Todt: "Whistleblower had told us the situation with the Ferrari engine"
F1 News
- GPblog.com
Jean Todt, President of the FIA, has indicated that he was the reason that the engine of Ferrari was looked extra closely to understand what was going on. At the end of the test days in Barcelona, the FIA announced that it had made an agreement with Ferrari because of the engine, and that raised a lot of dust. Now Todt has told Motorsport.com in detail what his role was in the story.
"There was the suggestion from some teams that Ferrari had broken the rules, so for months our technicians looked at Ferrari's engine to understand what they were doing, and if it was legal or not," explains Todt. "I have to say that I put some pressure on our team to do as many checks as possible".
Whistleblower told FIA
"I'm saying this now, but those tests weren't really necessary. There was some kind of whistleblower who told us. However, we had to make sure that every team had everything legal". According to Todt, the tests on the engine of Ferrari have been going on for a long time, even when Charles Leclerc's car took too much fuel in Abu Dhabi, which was noticed by the stewards.
"We wanted to have everything clear. So we carried out very complex exercises to understand the problem. We also checked Leclerc's car in Abu Dhabi and the stewards determined that it was human error, so a fine was enough. Despite the fine, we still looked carefully to understand the whole situation". Todt said that the suspicions of the FIA were present at Ferrari throughout the season, but because of Ferrari could never really take action. Ferrari insisted that they did everything within the rules, and the FIA could not prove otherwise at that time.