As first reported earlier this month, the FIA has been taking a close look at flexible wings over the first half of this season as it believes teams have been pushing the boundaries in terms of what is allowed.
It is understood that several teams, including Aston Martin, were advised to make changes to their front wing designs around the time of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in a bid to ensure that they did not fall foul of any rule breaches.
But as part of a ramped up effort to stop any attempt at getting around the regulations, the FIA has now issued a formal technical directive outlining what it believes are unacceptable designs with regards to flexible bodywork.
In TD018, a copy of which has been seen by Autosport and was sent to teams ahead of the Dutch GP weekend, the FIA states that it believes outfits are exploiting “regions of purposely design localised compliance” plus “relative motion between adjacent components” to deliver a significant boost to aerodynamic performance.
It states that any design that operates like this is in breach of Article 3.2.2 of F1’s Technical Regulations, which states that all components that influence a car’s aerodynamic performance must be “rigidly secured and immobile with respect to their frame of reference defined in Article 3.3. Furthermore, these components must produce a uniform, solid, hard, continuous, impervious surface under all circumstances.”
The FIA has been prompted into action because it believes that teams are exploiting sophisticated systems that rotate and flex front and rear wing elements in ways that cannot be detected through the regular load tests.
It has made it clear that any “assembly designs that exploit localised compliance or degrees of freedom are not permitted.”