Mercedes and Ferrari in 'secret' Pirelli tyre tests

The Artist..... said:
Basically, Pirelli has put Mercedes up shit creek, stolen their paddle, but a hole in the boat, and continue to pour shit down on top of them!
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I disagree.
All of the teams and personnel are fully aware of the rules and if they aren't then that's their problem.

I refuse to accept that Ross Brawn of all people would make a mistake like this.

Besides which, further reports now make it clear that the teams were written to in April 2012 making it clear in season tyre testing was prohibited unless agreed to by all teams.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/107726

Mercedes only have themselves to blame.
 
Mercedes were insane for even contemplating/entertaining such a test. Whether or not they get away with it or are fined the PR fall out was always going to be horrendous.
 
Fairly sure The Artist..... due to the plural in this quote

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2013/05/what-was-behind-mercedes-and-pirelli-secret-f1-tyre-test/

The FIA says it was not aware that Mercedes would use a current car for this amount of running; it signed up for 100kms only. It was also not aware it would be conducted by its current race drivers and states that its approval was conditional upon the test being run by Pirelli, not the team. (NB- Last year Pirelli used a two year old Renault with Jaime Alguersuari driving, engineered by the current Lotus race engineer Mark Slade.)
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Reading this it looks like Mercedes have broken a multitude of rules.
  1. Merc running the test and not Pirelli
  2. Using their current race drivers
  3. Using a 2013 race car
  4. Not getting permission from the FIA
And those are only ones I can think of off the top of my head...
 
Mephistopheles said:
Or somebody is lying....
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That would be TOO devious... The only other possibility I can think of is if both race drivers were involved, then the test would have had to run Wed-Fri, with LH taking over on the Fri (As we know he was back in Europe for the weekend, as he attended the Le Mans MotoGP)... Personally, I don't believe that though!
 
He could have left the track late Monday afternoon and drove beforehand as we know the test lasted for three days but only because of rain, so I would say the plan was for Lewis to drive Monday and Niko to drive Tuesday....
 
Mephistopheles

Unlikely, as he also had a round of golf on Monday afternoon... Once upon a time it might have been possible, but without concorde, it's a long flight, and not a lot of time to this.... My suspicion is that only Rosberg (if either) was involved....
 
Theres an often used phrase in politics whereby someone thinks they can get away with something (or at least reduce the effects of any punishment) because they think they have plausable deniability. Mercedes will end up claiming they thought Pirelli had sorted out the paperwok, Pirelli will claim they did nothing wrong and everyone will try and chalk it up to a miss-understanding and promise not to do it again. I fully expect the former Ferrari team boss who currently runs the FIA will look hard at the situation before working out what action to take against the former Ferrari team manager who currently runs the Merc outfit. Should take a while.
 
From the James Allen article it sounds as though the whole process was conducted under a considerable amount of secrecy - nobody knowing about Ferrari's post-Bahrain test etc. How the 2013 car came to be used, though, seems to me to be a key point - both parties would surely have wanted to confirm with the FIA that this was allowed? If Mercedes simply assumed that Pirelli had obtained the necessary permissions, on the face of it that's incredibly naive and negligent.

The bigger picture of course, is that the FIA need Mercedes cars on the grid this year, next year and as many years after that as possible.
 
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/107733

Leading Formula 1 teams Lotus, Ferrari and Red Bull insist they were never asked about the possibility of testing a 2013 car for Pirelli after the Spanish Grand Prix.
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Galahad raises an interesting point in that not much is being said about Ferrari's test, which was also conducted in secrecy.
They may not have used this year's car but they would still gain information on the tyre compounds based on what they know about the car which they did use.
 
So the Ferrari test was run in-season too despite that being explicitly stated as against the rules in the FIA email last year?
edit - and were the other teams offered the test too in this instance?

The Merc situation sounds worse but the Ferrari test doesn't appear to be fully within the regs either.
 

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