The battle to stop F1's revolution being watered down

Will the agreement to postpone the deadline for the 2021 Formula 1 rules package from June to October enable unhappy teams to push for a watering down of the planned technical regulations?

That's the fear expressed by those who are hoping to see a major reset and levelling of the playing field, and who are concerned that some competitors would prefer to see the status quo maintained.

But, the man ultimately responsible for putting the technical rules together - the FIA's head of single-seater technical matters Nikolas Tombazis - is adamant that there won't be any backing down.

Indeed, the former Benetton, Ferrari and McLaren man believes that the extra time potentially allows for a further push in the direction that Liberty and the FIA are trying to take as they seek to improve the show and reduce costs.

"We had a meeting last week involving team principals, technical people, drivers, Pirelli, F1 and ourselves," says Tombazis. "We will now have some more of those meetings. And I'm quite hopeful that in some of those meetings some extra rules may come about that are good, and that may not be part of this June package, but may be part of the October package.

"I'm hoping that between now and October we don't just dot a few i's and cross a few t's. I'm hoping that we're actually going to make some improvements. We're not going to go, 'OK let's throw it all away and let's start again from a clean sheet of paper', or something like that, because there's been a lot of work.

"And I personally believe there's a lot of merit in there, and the objective is to use the extra time to improve them, and not throw them in the bin and make another set of rules."

The October postponement is the latest novel step in what is proving to be a highly unusual process for F1. For the first time the impetus for change is coming from research conducted by the F1 organisation's team of engineers, and for the first time the teams do not have to agree to accept those changes. The FIA, with Liberty's support, is in the driving seat.

To recap, with no new post-2020 Concorde Agreement yet signed there is no governance in place covering '21, and so the usual procedures through which the rules are defined - with the teams very much at the helm - do not apply. Instead, the process and timing defaults to the International Sporting Code, which says that in the case of "substantial" changes the rules have to be published 18 months before the start of the calendar year on which they apply, which originally meant June 30 this year.

"It's in the ISC which covers all categories, not just F1," says Tombazis. "And it's intended to be such that if we do have a significant change of some sort, we can't just throw it anytime, and it has to have some sort of regulatory process.

"So the reason why we were talking about the end of June was due to not having a governance in place for 2021, and having some fairly ambitious plans about what we think we need to do to improve F1. That was really the deadline, which is 18 months before the year concerned, and which has been around for a long time.

"That usually gets overwritten by other governance agreements specific to F1. The normal governance, that was used for the rule changes for 2019, was that the F1 Strategy Group and F1 Commission had to approve it first, and then the WMSC.

The new regulations represent the most comprehensive change in decades

"For example, when we wanted to do changes for 2019 the deadline was April 30 '18, that was a deadline until when we didn't need to have the unanimity of all the F1 teams. After April 30 we could have done it with unanimity, which of course is impossible.

"To be clear, you can use unanimity any time. We can change the rules for tomorrow's race if everyone is unanimous, it's just that they will never be.

"The way the F1 Commission is currently formed it meant five or six teams had to support a rule change. For 2021, that governance is not in place, therefore we default back to the ISC, and June 30."

The teams may always struggle to align on rule changes, but crucially in last week's meeting in Paris they did agree - and unanimously, after some inevitable jockeying for position - to postpone that deadline by four months, to October 30.

"In the ISC there's a provision that if all competitors agree to a delay, it can be delayed," says Tombazis, pictured above. "Now it has been an incredibly busy period, and we have discussed things with teams individually, in technical working groups, and other forums with team principals.

"Nonetheless there was a view that we need to tie a few ends together and clarify a few matters a little bit more, and maybe get one or two more opinions on stuff. For that reason we proposed the delay, and it was accepted."

A draft set of 2021 technical regulations exists, and was sent to the teams a couple of weeks ago: "It was the first time they had had access to the whole document. They'd seen about 60-70% about a month before, they'd seen individual articles in the previous six months, and had discussed them. Those rules could have been voted by the World Motor Sport Council if there had been no agreement [to delay]."

The new regulations represent the most comprehensive change in decades. It's not a case of starting from scratch - the core has been refined over decades under the stewardship of the late Charlie Whiting and has stood the test of time - but much is new.

"Some bits are copy/paste," adds Tombazis. "We cannot say just start again, because a lot of the reasoning behind certain phrases has a history of 20 years, with some amendments or additions to try to avoid something or achieve something.

"So we cannot arrogantly throw them all away and start again, because we're likely to have to follow the same learning process. Some bits are totally new, we've tried to reorder them a bit to be more sensible as a sequence, because some bits had evolved and were maybe not properly structured."

It was always understood that the June draft would need some refinement even if passed by the World Motor Sport Council this month, and that was even more apparent after teams studied them in detail and began to offer feedback.

"First of all there may be aspects in those rules which are not properly written, there may be phrases which you think are achieving a certain rule, but if they get interpreted in a certain way, it can lead to a loophole.

"We obviously do our best to avoid that, but it's not possible to avoid it completely. The way that the World Council and the International Sporting Code work, if there were such things they could have been pointed out and corrected afterwards as well. Then there are dimensions in specific little areas that are maybe not completely tied down to the last detail.

"This delay does give us an opportunity to make sure we close any such open issues, and hopefully have a completely robust set of rules in October."

The rules as currently written also allow for standard part tenders which have not yet been finalised, but will be in the coming months: "What would have happened is there would have been bits highlighted as standard supply, and if a tender failed to produce a standard supply there was a provision in the rules to say if the tender failed to produce, then this piece will follow those guidelines."

"It's an opportunity to make a difference for the sport" Nikolas Tombazis

Tombazis says that the teams already have enough information to be able to start conducting R&D, albeit in the knowledge that details may change.

"The rules do give a comprehensive view of what the whole car is, and if they want to, teams can start working towards designing a car.

"Obviously I've been involved in that process for quite a lot of years. You don't need to have everything down to the last comma and dimension in order to start designing a car 18 months before the season. You can do some initial work, and then sometimes a new rule may arrive and you have to adjust something and maybe it's not perfect. You can still do a lot of work with what you currently have."

Whether the rules deadline is June or October, the key to the process is the fact that for once, the teams do not have to agree among themselves.

The end of the Concorde has given the FIA and Liberty a unique window during which they can push through significant changes that they know would not be universally popular.

"We felt that we needed to perform certain interventions, let's say, in some aspects of the sport which would be difficult to achieve if everything is a vote for every single matter, because then it becomes quite difficult to do what we need to do.

"I'm really conscious that I don't want it to sound as though the teams are not on board. They want the sport to be as good as it can be, because they want to participate in a healthy sport. It's just very difficult if every single thing has to be voted by a majority.

"So yes, it's an opportunity to make a difference for the sport, we believe, but we'd be foolish if we ignored team input for that, because they've got a lot more engineers and they've got a lot of good things to say. So I don't want to sound as if we're saying, 'Who cares, they have a different opinion, we'll do it regardless'.

"If we hear three teams saying one thing, and five teams say something else, we can listen very carefully to the arguments and have an informed opinion about which one is the correct one and the best way for the sport.

"And that may not always be what five teams are saying, sometimes it maybe what three teams are saying.

"Teams have by and large been very helpful on a lot of these things, they've done aerodynamic simulations to compliment what we are doing, they've done proposals of wording of articles. Overall they have a very good input."

There has been some negative reaction from teams, with opposition expressed to the move to standard parts, while some feel that too many restrictions will limit the freedom of engineers to be creative and find an advantage. Tombazis is happy to hear any feedback.

"We want to have teams saying what they think," he says. "Some of them say it in a more outspoken way, some of them go to you or your colleagues and complain about things, some of them say it privately, some of them come with constructive opinions. Teams have a different outlook.

"Everyone realises that something needs to be done. If someone comes up with a brilliant idea to either decrease costs or improve the spectacle or whatever, then we will try to introduce it. These four months we do not see as a compromise, it's not a backing down, it's also an opportunity to fix things and improve things, and if there's something new, we may do it.

"We have very much listened to every single team and every single stakeholder who comes and says, 'We think you should do this or do that'. We're not saying that only because a majority of the teams want it it's going to happen, because that's really quite difficult, and things then get watered down to a very poor relative of what we need to do."

Tombazis is adamant that the FIA and F1 will stick with the key principles that have been pursued over the past couple of years - and he remains confident that the teams will eventually come on board, even if they have individual objections.

"We have very firm objectives about what we need to be doing. I think we have a responsibility to make a step change in F1 on a number of issues, the most important ones being sustainability from an environmental point of view, the spectacle from an entertainment point of view, and the costs - having a slightly less dispersed field and less financial disparity.

"All of these objectives we think are an absolute mantra, we can't just throw them away. And I think people are of course influenced by their competitive positions, every single team from the top to the bottom and all in between, but teams by and large do realise that this thing is needed.

"I don't think anyone is saying, 'Look just leave it, don't do anything at all', people realise that work needs to be done."