F1 Fanatic

I’ve read the stewards decision (http://www.rallydeportugal.pt/Handlers/fileHandler.ashx?path=/ResourcesUser/Documentos/Quadro_oficial_de_afixacao/Stewards_decision_8.pdf&menuid=2) and the turbine appears to have expanded due to the extreme heat.

What heat? They weren’t exactly rallying along the equator here. Portugal was inundated with near-monsoonal weather all week.

That said, the turbine wheel deforming under extreme conditions does seem to be a fairly valid argument. According to the FIA, the wheel is supposed to have dimensions of 54.00mm, with a tolerance of 0.01mm, so it can be 53.99mm or 54.01mm and still be within the rules. Hirvonen’s turbine wheel, however, was measured at 54.02mm, so it’s one millimeter over the allowable margin for error. The FIA will test it further in a laboratory. Citroen claim that it was a standard part supplied to all the teams, so what the FIA really need to do is look at the turbine wheels of several cars (ideally from all manuacturers) and see whether it is a phenomenon common to all the cars (which means it’s a problem with the part), just the Citroens (a problem with the car in general), or just Hirvonen (a problem with Hirvonen’s car).

I’m just wondering how Citroen can say “the turbine wheel deformed in the extreme heat” when the rally has been run in cooler conditions. No, I’m not in Portugal, so I cannot say for sure, but the amount of rain the country has seen is comparable to some of the downpours we’ve had down here of late, and it’s generally been very, very cool.

Well, they claim it was the heat of the engine that caused the part to expand. If that’s the case, they should be less concerned about appealling the decision, and more concerned as to why their engines generate so much heat that a standard part deforms beyond the acceptable margin of error when nobody else is experiencing the problem. Especially considering that the next rallies are in Argentina and Greece, which are typically two of the hotter rallies on the calendar.

@ned-flanders – It’s all well and good to say “they should get a time penalty”, but I think that’s just asking for trouble. As soon as the FIA says that, the teams will push the boundaries of what is acceptable (especially if it comes down to a championship fight), comfortable that the worst that can happen is that they receive a time penalty. Hirvonen won the rally by one minute and fifty-two seconds – what kind of time penalty would be meaningful without affecting the results? The threat of exculsion for technical infringements like this is the most effective way of dealing with things. The teams will not push their luck, because they know that if they get caught, then they will get in serious trouble. It’s happened before, too – in 1995, Toyota were caught using an illegal variable restrictor on the Celica ST205′s turbo. Rule changes at the time made the restrictor opening smaller, and Toyota were concerned that they would lose so much power that they would be unable to compete with the other teams. So they created a variable restrictor that could be adjusted without tampering with the seal on the parts; that way, they could pass pre-event scrutineering, then illegally open the restrictor for the rally, and re-set it and pass post-event scrutineering. They only won the one rally in 1995 (Juha Kankkunen in Corsica), but when the parts were discovered, it was obviously cheating, and they were banned from competition for a year.

Citroen’s actions with the throttle appear to have been a genuine mistake (a part from the wrong batch somehow made its way into Hirvonen’s car; they’re unsure how it happened), and they claim that the clutch was heavier than the homologated part that they were supposed to be running and so it offered no actual advantage. Nevertheless, the FIA have to exclude them, because the rules are clear on this.

@andrewtanner – If I were Loeb, I’d be concerned. The revised result means that Petter Solberg is now within five points of the championship lead.

I’d be more worried about having Solberg chasing me than having Hirvonen lead me.