Scott Mitchell-Malm

It's not just the people that will be listening to this podcast as well.

It's inside the paddock.

It has prompted a significant amount of confusion, to say the least, and I suspect it will be very interesting to hear what people have to say off the record, much less on the record, in Spain about it.

Basically, what it boils down to is that there's...

there's the engine, which is, in this case, the internal combustion engine, the V6, and then there's the total engine, the power unit, which combines the engine and the electric side.

And with the ADUO calculations, the way that the FIA puts together this performance index to benchmark the various engines, it only judges the V6.

And

There's been fears from the very start that manufacturers would work out ways that they can game this.

And also kind of the criteria for benchmarking it is unknown.

And that's partly because the FIA was wary of...

manufacturers finding ways to basically sandbag with their engines and kind of manipulate the outcome.

So we don't really know exactly what the parameters are that they've got into, and therefore it's hard to judge how much

different variables will impact what the FIA is looking at.

I am aware of at least one manufacturer that thinks just purely, even if the FIA just simply goes about a V6 assessment, the basic things that you would need to analyse within the V6

will be impacted by choices that you've made for your car design and the kind of integration of the power unit into the chassis.

And therefore, you are potentially going to try and get yourself an upgrade on the engine side because you have basically deliberately compromised your engine to get an initial chassis benefit.

and put yourself in a position to upgrade the pu sort of further down the line so it is all murky partly out of design but also partly out of weird sort of f1 paranoia and and usual debate because we're waiting as we record this to get the the the final kind of revelation of everything but i don't think that's going to be particularly illuminating anyway because they're not going to say who's far like how far off everybody is and what the calculations are

It makes me think back to Australia and when we were looking at kind of how the different engine manufacturers were performing against the, you know, the big narrative at the time being obviously the energy demands of Albert Park and how much everybody was having to recharge, where they were deploying, what that was happening down the straits.

And we were all quite surprised at how strong the Red Bull engine cars were.

at that race and it was as we'd seen in the narrative through pre-season testing it was testament to the job that rebel powertrains had done and this was an amazing start and all of this and there was a bit of a suggestion at the time and this continued into the the china weekend where we were wondering if