F1 flexi wings: technical directive TD034G will not change values on track

As usual, there is no Formula 1 championship in which the FIA does not have to check the compliance of the cars with the reference regulatory framework. For several weeks, suspicions about the flexibility of the front and rear wings of some cars have been brought to the federal body, which, despite regulating the matter through static tests, does not seem to achieve the desired result. Teams have been exploiting the elastic properties of carbon fiber for decades and have become masters at appearing fully compliant when performing the necessary tests.

The workings of cross-woven carbon fibers allow this material to “bend” at certain speeds, then almost instantly return to its original shape in proportion to the deceleration. For example, in the recent Hungarian Grand Prix at the Budapest circuit, despite Max Verstappen’s car completely resting first on the right side of the front wing and then on the left following a collision with Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes W15 car, it remained magically intact.

By this, we clearly do not intend to highlight any illegality, but rather the absorption capacity of a wing element in extreme circumstances. With the usual sloth-like reaction times, better late than never, the FIA technical committee has announced that technical directive TD034G will come into effect starting from this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix at the 7.004-kilometre Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. The Federation aims to monitor and collect data on the rotation and torsion of the front wing at various speeds.

Although the federal body has emphasized the compliance of the cars, whose compliance to the regulations has been verified by the FIA, it deems it necessary to check if the regulatory framework is open to loopholes. Therefore, data collection will be conducted to discover if some teams have figured out some ingenious methods to use secondary parameters, such as temperature or simply aerodynamic load, to create additional flexibility. Essentially, operational conditions that are not replicated in the static tests conducted by the federal organization.

From a practical standpoint, the FIA will place additional cameras on selected cars during the Belgian Grand Prix in order to test and monitor the flexing of the front wings. Based on the first images coming from the Spa-Francorchamps paddock, markers have appeared on the inner part of the front endplates, useful for measuring the extent of the flexing through the aforementioned cameras.

The FIA has decided to measure the overall deformation of the front wing on track for an indefinite time. The Formula One Management cameras placed near the Nose Cone are not able to frame the entire front wing since a large outer part is out of the lens’s angle.

The TD034G technical directive has been sent to all Formula 1 teams by Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA Single Seater Director, so they can place the markers on the front wings of their respective cars. It should be remembered that Technical Directives are sent exclusively to the teams. They are not a rule and they are the method of enforcing it. At the same time, a technical directive could determine a regulatory review if certain numerical values vary as a limit. In such a case, the regulation article would be modified. For example, if the mass to be applied in the flex test or the flexion limit amplitude were to change.

Monitoring dynamically is very complex. At the same time, you can’t make the component too rigid as the risk of breakage increases exponentially. So a real solution does not exist. A car is legal if it passes the tests, and the flexibility ranges have been the same for almost three years.

In essence, the issuance of this directive seems more like an attempt to assert the FIA’s role as a regulator, which, in reality, it cannot exercise for many reasons, such as lack of personnel, skills not aligned with those of the teams and so on. In short, much ado about nothing if the goal remains the data acquisition of cars that have successfully passed static load tests. A rather embarrassing situation, especially taking into consideration the fact that in less than a year and a half, active aerodynamics will also be present on the front flaps, when the new Formula 1 rules and regulations will be introduced starting with the 2026 championship.