New road-relevance proposals met with scorn
Hinwil, Thursday: Formula One teams have reacted angrily to proposals by the FIA to make the sport more “road relevant” from 2010 onwards, with BMW Sauber in particular leading the protests against the planned regulation changes.
Angry: BMW boss Mario Thiessen
In a news conference last week, FIA President Max Mosley insisted that Formula One had to “meet the needs of the road car manufacturer” in order to stay financially viable, which included the introduction of lights, horns and other features onto the F1 cars of the future.
Dr. Mario Thiessen, team principal of BMW Sauber, was particularly scathing about the new rules: “They are a joke,” he told assembled journalists outside the team’s factory in Switzerland. “BMW have been constructing cars without functioning indicators for decades now, and suddenly the FIA have decided that they want to introduce expensive and irrelevant indicator technology into a sport that has always relied on manufacturer ingenuity rather than overbearing rulemaking. BMW has no interest in investing huge amounts of resources into these so-called ’safety features’ that will never make it onto our road cars anyway, and even if they did, they wouldn’t get used by the average BMW driver.”
Red Bull Technologies’ Adrian Newey was unavailable for comment, though it is understood that he is concerned about the aerodynamic impact the new mandatory fuzzy dice and novelty air fresheners will have on the cars.
