It appears as if there is another off track battle brewing in Formula One, if reports in the German press are anything to go by.
Reports in AMS indicate that five teams are up to no good at the moment, including Mercedes, Red Bull Racing, Honda, Force India and Toro Rosso.
How you may ask? Well it seems as if they are tweaking the rules regarding hydraulic suspension, something that was banned by the sport's governing body, the FIA in 2016.
Teams always look for a way around the rules without actually breaking them, and it seems as if this is the case at the moment, with the teams in question said to be heating their hydraulic oil to gain a competitive edge.
It seems that Ferrari complained about the situation in Baku as they believe that Mercedes found the answer to their tyre issues with this new trick, something they sort of admitted to after Monaco when they claimed they had found the answer to their tyre issues, and it is something that would be almost impossible for the FIA to detect, or in fact to punish.
AMS claim that the hydraulic actuators have been placed so cleverly in the gearbox that they heat the oil almost "randomly". (An actuator is a component that is responsible for moving or controlling a mechanism or system, for example by actuating (opening or closing) a valve). By hiding it inside the gearbox housing it heats the said oil prior to the race, giving the team an advantage over their rivals
So why do this? Well it seems as if the goal is to ‘keep the temperature of the hydraulic oil hot and therefore the ground clearance constant. When the oil is cold, the car is said to be lower than when the oil is hot.'
Because the oil is warmed up during driving, teams have to precisely calculate how to adjust the ground clearance in the pits.
“Without preheating, the drivers have to drive hard in the laps on the way to their grid slot so that the hydraulic oil heats up quick enough,” a Force India representative, Andy Green, told AMS.
Clever little darlings aren't they?
