Peculiar technical rules

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McMrocks
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Joined: 14 Apr 2012, 17:58

Peculiar technical rules

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FiA's rule book for the F1 championship became heavily sophisticated over the last decades. But there are other racing series which don't feature such an nitpicking rule book. This thread is about finding some peculiar, obvious or just lax regulations in any motorsport series.

We have all heard of the infamous "no visible smoke" rule for the WEC Prototypes. The rule stated that the car's combustion engines should not cause any visible smoke. It was rumoured that Audi's Diesel cars drove with a different engine setting in the night, as smoke is invisible during that time.
This rule belongs to the category of "lax". I believe this rule has been removed from the rules over the last couple of years.

In the rule book for the FiA Formula E we can find this amazing piece (inspired by the f1technical article about 2019 F1 brake ducts):
Front air ducts for the sole purpose of cooling the front brakes
and not producing downforce shall not protrude beyond:
- an extrusion of the periphery of the rim 25 mm following the
wheel centre line in the inboard direction;
- and the inner face of the brake disc in the outboard
direction.
A lax regulation like this "sole produce of cooling the brakes.... not producing downforce" only works in a single spec- series.

Looking at FIM's regulation for the Motocross World Championship we can find this piece, which to be honest, is more a engineering advice than a actual rule:
33.04
Handlebar clamps must be very carefully radiused and engineered so as to avoid
fracture points in the bar.
Surely the hint at radiuses to avoid tension spikes would have helped the engineers of the Eurofighter Typhoon. It isn't specified how big such radiuses need to be. But well, they need to be "carefully...engineered".

So i hope the community here is able to find even more pieces of regulatory ingenuity. I am sure in some less sophisticated racing series there will be a lot of lax rules and i hope there will be really hilarious ones aswell.

Cheers,

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