The technical regulations Formula 1 introduced last year are too limiting and haven’t been beneficial for the championship, Aston Martin’s technical director Dan Fallows believes.
F1 overhauled its rules in 2022, forcing teams to design completely new cars, in the hope of improving the quality of racing. However Fallows says the result has been a set of rules which are much more restrictive than before and more complicated for the FIA to enforce.
“The regulations we have at the moment have been introduced with the absolute best of intentions and with a lot of very good research behind why we’ve introduced them,” Fallows told an official F1 podcast.
“But we now have a set of regulations that are by far the most complicated in the history of F1 in terms of the length of the regulations – both sporting and technical regulations – and by far the most complicated to actually police, so the FIA’s job is exponentially harder than it has been over the last few years.
“And I just don’t think that’s really been beneficial.”
The restrictiveness of the rules means teams will inevitably produce increasingly similar designs as they try to improve their performance, said Fallows.
“I think we have certainly, as I say, with the best intentions tried to introduce regulations to improve the show. But what we’ve effectively ended up with is a set of regulations that make you design the car a certain way.
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“So the reason that a lot of the cars look the same or look very, very similar is that the regulations effectively make you design a car like that. There’s an incredibly complicated set of regulations for the front wing, for example, that are essentially making you design it in a very particular shape.
“Now we have these regulations, not only are the complicated, but they can only be regulated or only be judged by the FIA by referring to CAD as well. So part of the regulations are literally how you constructed the surfaces that go into the shape that you’ve got. Whereas in the past we had regulation boxes and as long as the car comply to those you could do what you like.”
Asked whether he felt the rules offer enough scope for innovation Fallows said: “Honestly, no, I don’t.”
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