Rule change will allow F1 to clamp down on 2021 loopholes

Tweaks to the way Formula 1 is governed will be made in a bid to clampdown on teams finding potential loopholes in the 2021 rules.

With a host of new sporting, technical and financial regulations coming into play for 2021, F1 is working hard to try and ensure teams cannot find loopholes in the rules that could potentially give them an unfair advantage.

In a bid to combat this issue, the FIA and F1 will revise its regulations in time for the 2021 campaign to allow them to change rules during the season to prevent teams from exploiting loopholes.

"The governance in the past has been the teams have to all agree to make a change,” F1 sporting boss Ross Brawn explained. “We’re pushing through governance where we can make changes much more on short notice than at the present time.

“If you exploit a loophole in the future, you can be shut down at the next race, which you could never do now. So the Brawn diffuser – as it happens, there were three teams that had it, so it would have carried on.

“But if one team stands out there with a solution that has never been conceived, and has never been imagined, and destroys the whole principle of what is trying to be done, the governance would allow, with sufficient support from the other teams, to stop it. This is a whole different philosophy.

“Then what happens is someone who has a loophole thinks, ‘Do I want to use it or do I want to tell the FIA about it as it wasn’t intended?’. You’ve found a loophole in the regulations and you turn up at the first race and the FIA say, ‘Sorry chap, that wasn’t intended, we’re going to hold a meeting now and if everyone agrees, apart from you, we’ll stop it’.”

Brawn said the aim of the changes would not to stop clever technical innovation but to simply prevent teams from coming up with a development that “completely corrupts the principle” of the new rules.

“A great idea is the exploitation of the regulations within what was intended,” Brawn said. “If someone comes up with something that was a play on the words, or some interpretation that was never intended, it completely corrupts the principle.

“What is the choice? Either live with it for a year, and have something which is not a great competition, or we change it, put it right and get the competition back to where it is.

“Would you take that risk of going into the championship with an interpretation that was risky if you knew it could be stopped? Therefore, the evolution and the way those things will develop will be different. The philosophy would be different.

“What we don’t want – and I say this with some hypocrisy [Brawn’s blown diffuser played a big part in helping the team win both world championships in 2009] – is that we don’t want a championship being won because of the loophole.

“We want people with an understood set of regulations that will be the best at what they do. I think they have to rely on us and the FIA, that we’re not going to penalise someone who has a great idea.

“That is subjective. But is a great idea the fact that someone put a comma in the wrong place in the regulations which means a lawyer can interpret it in a diverse way? I don’t think it is.”