From this weekend's Singapore Grand Prix, the FIA has got tougher on the design of front and rear wings in a bid to stop teams from playing games with flexible parts.
As first revealed by Autosport, the FIA has demanded to see all design drawings of wings ahead of the Marina Bay race to check they comply and has outlawed specific wing ideas that it believes contravene the rules.
This includes wing elements that move or rotate in relation to the bodywork they are fixed to, the use of elastomeric (rubber) fillets that can help permit localised deflection, plus designs that use soft trailing edges to aid flexing.
The FIA has long faced a battle to stay on top of the teams' flexi-wing antics, but its single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis has revealed how it was pushed to respond after discovering the lengths some teams were going to get around the rules.
In an exclusive interview with Autosport's Italian site, Tombazis has explained the thinking behind the new tough stance over flexi-wings.
"In the F1 regulations, we have many flexibility criteria: there are loads that we apply and a certain deflection is allowed," he said.
"There are static tests that we do to check, and it is obvious that these tests are never perfect because the direction of the [test] load you apply is always a bit different from the load that is on the track when it experiences genuine aerodynamic force.
"There may be differences and, for this reason, in the regulations, there are some general and conceptual specifications that, in essence, prohibit mechanisms.
"For example, one could draw a wing that, when applying the forces of the FIA test, is fixed but when applying any other load, it could be more flexible. For this reason, we have been clarifying for years that mechanisms are not legal and we have written several clarifications on what we consider a mechanism."
Source: Autosport