Getting around the Rules in Formula One

The days of trying a blatant cheat and hoping to get away with it are largely gone from Formula One. The rule book is too tight, the checks too thorough, and the penalties too draconian for that to work. The more common approach now is to get past the intent of the rules but not their wording. A great example of a team doing this involved the regulation banning traction control (which, by the way, was legally re-introduced in Spain 2001). With traction control, power delivered to the wheels is reduced when the electronics sense the onset of wheelspin. That’s what the rule banned. But what about changing the torque curve of the engine when the electronics predicted wheelspin was about to occur? The actual difference in the timing between predicting the spin and sensing it was perhaps one-hundredth of a second. But under the accepted terms, one system was traction control and therefore banned; the other one wasn’t and was allowed.
The traction control ban is set to reappear for 2004. This time, as well as more sophisticated policing devices and a different wording of the regulation, there is to be a psychological war on cheating the rule too! If anyone can supply information to the FIA that leads to a successful discovery of a transgression, the informant receives $1 million from the FIA and his identity is kept a secret. In this way, a mechanic or engineer could grass on his own team but still go on working there!