FIA initiates plans to outlaw copied designs in 2021

The FIA will amend the 2021 technical regulations to significantly limit the scope of design replication in F1 in order to prevent teams from following Racing Point's copycat approach to car design.

The FIA upheld on Friday Renault's protest against Racing Point's brake ducts, insisting the design of the elements located at the rear of the team's RP20 contravened the rules on listed parts, or parts that must be fully designed in-house by a team.

Following today's ruling, Formula 1 and its governing body have announced that further measures will be written into the 2021 rules to more clearly prevent copying or cloning among teams.

"We do plan with very short notice to introduce some amendments to the 2021 sporting regulations that will prevent this becoming the norm," said Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA's head of single-seater matters.

"This will prevent teams from using extensive parts of photos to copy whole portions of other cars in the way that Racing Point has done.

"We will still accept individual components to be copied in local areas, but we don't want the whole car to be fundamentally a copy of another car."

• FIA fines Racing Point €400,000, docks points following Renault protest

Tombazis insisted the future measures would not force Racing Point to scrap its Mercedes-inspired design.

"We will be providing guidance about that, as well as the ruling and the wording itself over the next weeks," he said.

"We want to give a very strong message to teams that they should not be starting doing that now for next year's car, because that will simply not be allowed.

"It will be of course accepted that team's, whatever they have now in the 2019/2020 cars, they are not supposed to delete it or start afresh because that is never how it works."

Tombazis acknowledged the widespread practice of copying in F1 but said the degree to which Racing Point had duplicated Mercedes 2019 W10 was simply unacceptable.

"Copying has been taking place in Formula 1 for a long time," he said.

"People take photos and sometimes reverse engineer them and make similar concepts. In some areas, [they are] even identical concepts or closely identical as other teams. We do not think that this can stop in the future completely.

"But what we do think is that Racing Point took this to another level. They clearly decided to apply this philosophy for the whole car.

By doing what I would call a paradigm shift: they actually use a disruption in the process that has been the norm of designing a Formula 1 car in the last 40 years.

"So one should not penalize them for that because they were original in deciding to follow this approach. However, we do not think this is what F1 should become.

"We don't want next year to have eight or 10 Mercedes or copies of Mercedes on the grid where the main skill becomes how you do this process. We don't want this to become the normal Formula 1."

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