FIA steps in after 'trick' by Mercedes and Red Bull discovered in qualifying

It was Ferrari who alerted the FIA to the workaround, which both Mercedes and Red Bull had been exploiting. By briefly bypassing the mandated power reduction, teams were able to maintain maximum output along the final straight approaching the finish line.

It’s important to note that the trick wasn’t illegal; rather, it fell into a grey area in the regulations. Teams could avoid reducing energy deployment if the MGU-K was disabled for technical reasons, but the rules failed to clearly define what constituted a genuine ‘emergency situation'.

While this workaround had no practical application in race conditions, due to the requirement that the MGU-K remain inactive for 60 seconds afterwards, it proved useful in qualifying, where that limitation carried little consequence.

Incidentally, it should be noted that the advantage that could be gained was very minimal, possibly only within the hundredths of a second. GPblog understands that the marginal return prompted Mercedes to stop using it as early as Japan. Reports that it only became definitively clear to the competition in Suzuka that Mercedes was using this trick are therefore incorrect.

GPblog understands that the FIA ​​has informed the teams in writing that the 'continuous offset' function in the SECU software is intended exclusively for its original purpose, namely, emergency situations, and not as a systematic means to improve performance.

The federation reportedly indicated that this function was initially included in the regulations for cases where teams needed to protect the MGU-K against potential malfunctions.

However, because it became apparent that more and more teams were using the function for performance enhancement, with potentially undesirable consequences, the FIA ​​decided to inform the teams that they are not allowed to use this function systematically during qualifying rounds.

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