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Many Thanks to Blinkist for the offer - now onto more FIA Shenanigans in our latest video.
After the rigmarole of the Tracing Point Pink Mercedes scandal this year and a whole hullabaloo
about exactly what constitutes “original design” these days, the FIA calmed the ruckus
down by agreeing to implement more concrete rules limiting the copycatting of parts between
teams. The FIA has now formalised these in the updated
technical regulations for 2021 and while their original concerns were around ‘wholesale
copying of another car’s ideas from top to bottom’, the regulations don’t cover
this at all and do instead focus on individual parts.
This isn’t actually a bad thing, as I’ll get on to in a bit.
So, the updates come via Article 22.3.3 of the Technical Regulations, for all those of
you reading along at home where they explain how you are and are not allowed to bring another
team’s amazing ideas into your own design. Firstly, the regulations note that, of course
you can be inspired by another team’s design concepts. I’ll go into this later but if,
say, Renault turn up with a front wing endplates that look like Pikachu’s tail and you go,
‘ahhhh that’s a brilliant idea, why didn’t I think of that? I’m going to hit the design
desk and have a crack at my own version.’ - that would be allowed. You’re inspired,
you understand the reasons for the concept, you design your own version using your engineering
nous. That’s absolutely fine and a big part of
F1. That’s why F1 cars have a lot of the same ideas - because someone dreamed it up
once and everyone else went, ‘oh man, I’m ‘aving that’
But, the regulations continue and make clear that firstly any information about a competitor’s
design must come from actual public events and tests.
So this means no hacking into the Ferrari computer to nick their envied power unit designs.
And no faxing off your blueprints to Woking either. The rules work both ways - you can’t
take intellectual property from a competitor and you can’t send intellectual property
TO a competitor. Furthermore, no competitor may design its
listed parts (that’s just any component a team HAS to design itself) via ‘reverse
engineering’. Now ‘reverse engineering’ is a very broad
term. And in many cases it can include “looking at a thing and copying it”. You see a good
idea, you think “having that”. But that’s not what the FIA is going for here, so they
specifically define ‘reverse engineering’ It lists four points that attempt to cover
what essentially amounts to digitally scanning in competitors work into 3D models by any
means. This attempts to distinguish ‘eyeballing it’ from ‘having an accurate model of
another component.’ Now Racing Point happened legally to have
in their possession the CAD models of several Mercedes parts, including the rear brake ducts
that they were ultimately busted for using illegally. There’s a video on the fine details
of that you can see on this channel. But the Racing Point saga began from the point
of their RP20 looking remarkably like Mercedes’ W10 from 2019. And this began a conversation
about whether it was cool to just outright copy another team’s entire design philosophy
from tip to tail. Wasn’t it a bit against the spirit of the rules of individual design?
Now again, I stress, these rules don’t actually address that at all. Racing Point wouldn’t
have broken any of the rules that have been introduced because they broke a completely
different rule in the sporting regulations, not the technical ones. But these regulations
are supposed to ‘head off’ the concern that hardcore reverse engineering could occur
in the future. Now how would this so-called 3D photography,
surface scanning or clever software actually work?
Well there are numerous ways to do this, and often techniques are combined to create the
most accurate 3D model possible. So say you wanted to create an accurate 3D
model of, I don’t know, a tomato. You could do some laser scanning on it. You
could point a camera on it and run some linear laser light over it from various different
angles. And if you know your positions of the camera and the tomato, you can work out
from the way the laser line is distorted over the object, exactly how the object is shaped.
You can also do this with something called ‘structured light scanning’ whereby you
essentially project an image over your tomato. The image is normally something easy to measure
like a series of regular stripes, dots or squares. Then when you project it over the
tomato, software can work out the shape of the surface from the way the pattern is distorted.
You can also just fire laser light at is, by knowing the position of the laser and the
camera, measure the way the laser light reflects off the tomato and by knowing the speed of
light and measuring the timing and quality of the reflected laser light, build up an
accurate picture of the shape of the surface of the tomato.
You can even do it without any fancy lasers or light project at all. You can create a
pretty accurate 3D model with just a bunch of normal photos.
In fact, this is how your brain works out 3D to a certain extent, except your brain
does it on a smaller scale. Stereograms exploit how your brain computes
3D space. You’ll probably know these as “magic eye pictures”. Here’s an example.
The idea is to relax your focus so parts of the image start to overlap and, if you can
do it, your brain will “lock on” to the point where it spots a 3D image happening.
This is a shark. Now that’s all a bit abstract but you can
just do it with two photographs. These two images of a delightful horse and
cart were taken at the same time, but an eye’s width apart. So essentially mimicking the
positions of your left and right eye. If you can cross your eyes so the left image
overlaps the right one, you should instead see one image in 3D. Marvellous. Feel free
to pause if you need a sec to make it work. I’m moving on though.
So, as your left eye and right eye are seeing the world from slightly different angles,
they see slightly different images. Objects closer to your eyes move across your vision
more dramatically than objects further away. If you hold up a finger and close each eye
alternately you’ll spot your finger jumping back and forth.
From seeing how much different parts of an image change between the two eyes, your brain
can work out how close they are and assign them depth values.
And so can a computer. But a computer can used loads of images, not
just the two. As long as you know WHERE the camera is compared to the object its scanning
you can build up a lot of data about the 3D surface its observing through multiple images.
This is called Photogrammetry. Google Earth does exactly this. It overlays
photographs taken from aircrafts looking down at the Earth and works out how the images
change from different perspectives to work out the contours of landscapes in three dimensions.
You can see this thoroughly explained in a great video linked in the card above
And you can even just use machines that touch the tomato and run mechanical arms over its
surface. As the machine knows where the arms are in 3D space, it can ‘feel’ the surface
of the tomato and log a 3D digital model. All of this information, however you gather
it, gets logged as a points cloud - essentially a 3D scatter graph. Hundreds of points represent
the surface with x, y, z coordinates forming a 3D shape, polygonal mesh or surface that
can be further translated into a CAD model. And once you’re there, you’re in business
and can start building. Now the FIA has the right to 3D scan anything
it wants if it suspects foul play. It can go into Aston Martin and scan in its brake
ducts and compare them to Mercedes brake ducts and if they match - there’ll be some explaining
to do. They can also double check that the brake
ducts (or whatever) that are on the car are identical to the CAD models supplied to the
FIA by the team. The teams, of course, supply a lot of their CAD models as part of the scrutineering
process, so being able to barge in and do a quick scan check makes it easier for the
FIA to police the designs. So this all makes a lot of sense. The FIA
are explicitly outlawing copying via scanning, essentially. They are saying, if you want
to copy Renault’s front wing endplate, or whatever, you have to eyeball it.
And for the most part, this will absolutely work, just as it always has. In F1, you see
a cool thing and you copy it. But you can’t just copy something and bung it on your car.
You have to understand how it works and properly integrate it into your car. That’s using
engineering and understanding. Racing Point couldn’t actually make their
Mercedes clone work at first. They took a huge step backwards with their early versions.
It took them a LOT of work, educated work, to engineer their own pink Mercedes that actually
had pace and developability. They did the work.
I guess it’s similar to saying ‘if you want to enter a Mona Lisa into an art contest,
you’re not allowed to scan and print a copy. You have to grab your paint brush and make
your own version’. It wouldn’t be a very exciting entry, but at least you showed some
artistic skill. And I guess… the real question I’m still
left asking is HOW the FIA are going to know shenanigans didn’t go on.
If Mercedes chose to be sneaky and scan the Alfa Romeo for some reason (maybe the Alfas
have really great diffusers or something) how could the FIA prove that was the case?
Especially with photogrammetry. Teams hire photographers all the time to take
loads of pictures of rivals cars. That’s why the bouncers often come out to block a
clear view of the goods. If Mercedes said to their photographer - go
and get me as many different angles of the Alfa’s diffuser as you can and then they
build a 3D model from those photographs and created a CAD model from that… how would
the FIA know that’s what happened? Mercedes could just say someone from Aero
popped into a meeting one day and said “Hello fellow engineers! I’ve got this great idea
for a diffuser”. As long as the diffuser isn’t *exactly* the same, I’m not sure
how the FIA could prove its dark origins. Nonetheless, this step has pleased the teams
so civil war is abated for a few more months before they start arguing about the next thing.
Which is probably over letting Red Bull have their engine freeze.