Mercedes demand HUGE change to F1 regulations

Mercedes technical director James Allison agrees with F1 bosses that cars need to be lighter and has called for regulation changes.

Cars currently have a base weight of 798kg, which is 200kg more than in 2008 when batteries and kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) was introduced.

The advent of the life-saving halo systems as well as bigger tyres have also added to the weight of the cars over the years.

Some drivers, such as George Russell, have complained that cars are too weighty and are counter-intuitively becoming less and less safe due to the crash potential of heavy cars.

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Allison concurs with those sentiments, telling the media: "I strongly agree with Stefano (Domenicali, Formula 1 CEO), and he's not alone in thinking that this sort of inexorable upward trend in weight is something that has to be arrested and then reversed.

"Year-on-year, [the cars] were getting heavier. It isn't super trivial to get the weight moving in the other direction. It is particularly tricky to dream up technical rules that are going to make the car much lighter."

Allison believes the regulations should be changed in order to leave more decisions to teams on what their cars should and shouldn't have in them.

"The way to make it lighter is to lower the weight limit and make it our problem," he added. "If cars are over the limit, then it forces us all to make some fairly difficult decisions about what we put in our cars and what we don't".

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