"Tale of the Tape"

What was the barge-board affair really about? by Colm Doherty

Bored of the Boards controversy? It appears, on the surface at least, that Max Mosley has drawn the issue to a convincing close, and those who are paid to race may resume racing. And yet this affair leaves a number of unanswered questions and inconsistencies in it's wake.

Most notable among these is that Ferrari now contend, and the FIA Court of Appeal accept, that the turning vanes comply with the regulations when measured correctly. Yet at Sepang, the Stewards memo announcing the exclusion of both Ferraris for non-conformity to the regulations included the words "… and the team's acceptance that this bodywork did not conform…" That memo is countersigned by Stefano Dohenicay for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.

At the track, when quizzed as to why Ferrari would appeal a decision which they had now accepted as correct, their position was that it had been "a fair cop," but that the punishment did not fit the crime. They were appealing against the severity of the punishment, but did not dispute the measurement.

On one side of the world, Ferrari's technical experts agreed that Joe Bauer had correctly measured the car and found it illegal. On the other side of the world, Joe Bauer accepted Ferrari's new contention that he had measured it incorrectly, and the car was legal! As Peter Mooney would doubtless remind us, these men are the cream of their respective professions, using (according to Ron Dennis) millions of dollars worth of high tech equipment to do their work. Is this all just down to jet lag?

Those of us at the track who observed Ferrari mechanics rush to pop "tea cosies" onto the turning vanes each time the cars returned to the pits were aware something was going on. But what? One theory at Sepang, which has yet to be disproved, runs as follows. During development of the cars for Nuerburgring, Ferrari discovered an aerodynamic gain by modifying the turning vanes, and on checking the relevant regulation - article 3.12.1 - discovered an ambiguity in the way it was drafted.

Sensing an opportunity, Ferrari's lawyers & engineers may have got their heads together and laid the groundwork. Confident they could win an appeal on this issue if excluded, the team then set about some gamesmanship. They drew the attention of the other teams to the turning vanes with the pit-lane tea-cosy dance, almost daring them all to protest the cars on this issue. But were the turning vanes simply a red herring - a decoy device to distract attention from some other area of the car where Ferrari had found an even greater performance advantage?

If Ferrari succeeded in attracting protest on an issue they could control, and that protest was thrown out - they'd be home free. There is a two hour window within which to lodge a protest, and there are no second chances. A car can be illegal, but if protested on a part, which later proves legal, the protest will fail. As if to underline this point, Ron Dennis now publicly regrets not protesting Schumacher's tyres which were as slick as his baby's bottom by the end of the race. In the event, the turning vanes had attracted so much attention that when McLaren pointed them out after the race (as admitted by Joe Bauer and McLaren), Joe Bauer and his colleagues reassured them they were "onto it," and that there was no need for McLaren to lodge a protest.

Is that it? Did Ferrari pull off the ultimate three-card trick by distracting everyone's attention while suckering Ron Dennis into blowing the whistle on the wrong issue? What's incontrovertible is that Ferrari did find a huge performance gain somewhere in the car. Enough to put Schumacher on pole with an enormous 1.1 second margin to the fastest McLaren - the best F1 chassis of the year - and enough to allow him total control of the race, running at whatever pace he felt was needed.

Was it the tyres? Was it the 048C spec engines fitted to both race-cars? Rival engineers will doubtless be mulling over these and other questions. We'll almost certainly never know. But it now seems likely that whatever the barge-board controversy was really about, it wasn't barge-boards.

Yours in sport,

Colm Doherty.

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