FIA beef up new car legality checks with laser-guided system

The FIA has introduced the latest technology to help it combat the potential illegalities of this year's cars.

The rewrite of the aerodynamic regulations has paved the way for a plethora of ideas with regard to the design of the cars, as well as opening the door for the teams to find loopholes.

That has resulted in the FIA introducing a fully electronic, laser-guided state-of-the-art scanning system to run the rule over the new variety of geometries.

As pointed out by FIA single-seater technical director Nikolas Tombazis, motorsport's world governing body "needed to up the game on checks".

Explaining the new device, Tombazis added: "We check the cars on computer to make sure they satisfy all the geometric constraints, and we have done that with all teams.

"Then we check the physical car against the computer model by scanning the car and that’s the process we are using now.

"The system consists of a tracker that detects the position of a device held by one of our scrutineers.

"We either scan the surface by holding a sensor over the surface or we check specific points on the car which are then checked against CAD, on the co-ordinates, and based on those measurements we can draw the final conclusions."

F1 teams face spot checks

Tombazis has confirmed there will be two types of checks, with the first looking at the basic parameters, such as width, height and making sure a car isn’t running too low, with the second far more detailed that incorporates a scan of the entire surface of the car.

At present, the new system is still in its infancy but Tombazis has no doubt it will prove invaluable going forward.

"We hope to eventually do the quick scans on all the cars across a race weekend, but we are still learning about the process, especially in a race weekend environment," remarked Tombazis.

"The more detailed scans will take place on a more random basis, probably a couple of cars per race and that means the team or teams selected won’t know they will be scanned, thus promoting compliance.

"Clearly, if a car does get protested or if we have serious concerns about the legality of a car or a competitor has concerns, then we may individually pick a car to be scanned in order to obtain the information required to deliver a ruling.

"So far the system has been working quite well. There is still quite a lot to learn but it’s a step in the right direction to further improve our capability at the track."

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