Red Bull USing Traction Control?

[Mia 01]

Only Sebs car, yes. Sebs car is the one with reliability to.

Sebs side of the garage is cheating, obvious isn´t.

In todays free practice two Seb was up to four seconds faster than Alonso in the long runs.

[Zico]

But traction control is banned. I don't know what the rules explicitly say but it seems funky to me that they are skirting them as such (yeah, I know, every team looks for that extra advantage).

Article 9.3 of the Technical regulations..

9.3 Traction control
No car may be equipped with a system or device which is capable of preventing the driven wheels from spinning under power or of compensating for excessive torque demand by the driver.


From the link you refer to this type of traction aid could perhaps be argued to be legal to because....We all know the RB's can still spin their wheels, so that part is fine... and if the system were to work as theorised in a linear fashion, based on suspension compression levels, it works purely incidentally to application of power by the driver and in certain conditions it might activate without power application and power application might not necessarily lead to the KERS harvesting functioning if the suspension does not compress beyond a given point.

This type of system seems very plausible to me, it ties in very well with how the car drives from a visual perspective. It could go along way to explaining why Red Bull have had so, so many KERS issues... and also a possible reason why the use an unusually high rake angle (compared to most other teams) and soft rear suspension.

[Whyzars]

This level of intrigue is why I love F1.


I was actually interested to see the dual rear brake fire today. I wondered about the bias electrics or what was operating the rear brakes in isolation. It looked to be a very balanced failure.


Where there are forms of traction optimisation being tested by teams, exactly how should F1 handle this?

Banning technological leaps is counter productive in my opinion but how long should secret innovations be secret?

Anything that makes a car utilise its energy efficiently is OK with me. We have narrower rear wings today so TC might not be the issue it was years ago.

[steveaki13]

I think its clear Red Bull found something since summer, but to always assume its something illegal is probably not fair.

I am worried though if Red Bull remain unchallenged next season, that they could win 8 titles in a row. Although In F1 things rarely stay predictable for long. In 3 years we might see Red Bull in the midfield again.

[N. Jones]

So whatever "solution" RBR are using is only on Vettel's car is it?

That's my understanding. We know that Marko is fully behind Vettel. Anybody else on the team is just a bonus.