The FIA has ruled out conducting further tests on flexible front wings during the 2025 Formula 1 season.
Flexi front wings were a contentious subject throughout 2024 with Red Bull and Ferrari pointing the finger at Mercedes and McLaren earlier in the campaign.
The complainants believed their rivals were abusing the rules regarding the flexibility of the front wing, a notoriously hard area of the regulations to govern due to the many variables involved.
Still, nobody ran afoul of the FIA’s load-bearing tests, which included selected video monitoring after a technical directive was issued ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix.
Despite pressure from the likes of Christian Horner and Frederic Vasseur, the FIA saw no reason to suspect anyone of foul play, declaring “All front wings are currently compliant with the 2024 regulations” in a September statement.
Heading into the 2025 campaign, FIA Single Seater Director Nikolas Tombazis told Autosport that no further changes would be made to flexi front wing tests.
“Obviously, there was a lot of hoo-hah about it during the summer and early autumn,” he said.
“We had made it quite clear to teams since 2022 at least, that we were not planning to introduce any further tests on the front wing and we stuck to that.”
Why flexi front wings are hard to govern
As mentioned, flexi front wings are a notoriously hard area to govern and as a result, they have long been a source of conflict between teams fighting to steal a technical advantage.
The difficulty arises because each front wing acts differently to the next with aerodynamic loading differing at certain points of the wing.
The aforementioned video monitoring introduced at Spa was part of a mission to investigate matters further and Tombazis said F1’s governing body was happy with the results.
“We are pretty happy with what we’ve seen,” Tombazis said.
“I hasten to say that it’s not a question always of being happy or not.
“It’s also a question of whether you feel that a meaningful test can be made.
“One of the challenges in the front wing is that, compared to other parts of the car, the front wing loading is much more varied between cars in a given location and so on.
“So most tests relate to the load of a certain direction, certain position of application, certain magnitude must not produce a deformation.
“The most successful such tests imitate as much as possible what happens in real life with loads and, on the earlier wing for example, it’s reasonably successful.
“On the front wing, the variety between cars would make that quite difficult.”
With no further testing measures in place amid the constant difficulty to govern, expect flexi front wings to be a key battleground of the F1 development fight in 2025.
READ MORE – FIA makes updates to F1 Sporting, Technical, Financial and new Operational regulations
Discussion about this post