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Lewis Hamilton's suggestion to prevent teams from starting work on next season's car has been dismissed by FIA president Mohammad Ben Sulayem.
During the race weekend in Australia, Lewis revealed that one of the major bottlenecks faced by Mercedes was the fact that Red Bull could start work on the 2024 F1 challenger much quicker than any other team.
As a result, while Lewis Hamilton could hope to catch Max Verstappen and Red Bull this season, the Austrian team will take advantage in the 2024 F1 season anyway.
Lewis has suggested that there needs to be a regulation in place that would prevent teams from starting work on next year's car too early. The FIA president has dismissed Lewis Hamilton's suggestion, however, as he claimed that something like this would be unfair to Red Bull.
He told The Associated Press:
“If we go about what’s good and bad we’ll open the door. I mean, was it good for Mercedes? Fair enough? It is (Verstappen’s) time, it’s Red Bull’s time. What do we do and punish the good kid? No, let’s go and make the other teams good. Nobody’s stopping the other teams from being better. We cannot punish people for being better, for trying harder. That is unfair.”
F1 president also not in favor of Lewis Hamilton's suggestion
Stefano Domenicali was also not in favor of introducing a regulation that targets one team over the other. When it was recently put to him that F1 could do something that would slow Red Bull down, Domenicali was against it.
As quoted by PlanetF1, he said:
“It’s not correct because we cannot be seen as part of manipulation. This is not correct, and this is not fair. I am not imagining at all this kind of approach. I think that the gap is between one team and the others. We need to consider that they [Red Bull] did an incredible job."
He added:
"It is true that the gap seems to be big, but we need to be prudent, because we know in life things can change very quickly. The others are very, very close. If you look at the gaps to the other teams, I think that they did an incredible job, [and it] needs to be rewarded."
Lewis Hamilton's suggestion that next year's car development also needs to be regulated never got too many takers either way. It will be interesting to see if the Mercedes driver has a comment after facing a snub from the FIA president as well.
