FIA, a high-voltage start to the F1 World Championship. The controversy over the compression ratio of the Mercedes engine has not yet subsided and the FIA is already fearing the next scandal in Formula 1. This is admitted rather candidly by the great head of single-seater regulations Nikolas Tombazis, former technical director of Ferrari for a few years and a leading director of the International Federation as well as one of the “minds” behind the regulatory revolution. The Greek engineer, protagonist of a long “questions and answers” video published by the FIA on its YouTube channel, explains that, due to the very nature of the new sporting and technical code which requires all teams to start from a blank sheet of paper, the chances increase that someone will be able to interpret in a particularly intelligent way some regulatory loophole or some of the inevitable gray areas of the regulation. The words of Nikolas Tombazis “Obviously – explains Tombazis – in the coming weeks and months we will not only talk about compression ratio. In the teams there are very intelligent people and I expect that they will try to find an advantage in a particular area, which means that in the FIA we will be even more vigilant in doing our checks in those areas. Perfection is when there are no discussions on any aspect of the regulation, when everything is completely as expected and without interpretations. This is our goal and that is what we want we are committed. We have made a lot of progress in this regard, but when the regulations change a lot, then many unforeseen circumstances can arise.” “We work a lot with the teams and power unit manufacturers – he adds – but each team has maybe 200 engineers and around 1,000 people working on the car, sometimes even a little more. So it’s inevitable that, among those thousands of people, sometimes someone might think of something that no one had thought of before. It’s a question of numbers and statistics and it’s impossible, when we have new rules, not to have such areas of discussion. It’s always been like that. I think what has changed is that we are determined to make this championship a competition between the best drivers, the best engineers, the best teams, but not a championship of interpretation of the rules”. “The FIA wants it to be a championship of engineering skills and driving skills, but not just of those who are best at interpreting the rules,” concludes Nikolas Tombazis.
