infer guilt from this, but impossible to prove it. There may be an innocent explanation.

It’s also impossible to be certain that a wing is illegal simply by looking at video footage of it.

You don’t have to dig far on social media to see individuals sharing in-car footage of wings appearing to flex and claiming – often in hysterical tones – that this is a smoking gun which needs to be acted upon. In fact, it’s perfectly natural for wings to deflect under load, and impossible to prevent completely – the question is how much has been deliberately engineered and to what end.

The only practical way to measure the exact degree a wing flexes under load is to do it at rest, by applying weights. Even this isn’t quite like-for-like, hence the recent changing of the permitted tolerance in the rear-wing tests.

F1 teams have been exploiting static measurements for decades. In the previous ground effect era the FIA tried to clamp down on it by imposing a minimum ride height, which could of course only be measured when the car was at rest.

Brabham’s Gordon Murray was the first to circumvent this, fitting the bodywork of his car on pneumatic struts which kept the side skirts at the legal height when stationary, but compressed under load.

The FIA’s purpose in introducing new video checks at the Belgian Grand Prix last year was to find some way of indicating scientifically the degree to which a wing is flexing under real aerodynamic loads. High-definition cameras facing frontwards and rearwards were trained on the front and rear wings, which carried dots on the endplates so the FIA could examine the extent to which wing elements were rotating.

At the moment these cameras are only used during free practice sessions (which of course opens up the potential for teams to swap in components that are on the ragged edge of legality for qualifying and races). It’s understood that examination of various cars’ onboard footage during FP1 in Australia was the prompt for the latest change in the testing regime.

But Williams hasn’t been found to have broken any technical regulations. This is merely a procedural breach of a Technical Directive, and in any case there would have been no expectation to provide footage from sprint qualifying in China.

Also, the technical delegate’s report didn’t say that Williams hadn’t provided the footage at all, simply that it had failed to supply it within the given deadline of one hour after practice ends.

That’s likely to be why the stewards elected to delay the hearing until Saturday morning in Shanghai: this is not a case which needs to be heard urgently.

But it does need to be heard, because if Williams is seen to go unpunished for such a breach, other teams would feel that they can fail to provide footage and escape sanction. That would undermine the entire philosophy of subjecting them to (almost) constant scrutiny.

So, even if there is an innocent explanation for failing to provide the footage by the specified deadline, and no technical regulations have been broken, some punishment is inevitable. The question, given the unprecedented nature of this affair, is the severity.