At least three Formula 1 teams have requested the FIA to provide clarification ande details regarding the legality of the Haas VF-22 car, a recent report from German automobile magazine ‘Auto Motor und Sport’ informs.
Haas, just like Scuderia Ferrari, decided not to invest resources on last year’s Formula 1 car, aware it would not bring any major improvement and instead spent most part of the last season focusing and developing for the new technical rules and regulations which have been introduced this year. This meant that Haas ended the 2021 F1 campaign with very poor results and was not able to score a single point as Nikita Mazepin and Ferrari junior Mick Schumacher failed to get near the top 10.
While Ferrari returned to the top in 2022, Haas has also made significant gains: helped by the return of a more experienced driver like Kevin Magnussen, who replaced Nikita Mazepin, the American outfit have scored points in two of the first three races this season. As a result, a lot of heated discussions have started as to how they have made such huge leap in performance and rivals have of course pointed to the fact that Gene Haas’ side buy a significant portion of their parts from Ferrari, who supply them with power units and other components, while at the same time and use them as a junior talent pool.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, whose team dominated the sport in the last years, said: “Haas has made a huge jump from being last into being solidly into Q3 in Bahrain. So that’s an interesting step. For us, it’s a learning exercise because an organisation we have 1000 people and we’ve been successful in the past. Suddenly, you’re fighting a team that’s much smaller in size, so they must have done a super job.” – he added.
But some of the job-hopping, or entity-hopping, on the same premises is just creating arguments that are not necessary for the sport. We have Aston Martin in the windtunnel that, two years ago, we had quite a storm about. We have been handling that with the utmost diligence. But going forward, if we were to need to compromise our income ability, we need to do this because none of the teams should be able to cooperate in a way that we’re seeing with some,” reckoned Toto Wolff.
Mercedes are not the only side questioning the big steps Haas have taken this season and how this performance was achieved. Alpine boss Szafnauer also opened up on the subject: “It’s a small team that’s done well over the winter from last to sometimes third fastest team. I thought that the pecking order would stay almost the same because, over the years that I’ve been in Formula 1, the bigger the regulation change, the more it favors those with know-how and the infrastructure and the tools to exploit the new rules. So it’s a bit surprising that Haas are where they are for a small team. But I trust the FIA will investigate and come to the right conclusion between how similar the two cars are. In an ideal world, the rules are pretty clear and the difficulty is policing. So if the policing of the rules is impossible, then we should change the rules so that they are able to be policed such that the playing field is even. There’s more discussion to be had with the FIA and perhaps a bit of reform on the rules such that they can be policed,” added Szafnauer.
It is worth mentioning that current Alpine boss Otmar Szafnauer was in charge of the Racing Point team two years ago when they were accused of intimately copying the 2019 Mercedes car, and he was aware that the teams with the best pre-existing resources such as Mercedes, Red Bull and Scuderia Ferrari would still remain in front despite the new rules for 2022.
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Alfa Romeo boss Frederic Vasseur reflected on the importance of evaluating and ensuring legality in every aspect, from the new limits of budget cap to the sharing of wind tunnels, but admitted that he does not have any concerns regarding the FIA’s integrity and competence.
“It’s like the old and new regulations about financial, for example, that the most important is to be able to control everything, that we have restrictions on the wind tunnel, we have a restriction on the budget. But we have to trust the FIA, they are doing a good job and for sure, they will be on every single case.” – the Alfa boss concluded.
For the moment it is not officially known exactly which teams might have contacted the FIA regarding Haas’ close partnership with Scuderia Ferrari, but it has been suggested that McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin and Alpine are likely to be among them.
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