Standard ECUs facing opposition

Following a series of meetings between the carmakers and the FIA in Bahrain to discuss the issue, high level sources have revealed that the standard ECU issue is now the major hurdle to be overcome to head off the threat of a breakaway championship.

But even though FIA president Max Mosley is understood to be unwilling to back down in his plans for the ECU, the manufacturers have said they are still not convinced it is the right way for F1.

BMW motorsport director Mario Theissen said: "As we understand, the original aim was to rule out artificial driver aids and we fully support that, even if road cars have it, we want to see the best drivers out here and want them to cope with the car at the limit and that is certainly more exciting without driver aids.

"We have had talks between the manufacturers and some teams, I think it was a year ago - at least a year ago - about how to achieve that, and we came to the conclusion that it should be possible to do that with a controlled section, accessible to the FIA, to make sure that there are not artificial driver aids.

"We would prefer to go along this route because today there are not the mechanical parts, components, development on one hand and the electronics components on the other hand. Virtually everything comes with its electronics and virtually every functionality is controlled electronically.

"So in order to have the possibility to test new functionalities, we would need to have access to the electronics and then you are immediately down to the question: what is standardised?"

Toyota president John Howett added: "I think in principle, most of the manufacturers would prefer freedom with the ECU, at least the actual cost of the ECU itself is not of an extreme magnitude. OK, one would probably need to be more draconian in restricting electronic capacity to significantly reduce the cost area.

"I think there is an issue of actually ensuring that there are no artificial aids which are intended to be eliminated, such as traction control in the future, and therefore by having a standard ECU it may make it very easy to police and avoid any rumours of a certain team having this capability or not.

"I believe that's one of the reasons that the FIA wishes to integrate the actual standard ECU, but I think as a preference we would prefer to keep freedom."

Honda Racing technical director Geoff Willis also claimed it would be difficult for the teams to integrate standard ECUs into their cars in time for the start of 2008.

"Changing ECUs and changing all the integrated code with it and the software the team uses is a very big challenge and there's not a lot of time between now and the beginning of 2008," he explained.

"And none of us would want to be starting on January 1, 2008 with a new system. We want to be trying to test it earlier so I think there's a pretty tight timescale."