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Adrian Newey open to F1 windtunnel ban

Formula 1 could now ban windtunnels outright if it wanted regulations that restricted resources but rewarded creativity, reckons Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey.

The designer behind many of the most successful F1 cars of the last three decades said he accepts the need for the championship to cut costs and become more of a level playing field.

While opposing any suggestion of reviving the budget cap concept, Newey believes there is plenty more scope for rules that restrict teams' resources.

"My personal view is that [F1] should be a battle of drivers coupled with the creativeness of engineers," he told Sky Sports F1.

"That means it shouldn't purely be battle of resources, which is what it has tended to become on the engineers' side.

"It would be entirely possible to come up with a set of regulations that would reward creativity more than simply the number of people [in a team].

"A budget cap is very difficult to implement but you could come up with resource restrictions, certainly on the chassis side, most of them aerodynamic driven.

"You could restrict research resources much more heavily than we do, perhaps scrap windtunnels altogether, be much more restricted on the CFD runs.

"If you restrict the resources there wouldn't be [any] point having so many engineers because they couldn't feed it through the funnel."

Newey is also sceptical about the value of F1's hybrid engine format.

He believes there has been little successful technology transfer to road machinery, despite this being a key aim of the regulations introduced in 2014.

Underlining that his view was a "personal opinion, which I'm sure will be a very controversial one", Newey predicted that manufacturers' proclamations of road relevance would prove hollow.

"All this blurb which a few manufacturers would like to put out, that it improves their road car product... if that is the case then those manufacturers in the future, five years at the most, should be demonstrably ahead of their rivals in the automotive sector," Newey said.

"Somehow I suspect that will not be the case, which tends to say it is marketing blurb."

Zdroj: autosport.com