Cheating doesn't impress me, any idiot can cheat, only the cleverer idiots get away with it
Reading the rules and finding loopholes is a much more difficult game to play but writing rules is the hardest game of all
I worked at Honda when they were banned from three F1 races for cheating, know what went on, know who was responsible and know who knew about it. Only takes a couple of bad eggs to spoil a good omelette
Also worked at Ferrari, they had a reputation of cheating but I found they played the straightest game with regards to the rules than any other F1 team I'd worked for. Their secret was how they approached the rules and more importantly the way in which they asked for clarifications to get the answer the team wanted
Over the years I've had F1 rule clarifications from other teams (thank you Williams
) stop me from doing what I was doing and I've also found ways to do the same to competitors (sorry McLaren and Mercedes
). On one occasion I had to redesign a part but my redesign improved performance (thanks again Redbull
) It's all part of the game of distracting another team away from adding performance to their car
Stuff I've designed which didn't break any rules has also caused new rules to be created to stop our team doing what we were doing. Most effective example being the qualifying only Benetton F1 car, The ultimate endorsement for getting it right!
I've also been on the other side of the fence too, this was harder, was writing the cockpit safety rules for the F1 inshore powerboat world championship. Did this in my spare time while helping McLaren beat Porsche at Le Mans and the GT world championship. Well, until they exploited the rule book better than we did and started to homologated race cars for the road along with Mercedes instead of the other way around as the rule book intended
More recently I helped break the F3 European Championship with Lance Stroll in 2016. We didn't cheat just exploited the rule book in every way we could think of. Basically we attacked a restrictive, homologated championship using a F1 approach, like taking a machine gun to a knife fight, the other drivers/teams didn't stand a chance
