FIA 2013 Regs - Curfew tweak

Mezzer

A fine chap if ever there was one.
Contributor
Per this article the FIA has tweaked the curfew regs:
"Secondly, the team personnel curfew - which prevents team members from being in the paddock during specified periods - has been extended from six to eight hours on Thursday nights. The number of exceptions allowed during a season has also been reduced from four to two."

Being an ex-software developer, and therefore being a combination of a) a devious mind, and b) seeing any rule as being a challenge to still do whatever I want to do with actually breaking the rules, I wondered how effective this would really be. What's to stop any team, especially one of the wealthier ones, from keeping a well-equipped trailer (or two) off-circuit and having the boys doing as much as possible after hours so that when they get back to the paddock they're just putting things together?
 
Mezzer

I can understand your point, but have you ever seen the logjam that it takes for the mechanics to get back into the circuit? In order to access the paddock, they have to go through FOM turnstyles - it would be mighty difficult for them to secrete a (Say) fully assembled gearbox, or rear wing through.... Similarly, I don't think it's quite as easy as all that - the parts on the car come off in a set order - it's not quite as simple as assembling a suspension assembly, and then bolting it on to the chassis - the suspension, and many other parts, are integral to the car as a whole, so assembling parts off-circuit may not be as helpful as it may seem....
 
Mephistopheles...

Have you not seen Adrian Newey's front room during that time? They're not allowed to run the computers in the factory, so his "Laptop computer" fills his whole room...and that's just for accessing Facebook... ;)

*Disclaimer. I have never seen Adrian Newey's house. Adrian Newey almost certainly does not take a mountain of servers home so that he can keep on designing parts for the Red Bull car. Adrian Newey was only included as an example of a designer in F1. I could have used any other name. Adrian Newey does not break any of the FIA Formula 1 rules.
 
The whole "not allowed to run computers" in the factory thing is a joke, you show me a well funded team that doesn't have a remote data centre where they are running their servers so anyone can connect at the right time with the right authentication. The only thing this may stop is high intensity data applications such as the wind tunnel controls etc being run as they will all be local to the factory. Collaboration, design software and stuff like that will all be run remotely and only a small part of the data shipped to the individual laptop ;)
 
I feel sure that wind tunnels have been calibrated during the break. Just how you do that without a car in I do not know.
 
Yes Brogan dependant on the size of the wind tunnel they can be anything from a quarter scale, half scale all the way up to full scale, and to be honest anyone with a hair dryer, a glass tube, a smoke pellet and an accurate scale model can build and gleam some information from a home created wind tunnel....

The problem is rolling roads and getting info from the turbulence created from the wheels turning and exhaust blowing....
 
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