Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s wish to keep Fernando Alonso in Formula 1 has opened a more practical discussion: whether the rules give Honda enough freedom to recover from its difficult start with Aston Martin.<\/p>\n
The FIA president spoke with Alonso and team owner Lawrence Stroll in Madrid, arguing that the two-time champion should not be driven into retirement by an uncompetitive car. Rival team principals have responded with qualified support for examining the development rules.<\/p>\n
The rules are in place to do what’s best for the sport, and you need adjustments from time to time, said Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. We want to have all the top constructors involved in the sport.<\/p>\n
The existing Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, generally known as ADUO, permits extra development for manufacturers whose engines fall behind the benchmark. Sky Sports reports that one possibility is to broaden the assessment beyond internal-combustion engine power, through discussions involving all five manufacturers.<\/p>\n
Red Bull principal Laurent Mekies said teams had already supported an earlier adjustment to help manufacturers further behind. He expects the shortcomings of the system to be discussed again.<\/p>\n
As much as we cannot agree all the time, as a sport we try to keep a fairly open look at the regulations, he said.<\/p>\n
That is support for a conversation, rather than an agreement on a particular concession. Any change would still have to emerge from the regulatory process.<\/p>\n
Honda’s Shintaro Orihara was more concerned with the engineering work.<\/p>\n
I don’t think he can give us any magic solutions, he said of Ben Sulayem. We’re simply focusing on our development plan and working hard to improve our product. That’s our plan right now.<\/p>\n
Aston Martin still wants Alonso to continue, with ambassador Pedro de la Rosa saying the team is giving him time to decide. Extra development freedom might improve the case for staying. It would not, by itself, add horsepower.<\/p>\n
The next meaningful development will be a defined proposal from the manufacturers and the FIA, followed by Honda demonstrating what it can make of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s wish to keep Fernando Alonso in Formula 1 has opened a more practical discussion: whether…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-894350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}