Ferrari SF71H was under the scanner in the past few days as the rumour mill suggested that Ferrari’s battery system was helping them get some ‘illegal’ advantage over their rivals.
The complaint was actually lodged by Mercedes, as Mercedes’ technical director, James Allison had met with the FIA in Baku during the Azerbaijan GP, as confirmed by Charlie Whiting, the F1 race director.
Mercedes had been having tough time explaining this ‘performance enhancing’ battery system situation of Ferrari and thus wanted to consult with the FIA at all costs.
FIA carried out a thorough investigation and are now convinced that there is nothing wrong with the way Ferrari are using their battery system.
“We had some concerns in Baku that were difficult to explain and we worked through it with them,
“[The rulebook] says that it is the duty of the competitor to satisfy the FIA that their car complies at all times and they were having difficulty satisfying us. Here, we are now satisfied.” Whiting said, as quoted by Reuters.
However, even to the FIA, the picture was initially not clear as they couldn’t completely understand a few aspects of how Ferrari were running that car.
“Some things in the data we could not quite explain… we went through it with Ferrari and they gave explanations which were not particularly convincing,” he said.
“We wanted to really get to the bottom of it and in Spain, they took some measures to make sure we understood it more and that we were seeing things that we were happy with.” he added.
The FIA President wasn’t happy with the ruckus created around this issue and feels that Mercedes tried to use the press to blow the situation way out of proportion.
“If a team has some doubts, they could have made a protest. It would be much more healthy rather than to manipulate the press to address the problem.” Todt said.
