Red Bull’s Christian Horner says Formula 1 must find an alternative solution to monitoring the fuel flow during races, as the present system is giving some teams a significant advantage.
Red Bull chose to ignore the data coming from the FIA fitted sensor in Australia as it deemed the data inaccurate and says it would have had a detrimental affect on their pace.
Whilst the margin of error is small, Horner said the performance gained or lost from even the smallest of change is enough to determine which cars might win a race and which won’t.
“We have got to find a better way – especially when the margins are so fine and the knock-on in performance is so significant,” he told Autosport on Wednesday.
“Depending on the calibration of your sensor, it will determine your competitiveness, which is completely wrong,” he explained.
The teams may fit their own sensors according to the rules, as long as they’ve been approved by the FIA. Horner says this could lead to some spending vast amounts of money until they find the most beneficial sensor.
“Teams will end up buying hundreds of sensors, as some manufacturers already have, to try to pick the best,” he added.
“It ends up like the tricks in go-karting, where you go through carburettors to try to find the best ones. I don’t think that is an acceptable way of moving forward.”
The 40-year-old believes the sport must find a better way going forward if it’s to avoid controversial decisions, such as the one to disqualify Daniel Ricciardo from second place – a decision which the team have appealed.
“We know that some cars’ fuel sensors didn’t work at all in Melbourne – so we need to find a more robust and reliable way of having confidence in the FIA measurements.
“On an aircraft they have three sensors and they believe the mean between those sensors,” he explained.
“If one shows a drift then the other two count. I think it is very immature technology in F1 and we are trying to rely on a sensor that has proved to be problematic.”
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