For those who are not following - Ferrari "cheated" last year with their engine and have a secret "agreement" with FIA to cut out thr cheat which also meant apparently rebuilding a lot of the PU. They should be back on pace in 2022.

Part of the agreement is that Ferrari engineers are helping the FIA to police the other engines.

The engineers on the payroll at the FIA don't have the time/resources/knowledge to judge the legality of these insanely complex powertrains.

All manufacturers were forced earlier this year to provide detailed info about their Energy Recovery Systems, rumors are that Ferrari suspects the Mercedes ERS to make use of loopholes so Ferrari lends their engineers to the FIA to research the data provided on all engines.

Close some of those loopholes with a Technical Directive (Basically a clarification of the rules, which takes immediate effect) and you can slow down your opponents with immediately.

Source? I find it hard to believe FIA would give Ferrari privileged access to other teams data.

Teams give FIA the data and Ferrari gives pointers and other help. The sensitive data is not shared with Ferrari.

If you are talking of DAS - they spoke with FIA through development process and was ok'ed.

And DAS is made illegal from next year.

Are you saying Ferrari worked with FIA for their sensor cheat last year as well? BTW, none of us on the outside even know what they even cheated on and what the agreement is etc. The theory is that FIA knows there was cheating with the sensors but doesn't have the necessary evidence to prove it.

To me this is the main problem with F1 as a sport. In football and basketball you can see most of the important strategy play out on the field.

In F1 you are always left guessing which hidden aspect of the engineering is affecting the outcome of the race.

Making everything open source wouldn’t change anything, but at least from a fan perspective you could really delve into those cool engineering bits. Right now we are left guessing at what the Ferrari engine was doing and how it worked.

The things that are actually resulting in the wins/losses are not even not visible, they are secret! What other sport is like that?

They are not really secret, there is specualtion, there is copying and eventually there is details.

The whole thing came to this end because RedBull guessed what Ferrari were doing.

Perhaps that is why I love F1 over any other sport. I love the technical aspects, the need to push into gray area etc.

How so? Do you mean there toe in steering setup? If so I don't think that's really cheating as it's a loophole in the rules rather than a contravention of the rules.

Yeah, and exploiting loopholes in the rules is as old as F1. You follow them to the letter, gain an advantage, hopefully win a championship, and then the FIA specifically bans what you did for future years.

For me this is F1. If someone wants to create a competing racing class with standardised chassis and engines then that's fine too. But it isn't F1.