FIA looking for F1 speed reduction

With speeds increasing on the racetrack again this year, despite the FIA’s attempts to slow them down, President for the sports governing body, Max Mosley, has announced that they are looking at use new powers to slow the cars down.

"We are looking very carefully at possibly using powers that we have under the Concorde Agreement to reduce the performance of the cars," he told Reuters.

With times at the new Bahrain circuit expected to be in the 1:33’s, Jenson Button’s record lap time was in t he low 1:29’s. This followed on from Michael Schumacher’s blistering qualifying time in Sepang that was four seconds faster than the 2003 record.

"If we conclude that the cars are too fast, then we can give notice to the teams under the Concorde Agreement which requires the technical working group to come up with proposals for slowing the cars," Mosley added. "And they have to do that within a limited time. If they don't come up with the proposals, we have the right to impose something."

According to Mosley, a lot of the added speed is coming from the tyres and the fact that the cars can actually take corners a lot faster than they used to…

"I think a lot of it is down to tyres and varying fuel loads, track temperatures and all sorts of factors," said Mosley. "It may be that we're worrying unnecessarily but it's all starting to look as though maybe we have got to do something. A lot of the teams have given us very accurate data. We can compare speeds, particularly in the high speed corners, with a year ago and that enables us to do it quite accurately."

If Mosley has his way, things will change before the 2004 season comes to a close.