Originally Posted by
rage2
There are hints that this was triggered by Ferrari whistleblowers. Ferrari “complied” because they didn’t tell FIA the whole story. Once they were approached by Ferrari staff, they did a full investigation and found the problems which may or may not be illegal, but at a minimum contravened the spirit of the rules. It’s kept between the 2 because Ferrari agreed to help catch others doing similar stuff, but didn’t want to reveal exactly what they did in tears of other teams trying to invest in that area.
Publicly, Ferrari has continuously denied cheating, but continue to reiterate that they are down on power this year because they redesigned their engine to improve reliability. Testing data has so far shown that Ferrari is definitely down on power, but other teams aren’t, which makes sense other teams weren’t privy to the power tricks that Ferrari was using.
Whatever the tricks were, it was clear that after the directives came pouring down from RBR clarifications, one of them hit the mark, and Ferrari was down by nearly 100hp and completely lost their competitiveness.
I’m sure we’ll know more in the upcoming weeks.