GETTY IMAGES, PIRELLI, DPPI
The Baku weekend began with a lot of talk about illegal ‘bendy wings’, further stoking the Mercedes/Red Bull rivalry – but it never amounted to much. How do you test legality when cars’ floors, front/rear wings, barge boards and such generate around 1.5 tons of downforce at 150mph and they can only test a fraction of it? People criticise the FIA, but it’s hard to police. The FIA test for a rear wing now allows a maximum deflection of 7mm at 50kg of load and there’s a new directive that will accept a 20% tolerance just for the first month of these new tests. In Baku, it ended up as a playground spat between Toto Wolff and Christian Horner. Not that interesting.