F1 not headed towards spec cars - Steiner

Haas team principal Guenther Steiner is confident there remains "a lot of room for development" within the 2022 regulations.

F1 revealed a full-scale demonstration car of the soon to be introduced aerodynamic regulations ahead of the British Grand Prix.

Despite this, Steiner dismissed F1 is headed down the route of becoming a 'spec car' championship akin to IndyCar or Formula 2.

“I don’t think that there is, as much as we think it is a spec car, it is not really a spec car," he said.

"A lot of interpretation of it is like ‘yeah it is a spec car’ but it is not. There is still a lot of room for development.

“The spaces where they car develop is smaller but they are still free. It is not like an IndyCar which you cannot do anything.

“You have still got room to do things and it will be less noticeable to be honest when people do different things because the devil is in the detail."

F1 reveal just a the "principle" of regulations

Haas stopped development on its 2020 car midway through last year and, despite bringing minor upgrades early this year, the team elected to spend all its budget on the 2022 changes.

"There are still a lot of things you can do to get the diffuser to work from that side so they are different and I wouldn’t compare it with an IndyCar because that is obviously a spec car," Steiner explained.

"A Formula 2 car is a spec car, but a Formula 1 car, there is a lot of work and areas you can work on still in the new regulations.

“What you saw was a principle of a car, how the base will look like, but the cars will be quite developed.

“When a hundred engineers work on that, a few hundred engineers in each team work hard on it, they find places if they have got an opportunity to do something different.

“So it will be still very competitive as well.”

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