FIA will be stricter during inspections: 'A number of cars every weekend'

In a battle against illegal cars on the F1 grid, the FIA has taken a number of measures to check more frequently the legality of the car the teams are driving. In Bahrain these measures came into force for the first time and if it is up to Nikolas Tombazis, head of the technical department of the FIA, these 'checks' will take place much more frequently.

"The reason we choose this process is because the cars have become much more complicated and it is very difficult to dismantle them completely," Tombazis acknowledges in conversation with Motorsport.com. The new process selects a random number of cars each race weekend that the FIA looks at extra carefully.

More checks in 2021

In Bahrain the cars of Sergio Perez and Yuki Tsunoda were checked. In addition, nine cars were checked for oil consumption and oil samples were taken from the cars of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. "We will start doing this every race. We divide the car into about twenty important sections."

Of those twenty key sections, only a few will really be controlled down each race weekend. "Each weekend we will select two or three areas that we will check well." Tombazis does acknowledge that the random selection can cause debate. "We want to have the random aspect that a car can be checked at all possible times. Theoretically, it could be that the same car is going to be checked five times.”

"All teams will always have suspicions with their biggest competition. They will think that team X or Y are doing things and I am also sure that in some cases things have happened under our radar," Tombazis concluded.