While the Canadian Grand Prix is known for groundhogs moving side to side across the track, Esteban Ocon’s rear wing was swaying on the back of his Alpine for the latter half of the race in Montreal this past weekend.
Photo credit: Alpine F1 Team
The FIA is normally very strict about parts being unsafe on all cars. Haas was shown multiple black and orange flags to change front wings last year, and yet Ocon’s wobbly wing was deemed safe by the FIA.
While the FIA had no problem with the condition of the wing, McLaren certainly had a few words to say. When trailing Ocon, McLaren’s Lando Norris said that “It’s going to fall off at some point, that thing’s pretty dangerous. It’s very loose.
“If this falls off it could hit someone,”
After the race, Team Principal Andrea Stella commented that the new vision for the FIA in terms of car part safety leads to a slippery slope in the heat of the moment.
“The race direction now leaves the duty of care to the teams,” said Stella. “It’s the team’s call to say ‘we should retire the car’ or ‘we should leave the car out’. It’s a tricky one because teams, when they are in a competition, you have a conflict of interest in terms of safety of everyone involved and maximising your result.
“I think this is a debate that will deserve more time and I’m sure that at the next Sporting Advisory Committee it will be raised again. Because Lando said a couple of times that it is not nice when you follow a car with a wobbling rear wing and this may hit you, and kind of nothing happens.”
Since the decision was in Alpine’s hands to determine the car’s safety, Team Principal Otmar Szafnauer said that the team was confident that Ocon’s wing was safe, and that he could finish the Grand Prix with ease.
“It didn’t fail. So it stayed on. We designed that wing and we manufacture it. So that failure mode was probably most familiar to us. And we were happy that it wasn’t going to come off. We test for that in R&D, so we put it through those tests, just because of the way it’s mounted, and we, therefore, see those types of modes and understand if it’s going to come off or not. So we’re happy that with all the testing that we do, it wasn’t.”
Even though Szafnauer was confident in Ocon’s rear wing, even the FIA had to talk to Alpine to clarify it due to the excessiveness of the movement:
“We talked about it, and the FIA came to us as well and said it looks like your rear wing’s moving, and we looked at it and talked about it. We were confident that with a couple of laps left that it was going to be fine.”
However, at what point does safety trump the opportunity for a few extra points in the World Championship, which could mean a few more millions in the pockets of the F1 teams?
