F1 News
Mercedes feel open-source system of designs are "worthy of exploring"
- Tom Mason
The technical director at Mercedes James Allison feels that open-source system of designs in F1 should be something that is looked at. Formula 1 is deciding on whether to allow teams to post online design and parts documents for rivals to have access to.
"It's quite a new idea and a reasonable amount of chat is going to be needed to turn it from promising concept into a deliverable reality, but I think it's worthy of exploring," Allison said.
"It will take a decree of patience because imagine we're coming up to 2021 – everyone designs up to the wire and then releases and goes racing.
"So you couldn't sit there waiting for the open sources design to come from a competitor, thinking 'I won't do that myself, I'll just wait for it to appear on the internet.
"Because by the time it appeared it would be too late."
This approach has been intended to lower costs, which many teams agree with, but teams do have worries that this could cause some reliability issues.