Ferrari would need until ‘mid-season’ to copy DAS

Jamie Woodhouse
Charles Leclerc Ferrari

Charles Leclerc described his Ferrari as "extremely hard to drive" in practice for the British Grand Prix

Ferrari principal Mattia Binotto says that if the team wanted to introduce their own Dual Axis Steering system, it wouldn’t be until mid-season.

Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas both have the ability to push and pull their steering wheel to control whether the tyres on the W11 are toed in or out as they navigate through straights and corners.

As soon as footage of this DAS system was shown on TV, thanks to the full coverage available of pre-season testing this year, the paddock was sent into a frenzy as teams and reporters scrambled to find out exactly what it was.

Mercedes insists that DAS is legal and safe, but the FIA has confirmed that it will be banned from 2021.

This hasn’t stopped suggestions though that some teams may look to design their own system, but Binotto batted away the idea that Ferrari could have one ready for the season-opener next month in Australia – instead it wouldn’t arrive until mid-season, if they decide to bother copying DAS at all.

“I have no idea if it would be worthwhile or not, but it’s certainly longer than that,” he is quoted by Racefans.net.

“It’s an entire concept design, producing homologation, just to be safe. So if it is, I think it can be like mid-season not earlier.

“I think we need to first obviously understand how it works and understand what would be the performance benefit.

“I don’t think that at the moment we’ve got any idea. But we will look into it, no doubt, and [whether] developing applications is worthwhile or not.”

One team who aren’t looking into a DAS system of their own are McLaren according to their principal Andreas Seidl.

“First of all, hats off to Mercedes for this kind of invention. It’s great to see in Formula 1. And also for all the publicity they created for Mercedes by that,” he said.

“I don’t know details about the system so I think it would be wrong to even judge it, what it brings and so on. For our side, because the next question is if we try to copy it, I think for us as a team where we are right now, there are other areas we have to focus on where we can make bigger steps than trying to put a system from Mercedes.”

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