Post here all non technical related topics about Formula One. This includes race results, discussions, testing analysis etc. TV coverage and other personal questions should be in Off topic chat.
Option 11- Launch Control, look at the 94 French GP start.
Option 12- 4 Wheel steering, just a rumor.
Option 13- Traction Control, what this thread is about.
There is also the "removing of fuel filter" from the fuel rig, see 94 German GP when Jos nearly was toast, and how Schu beat Senna out of the pits in Brazil.
An old Benetton mechanic is quoted as saying "the only thing that car didn't have was cruise control" !!!
Schu was also given a 3 race ban for ignoring a black flag at Silverstone 94.
Schu punts hill off at Adelaide 94 to win WDC.
Flavio, Schu and Byrne's were the ultimate cheat team in 1994.
Senna knew there was cheating going on and he wouldn't have had to push the dog handling FW16 so hard to stay in front of Schu. When Newey made the changes Senna wanted from the start of testing which became the FW16B, the William's became the best car again and Hill should have won the WDC. So it makes you think that Senna would have easily won the WDC if not for his death as Ayrton was way better than Hill. Food for thought.
if they where using TC, they did a good job hiding it, and I dont see the relationship between TC and corner speed, I mean TC is for putting down the excess torque from the gearbox.
jos is saying that Michael's car was faster in the corners and that he cant keep up from braking late, but Michael is not the best of the late brakers he simply just driving around a corner a lot faster, late braking doesn't really suggest anything. I watched a few of the onboards its hard to pick up the sound of TC and there are a few instances when Michael had to counter steer the car, why would he do that if he had TC??
as this is F1 technical I would like to point out that Jos has no evidence of such. Him being a slower driver does not mean the other driver was cheating as ringo pointed out does this mean vettel is cheating since he is faster than webbe. I say the burden of proof is on Jos.
I Personally believe that the car did have it on there not sure if the drivers even knew of its existence.
I remember reading that they had some TC programmed from the year before, but never removed it from the code(which was thoroughlt checked) because it was complicated to remove it. They could never prove he used anything, not a Shumi fan but as they say.. you're innocent until proven guilty.
It's the same thing with the flexiwing and this and that, height contrl.. bla bla. It's F1, come on..
The banning of TC and active suspension came at the end of 1993.
The lateness of all this contributed to Williams hurriedly redesigning their FW16 resulting in a car with some rather evil handling characteristics and poor traction.
Benetton had designed their car for passive suspension but it had active dampers the year before and they were still not committed to a fully active car. The result they were more prepared to homologate a racing car with passive suspension that handled well and they did.
The Option 13 was found buried deep in the Ford Zetec-R 's ECU and it required a very specific set of actions to activate. It was a type of launch control not TC. Benetton admitted the software had never been deleted from the ECU because it was an integrated part of the engines mapping. The only way to disable it was to not fit the sensor suit required for to feedback to the ECU.
An active sensor suit was never found on the car over race weekends hence the FIA dropped the complaint. Benetton admitted to using it during tyre testing sessions away from GP weekends.
What made the B194 successful was excellent weight distribution, fairly good midrange power and torque from the Cosworth Ford Zetec RV-8 and a electronically adjustable differential that provided great traction. Those were not banned items.
The B194 was also lighter than the other cars on the grid and it carried a fair amount of balast weight to bring it up to regulation weight.
Jos said at the time the car was difficult to drive because it gave no warning of oversteer. Schumacher called the car perfectly balanced. The discrepancy suggests that the big difference lay in how the car was set up and what the driver could do to adjust the electronic diff.
