General
Horner: "That's the ambiguity that these regulations create"
- GPblog.com
Red Bull Racing has let it be known that it is unlikely to appeal in the case of the Mercedes DAS system. According to Christian Horner, the system is a product of the ambiguous technical regulations of F1.
Protest
Red Bull had made a protest to the FIA on Friday, but the FIA sided with Mercedes. The system will be banned from 2021, but in 2020 Mercedes will be allowed to continue using the disputed system.
"Having seen it on the car yesterday we chose to use the avenue of a protest to achieve clarity", says Horner in conversation against Sky Sports F1. "We informed Mercedes of that prior the official protest."
Legality
"The system is very complicated and of course it comes into question ‘what is a steering wheel for?’. The stewards backed the decision of the technical delegate so we have that clarity now, it is legal and if we want one then we will have to decide if we want to develop it on our own", Horner continues.
"The engineering feedback we had was that it wasn’t fully compliant to the regulations this year which is why we got that clarity late last night, so as far as we are concerned it is book closed now", Horner continues.
Ambiguous regulations
"I think it is [used] a combination of achieving balance shifts and tyre warm up during safety car periods, so in that respect it is a tool that doesn’t have anything to do with steering the car because they only use it in a straight line", says Horner.
“But that is sometimes the ambiguity that these regulations create, it is something that has been tidied up for the next year”, concludes Horner.