Originally Posted by BinaryDad:
“Wasn't the actual official punishment for ignoring instructions from the FIA? I'm pretty sure it was, and because of this, I've been completely baffled about Horner and co. banging their drum about having definitive proof about not violating the fuel flow regs, when they were never punished under that specific rule.
Some interesting stuff from the appeal hearing;
RBR claimed that their fuel flow model was more accurate than the sensors, but then the FIA and RBR demonstrated that it an error of +1/-1 compared to the sensor error of +0.25/-0.25.
RBR admitted that they didn't turn down the fuel flow when requested because it would cost them 0.4 seconds a lap and their place on the podium.
RBR's faulty sensors were faulty because RBR had damaged the seal on the sensors, rather than them being "inherently" faulty.
I'm rather disappointed that RBR haven't been given additional punishment (yet) given that they constantly criticized the FIA and the fuel sensors in the run up to the appeal, as well as the blatant disregard show to the FIA's instructions during the race. It's almost as if RBR ignored the FIA's repeated instructions to gain a performance advantage over the other teams.”
See, a lot of that strikes me as being rather hard-headed.
I mean, as I said before, if an FIA steward used a faulty tape-measure to instruct a team that their car was too wide, should a team be forced to comply with
that instruction, regardless of whether it was correct or not?
And then, should a team be penalised for refusing to obey the instruction, itself, regardless of whether or not the instruction was erroneous?
I'm pretty sure that one of the key issues here was that the FIA, themselves, decreed that their technical memo's were
not legally (in the sporting sense) binding and should only be considered advisory so, that being the case, it seems rather unfair to then use the fact that a team elected to ignore one as the basis for punitive action.
In short, you can't say "We're offering you advice but you don't have to take it" and
then punish a team for not following that advice.
Secondly, the information about the relative accuracy of the flowmeters vs the EM systems is rather disingenuous because it relates to
fully-functional equipment and the whole point, here, is that several teams have found the flowmeters
not to be fully-functional.
It's kinda like timing somebody using a broken stopwatch and then insisting that the timing is accurate because the stopwatch has a stated accuracy of 0.001 of a second.
The fact that the FIA were advising people to apply offsets to the f/m readings suggests they
aren't accurate, and certainly not to 0.25%, but it was always inevitable that the FIA would refuse to acknowledge that fact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure RBR are trying to manipulate the situation and that if, say, a f/m was reading 10%
low they'd be quite happy to comply with it and increase fuel-flow by 10% rather than abiding by their EM data but the fact remains that if the FIA f/ms aren't actually robust enough to provide consistent, reliable, data then they shouldn't be used as the tool for policing a rule.