Lotus move on from ’DDRS’ protest

Lotus technical director James Allison confirmed his team accepts the ruling of the stewards in China regarding the legality of the Mercedes DRS.

Speaking in the Friday press conference Allison confirmed that his team will move on from the rejected protest and study whether or not to integrate a similar system into the Lotus E20. “[We will] get on with looking at what possibilities are open, having accept that this is a perfectly OK system to put on the car.”

Allison added that for technical departments in the era of resource restriction it isn’t a foregone conclusion that everyone will rush to adopt a system – rapidly become known as the Double DRS – similar to that used by Mercedes. “They’ll need to decide whether the… opportunity-cost of doing that system is higher than developing the things they had in mind otherwise – and that’s exactly the same choice we’ll face in our team.”

The Lotus technical director responded with equanimity when questioned about his level of disappointment with the stewards’ decision. “I have to say we got a very fair hearing yesterday. The stewards took a lot of time to listen to our arguments and what I hoped were very strong arguments didn’t prevail – but that’s the process and it’s fair enough, [we] just get on with it and accept that we were wrong in our earlier view.

“It’s been no secret that our team has had some disagreements with what we saw Mercedes to be running. We thought there were strong arguments against such a thing. That’s been rumbling along gently in the background, as everyone knows. We made what we hoped were strong arguments both to Mercedes and to the FIA but didn’t prevail and so with some regret we decided it was worth bringing it before the stewards to settle the matter one way or the other.”

The stewards’ decision echoes the view offered several times by race director and head of the FIA technical department Charlie Whiting.