McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has raised a conflict of interest he feels now needs addressing in the wake of the Alpine wobbly wing saga during the Canadian Grand Prix.
Lando Norris initially brought the part to the attention of all concerned when he reported the wing over the team radio as he followed Esteban Ocon over the closing laps of the race at Montréal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
A rear-facing camera on Ocon’s A523 appeared to show the looseness of the wing worsening, leading Norris to suggest its apparent fragility was “pretty dangerous”, and that if it fell off and hit another car “it’s going to be extremely bad”.
The FIA, however, opted not to act, seemingly following their own guidelines issued last season after the United States GP in which Fernando Alonso completed the event for Alpine despite racing with a loose mirror that eventually broke off.
Stella has revealed it is now up to the teams to make a judgment call on the safety of their own cars, which he feels is a topic that needs addressing. Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer naturally stated the wing was safe and would not have fallen.
“Race direction now leaves the duty of care to the teams,” said Stella. “It’s the team’s call to say ‘We should retire the car’ or ‘We should leave the car out’.
“It’s a tricky one because the teams, when they are in a competition, have a conflict of interest in terms of the safety of everyone involved and maximising their result.
“This is a debate that deserves more time and I’m sure at the next Sporting Advisory Committee it will be raised again.
“Because Lando said a couple of times that it is not nice when you follow a car with a wobbling rear wing and it may hit you, and kind of nothing happens.”
As an engineer, Stella felt the wobbliness of the wing was “extreme”, and was “not operating within design”.
He added: “You need to know the construction of your car. You need to assess what’s wrong, and then you need to wonder ‘Have I put out my car and my components in this condition?’. Very likely, the answer is ‘No, we didn’t’.
“So it comes down to a sense of responsibility which every team can interpret in a different way.
“When Lando was following Ocon, he said that it got worse and worse, and this was the concerning element.
“Sometimes we’ve seen already the Alpine rear-wing wobbles, you might have noticed as well.
“But then when Lando reported it, it started to look like there’s something broken on that wing.
“It can’t wobble like that through normal behaviour. It wouldn’t be accepted by the FIA. It wouldn’t be accepted by the team themselves.”
Stella stated he would wait to hear the assessment from FIA technical delegate Jo Bauer on whether the wing operated with “acceptable behaviour or not”.
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