McLaren are waiting on the final FIA ruling as to whether or not Mercedes super-DRS is legal, before developing their own version of the system.
The teams technical director Paddy Lowe says they’re currently ‘stuck’ in a state of limbo, whereby developing the system for it to only be outlawed would be a considerable waste of resources, but not doing so could cost them potential gains.
The system is currently deemed legal and is only being used by its pioneers, Mercedes. However, a few outfits namely Red Bull and Lotus, want the system banned. A final decision is expected this weekend in China.
“At this point, what we really need to have is clarity,” Lowe said during a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes phone-in. “I would say actually it would have been better if we could have had clarity before now. We’ll see what events in China bring us in that sense.
“Until we’ve got clarity, it’s difficult for us to make a huge amount of effort in that direction. That’s really where we’re stuck at the moment.”
Lowe says McLaren don’t stand on either side of the fence as to whether it’s legal or not, but did admit that it isn’t within the spirit of the regulations regarding DRS.
“We don’t have a strong view one way or the other,” he added. “If you look at the system on the Mercedes, you could get into arguments there about whether it’s in the spirit of what was intended with DRS. Well, it definitely wasn’t. DRS was created as a rear-wing flap, it wasn’t anything else.
“[But] there’s no such thing as the spirit of the rules. It’s a term often used, but the rulebook is text that has a meaning – you decide what that means and how you work to it. There’s no headline regulation that says ‘above all else, you’ve got to remain within the spirit of what was intended.”
