Behind the scenes of how F1 tech is policed

Jo Bauer arrives at the FIA's Yas Marina hospitality building and, without preamble, sits down and says: "I don't have much time." From anyone else that might seem a little brusque but Bauer, the FIA's technical delegate, is always in a hurry.

For want of a better description, Bauer is Formula 1's policeman - and in the F1 pitlane everyone is guilty of something. Probably.

Bauer's job encompasses an eclectic range of responsibilities but in the public eye it's scrutineering that holds the attention. Verifying the legality of cars is largely a bureaucratic process, though there's the occasional hand grenade buried within the paperwork: a floor out of compliance; a laggardly clutch response on the grid; a tank mysteriously containing more fuel than expected. A couple of innocuous lines in a report is the equivalent of a heavy hand on the collar and a polite enquiry of what's all this, then?

In an ever more intricate sport, uncovering illegality is a win for the scrutineers but Bauer sees it as a pyrrhic victory. F1 has an unusual relationship with cheating: perpetrators are as often admired for their ingenuity as they are vilified for their skulduggery.

For Bauer it's all rather more straightforward.

"I don't like it," he says. "It's bad for everyone - but as the sport gets more and more complex, it's more likely also that you will find things."

Following a spell as technical delegate for the forerunner of modern DTM, Bauer swapped paddocks in 1997, taking over as F1's technical delegate when that position was vacated by Charlie Whiting. It's an unusual job, requiring a detachment that isn't common in the close-knit F1 travelling community.

"It's a friendly environment but there's a professional distance," Bauer concedes.

"It wouldn't be right to be grumpy or unfriendly - but at the same time you can't have favourites. This is why you'll never see me having a drink or a meal in a team's hospitality unit: it wouldn't be acceptable; everyone else would assume you were doing dodgy deals!"

Back in 1997, the FIA's technical crew in the F1 paddock comprised a software analyst, a fuel technician and a technical assistant - and Bauer. Today there's six software engineers and five technicians, supported at each race by around 30 volunteer scrutineers.

"As trivial as it sounds, car weight is still the best and the cheapest thing to cheat" Jo Bauer

Given the staggering growth of teams, the authorities are almost always playing catch-up. That may change in 2021, when F1 switches to CAD-referenced laser metrology for many of its geometric checks. For the moment, however, the scrutineers still rely largely on the use of scales, templates and the reference plane, much as they always have.

Following self-scrutineering on Thursday (think of it like a supermarket self-checkout), 
the process moves onto legality checks when the cars hit the track on Friday. Via telemetry and data analysis, the FIA's software wonks begin looking at code, while cars returning to the pitlane are subject to random inspection, usually a trip to the weighbridge but including other physical checks if the FIA sees fit.

Exactly how random is random? Not very, it transpires.

"There is a randomiser but we're in the pitlane all the time, and when we see something new, or something strange, then that car will certainly be selected for scrutineering," says Bauer.

"Also, many of the checks we do will be circuit-dependent. Here, at Yas Marina, we're on an aero circuit, so we'll be looking carefully at parameters such as aero-elasticity; at a circuit with hard kerbs, we'll be paying close attention to floors."

Live checks, and the more leisurely tests carried out after FP2, are largely a prelude to the real work, which takes place once qualifying begins and the cars are in parc ferme conditions.

Everyone factors a call to the weighbridge into their timing calculations - but even so, there's usually a frisson of panic in a garage when, with four minutes of the session remaining and a lap time on the cusp, the car is stationary at the wrong end of the pitlane.

Post-qualifying, scrutineering the field will take between two and three hours. This is the most significant compliance session. The cars are under parc ferme conditions until the end of the race, so comprehensive checks after qualifying keep the post-race scrutineering process brief, allowing (usually) the provisional result to be swiftly ratified.

On Sunday morning the cars are weighed. Despite fiendish geometry and miles of code, the scales remain the number one tool in the scrutineers' armoury.

"As trivial as it sounds, car weight is still the best and the cheapest thing to cheat," says Bauer.

"10kg is worth around 0.3s per [datum] lap, which is why even the drivers are weighed whenever they have finished qualifying or the race and, in addition to random checks, every car is weighed after qualifying, and the scoring cars are weighed after the race."

Every so often the process catches an offender. The hit rate, however, doesn't bear much relation to the often febrile paddock seeing mischief in every corner. The disparity, says Bauer, is inevitable for a confined space filled with over-achievers.

"There is always a team at the front, and the automatic assumption from everyone else is that they're cheating," he says with a world-weary sigh.

"Everyone pays their engineers to win the championship, and, with the big money, the manufacturers and their reputations, some of them cannot imagine being second. Nobody will admit another team has simply done a better job and so we have this kindergarten game of whispers and whistleblowing."

If Bauer and the FIA technical department are the paddock's police service, then they are abetted by an active and engaged Neighbourhood Watch. Teams study their rivals to the point of obsession and, like the twitching curtains of a close-knit village, this can be as big an irritant to the authorities as to the neighbours.

"Nobody wants to be seen as the bad guy," admits Bauer. "They don't want to be blamed for being nasty, and so, rather than come to us, they prefer to talk to the press,
 and we have to react to a rumour rather than a protest."

The demi-monde of hints and allegations that lie under the surface of F1 tend to mirror the dominant technology battles of the day. In the V8 era, with closely matched engines, questions of aero-elasticity dominated: bendy wings and flexible floors took centre stage.

"The police cannot look at everything. If we were to check a car completely it would take half a year" Bauer

In modernity horsepower dictates, and it's fuel flow under the microscope - or boroscope. Occasionally there's a more straightforward matter for consideration - such as Racing Point's protest of Renault's brake-bias system in Japan.

Bauer discusses this with something approaching fondness. "This is how teams should act. They saw something; we didn't see it; they protested rather than going to the press. This should happen more often: stirring up rumours is not sport."

After exclusion, Renault candidly claimed the system had been unchanged for years - which raises the thorny question of why it wasn't spotted earlier. "We didn't see it because we weren't looking for it," says Bauer bluntly.
 It's an illuminating answer.

"This is like life," he continues after a short pause. 


"The police cannot look at everything. If we were to check a car completely - check every piece of hardware, every line of software - that process would take half a year. This is why motorsport allows protests. If you're not happy, you can go to the stewards."

And with that, Bauer is away, back to the FIA garage, keeping F1 - sometimes unwillingly - on the straight and narrow. A few hours later his team will discover Charles Leclerc's Ferrari contains rather more fuel than it is supposed to, fanning the flames of a long-running controversy that will keep F1 fans warm in the off-season.

But this isn't Bauer's problem. He records and reports evidence: decisions and sentencing fall under the aegis of the stewards. Once the paperwork is filed, he moves on - the good copper back on the beat.