F1’s Imitation Game — Clones, Copies and Counterfeits Throughout Formula 1 History
Formula 1 is relatively unique among modern motorsport categories in that it allows each participating team to design their own car, with the only restriction on design being the set of regulations or “Formula” which give the series its name.
While these regulations have steadily become stricter over F1’s nearly 75 history, the series has always enabled competing teams to take various approaches to making the fastest car possible, which makes Formula 1 as much an engineering challenge as it is a sport.
Formula 1 allowing car development has always come with a number of interesting consequences though.
Naturally, in an environment where teams have to design their car for themselves, one team will do a better job than everyone else and produce the fastest car in the field, with other teams having to look on in envy at their advantage, at least initially.
In such a scenario, the obvious option for the chasing teams is to try to copy the leading car. In some cases, this copying may be restricted to one or two key areas such as an aerodynamic component or a particular mechanical development.
Copying of this nature has been considered a key part of Formula 1 for decades and has been done by just about every team to have competed in the sport, with technologies which now play a key role in F1 such as ground effect aerodynamics, turbocharged engines and semi-automatic gearboxes all having started out as developments belonging to just one team until their rivals copied them.
Other times though, teams take mimicking a successful team to its logical conclusion by trying to copy their entire car in the hopes of also emulating their fortunes, or at least getting better results than would have been possible if they designed their own car entirely independently.
In contrast to the acceptance of copying when it comes to specific developments, large-scale copying of an entire car (or large parts of it) has continually been met with acrimony, with many considering it against the spirit of Formula 1 as an engineering competition.
Nevertheless, teams have repeatedly found ways to get around any attempts to regulate copying or information-sharing of this kind, which has led to debates over the provenance of cars being a consistent feature of the sport up to the present day.
In Formula 1’s early years copying was almost unheard of. The rules at the time allowed so-called “customer cars”, where a team could purchase chassis from another manufacturer in order to run in F1. This meant that the expenditure of trying to copy a top team’s equipment made little sense, as a privateer could simply buy a known competitive chassis for far less than it would cost to attempt to reverse engineer it.
However, as the professionalism of the sport and the complexity of its cars increased, the notion of copying another team’s work started to become more attractive. This was particularly true during the 1970s, where the rapid development in aerodynamics combined with the availability of the highly competitive Ford-Cosworth DFV engine to anyone who wanted one made chassis design more important than it had ever been before.
This state of affairs attracted many new teams to the sport, and the prospect of coming right out of the gate with a competitive chassis was particularly attractive to these new arrivals. Among these entries was Arrows, which entered Formula 1 in 1978 after being formed by a group of disgruntled former employees of the Shadow team which had been a feature on the F1 grid since 1973.
Among the defectors to the new Arrows team was designer Tony Southgate, who had just finished designing Shadow’s 1978 car — the DN9 — as an external consultant.
Southgate’s defection gave Arrows access to the DN9’s technical documents, and the team believed that since Southgate had merely been hired as a consultant by Shadow, the intellectual property rights to the design were his. The team therefore produced their own copy of the DN9, which they christened the FA1, for use in the 1978 season.
The car proved reasonably competitive, being an early adopter of the ground effect aerodynamic principles which would go on to revolutionise the sport, following their introduction by Lotus the previous season.
At the third race of the 1978 season, Arrows’ young driver Riccardo Patrese very nearly shocked the F1 world by taking the lead of the South African Grand Prix in his FA1 in both his and Arrows’ first full season in Formula 1. He would hold that lead until lap 63 out of 78 around the punishing high-altitude Kyalami circuit, before suddenly retiring with engine failure. While his drive went unrewarded, the FA1’s performance had put the F1 world at attention.
Patrese then turned more heads by claiming his first podium with a solid second place at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, behind only the infamous Brabham BT46B “fan car” of reigning world champion Niki Lauda.
The results also attracted attention that Arrows would rather not have had though — namely from Shadow Racing’s boss Don Nichols. He contended that the FA1 was a blatant copy of his team’s DN9 chassis, and that Tony Southgate had been mistaken in his assumption that he owned the rights to the design and was free to produce a copy of it.
There were no specific rules in Formula 1 at the time against cloning another team’s design, meaning that as far as the FIA were concerned there was no issue. However, Nichols was confident that the copying was so extensive that conventional intellectual property law would come into play. He therefore sought an injunction against Arrows in the London High Court, looking to stop them from using their FA1 chassis.
The move was a major blow for Arrows, who knew that they would almost certainly lose the case. However, the lengthy legal proceedings gave them a window of opportunity, and while the court case was still ongoing, Southgate and his design team got to work on designing a whole new car in anticipation of losing the lawsuit.
A mere 52 days later, two things were finished. One was the court case, which predictably came down firmly on the side of Nichols and Shadow, and ordered Arrows to stop using the FA1 chassis and to hand over all of the monocoques to Shadow Racing, just as the Arrows team had anticipated.
Arrows were ready though, because in those 52 days they had managed to design and build a whole new car, which they defiantly launched the day after the verdict from the court case was handed down. This new car was christened the A1, and allowed Arrows to see out the remainder of the 1978 season without missing a race.
While it was probably a slight step back in terms of competitiveness compared to the FA1, it still enabled Patrese to claim a strong fourth-place finish at the final round of the season, and went on serving the team in upgraded form into the following 1979 campaign. Shadow meanwhile had its best days behind it despite winning the case with the team scoring its last points at the final race of the 1979 season courtesy of Elio de Angelis in the very same DN9 chassis the team had gone to court for, before bowing out of F1 in 1980.
Arrows had shown the benefit of copying a rival design for all to see, even if it required navigating something of a legal quagmire, and it was perhaps partly with their showing in mind that a major rule change hit Formula 1 during the early 1980s.
In 1981 it was announced that going forward, all teams in Formula 1 would be required to own exclusive intellectual property rights to the chassis that they competed with. Effectively this was a ban on customer cars, with teams being required to either design their own chassis or pay an external firm to do it for them in a deal which gave the team the rights to the design and nobody else.
The move came about during the professionalisation of the sport in the early 1980s, with lucrative television rights deals being signed and money pouring in. However, the Arrows furore of 1978 and a similar situation the following year where Lotus decried both Williams’ FW07 and Tyrrell’s 009 as clones of their groundbreaking Type 79 chassis seemed likely to have had an impact on the decision too.
The move was not a ban on copying, but it did seem to cause teams to be a bit more careful when it came to releasing unabashed clones of other cars, as well as effectively killing true privateer entries overnight.
The following years did see some teams test the waters when it came to similarity to rival machines, such as in late 1982 when Arrows launched their A5 chassis, which bore a striking resemblance to Williams’ championship winning FW08 of the same year. For the most part though teams were surprisingly well behaved throughout the 1980s, with the makeup of the grid being highly varied for most of the decade until designs inevitably converged as the 1990s drew near.
The new decade saw arguments over copying reignite in dramatic fashion though.
The most notable example of this came in 1995, when French Ligier team unveiled their new JS41 chassis. Observers were quick to note that the new Ligier bore a striking resemblance to the B195 chassis which had been launched by winners of the 1994 world driver’s championship Benetton.
F1 had seen cosmetically similar cars before, but with the Benetton and Ligier there was an additional factor which made the resemblance seem more suspicious. At the time, Ligier was part owned by a certain Flavio Briatore, after he’d bought a stake in the team at the end of the 1994 season. The fact that Briatore was simultaneously the team principal at Benetton was not lost on anyone.
It seemed to many in the paddock that Briatore was taking advantage of his involvement in two different teams by sharing resources between them. He used Ligier’s resources to bolster Benetton’s competitiveness by transferring usage of Renault’s top-of-the-line V10 engine from the struggling French team to the Enstone-based Benetton squad, replacing the Ford V8 which had been seen as a weak link in Benetton’s package by many observers.
Meanwhile in return, it seemed that he had allowed Ligier’s designers access to Benetton’s technical documents when it came to designing their chassis — a belief which was further bolstered when Benetton’s chief engineer Frank Dernie was transferred over to Ligier as its new technical director.
The situation attracted widespread suspicion in the F1 paddock, but the true situation when it came to ownership of Ligier was kept closely guarded, with a deliberately confusing web of firms holding stakes in the team alongside Briatore and Briton Tom Walkinshaw, who was at the helm when it came to operations during 1995.
While the relationship between Benetton and Ligier was undeniably sketchy, it was therefore almost impossible to definitively prove, and as the rules introduced in 1981 only covered instances where a firm had provably designed a chassis for two different teams, the FIA was powerless to do anything.
Ligier and Briatore therefore went unpunished for their sneaky bit of bit of mimicry, while Ligier enjoyed one of its most competitive seasons in some time thanks to its new chassis. The JS41 was also developed further the following season into a form which allowed the team to claim its famous final victory at Monaco in the hands of Olivier Panis.
The Benetton-Ligier affair seemed to set a precedent that associated teams could freely share information on car design with each other, so long as they didn’t provably have the same staff doing the design work. As F1 entered the 2000s, this kind of copying therefore steadily gained traction, particularly with the growing prevalence of “junior” or B-teams which was already taking place.
One excellent example of this kind of copying is Sauber’s relationship with Ferrari in 2004. Sauber had been a customer of Ferrari when it came to engines since 1997, albeit with the engines being rebadged with the name of the team’s sponsor Petronas, which gave the team a close association with Maranello.
Ferrari had never been shy about leveraging the sway that this relationship afforded them, such as in 1997 when they instructed Sauber to block Michael Schumacher’s title rival Jacques Villeneuve in qualifying for the deciding race at Jerez.
For 2004 though they looked to expand this relationship by giving Sauber’s design team access to technical documents about Ferrari’s title-winning 2003 car, and also giving the team access to its brand-new engine as opposed to the year-old units they had previously been provided with. With these factors to their advantage, Sauber’s design team duly unveiled their new C23 chassis.
To their credit, Sauber did make appreciable alterations compared to the 2003 Ferrari, but this was not enough to prevent controversy in the paddock. Much like with Ligier in 1995, Sauber’s partnership helped them to a strong season, with their Ferrari look-alike proving a regular points finisher in the hands of Giancarlo Fisichella and Felipe Massa.
While some figures within the F1 paddock condemned the C23 as a carbon-copy of a Ferrari, the FIA were very much not among them, and suggestions of potential punishment came to nothing. The somewhat vague precedent which had been set by the Ligier affair therefore seemed set in stone, and other teams began looking to take advantage by strengthening their relationships with larger teams with greater resources.
The mid to late 2000s was already seeing a rise in so-called “junior” teams on the grid with the likes of Red Bull buying Minardi to form Toro Rosso, and Honda setting up Super Aguri. It was a no-brainer for these B-teams to take as much as they could from their parent outfits, and the precedent set by Ligier and Sauber left them confident enough to start openly using chassis derived from those used by the senior team with which they were associated — albeit with the added insurance of having the chassis for both teams constructed by a third party department within their respective companies.
The FIA responded to the increasing prevalence of this kind of sharing and copying by issuing an edict which shocked many in the paddock. It was announced in late 2006 that from the 2008 season onwards full-on customer cars would be allowed in Formula 1 once again after their ban all the way back in 1981.
On the one hand this seemed a canny move. Allowing proper customer cars again would bring clarity back to the rules and nip the kind of skirting of the regulations that was being done at the time in the bud by allowing the junior teams to simply purchase their parent team’s chassis without having to use loopholes. This was also seen as a good way to reduce the cost of F1 at a time when discussion about the spiralling budgets seen in the series was reaching its peak.
The announcement therefore garnered support among some of the existing F1 teams, and particularly with outfits looking to enter F1, with the prospective Prodrive team run by former British American Racing team principal Dave Richards notably announcing their intention to enter the category from 2008 onwards using customer McLaren chassis.
Support was far from unanimous though, with the response from other teams bordering on nuclear. As they saw it, the FIA had finally firmly committed themselves to one side of what had been an ongoing debate up to that point, and F1’s existing powers saw that as a call to action to prevent changes which they saw as being against the spirit of Formula 1.
Several teams banded together to file an arbitration case aimed at challenging the planned rule change. What ensued was a major political struggle between the FIA and teams with continual back-and-forth over whether the rule allowing true customer cars would go through.
The situation was only worsened by the emergence of a separate scandal around the same time which also centred on teams making use of rivals’ technical data — the famed “Spygate” affair.
In 2007 it emerged that the prominent McLaren and Renault teams were in possession of confidential technical data belonging to rival teams, which concerned the construction of their cars. In the case of McLaren, they were found to be in possession of Ferrari design documents, while Renault somewhat ironically were caught with McLaren information.
The scandal caused huge fallout which had a direct impact on the incredibly tight 2007 championship battle, with McLaren in particular being met with huge fines and disqualification from the 2007 constructor’s championship.
While it could not be definitively proved that either McLaren or Renault had used the documents that they possessed to inform the design of their own car, it nevertheless seemed to suggest that F1 was in dire need of setting firm boundaries when it came to how much outside information could be used when designing a Formula 1 car, and whether teams needed to design their car themselves at all.
2007 eventually became 2008, and clarity on both copying and customer cars had still yet to be achieved, much to the frustration of new teams such as Prodrive who were hoping to enter in the wake of the new rules but were now left high-and-dry due to the lack of a clear verdict.
The likes of Toro Rosso meanwhile continued running what were in essence Red Bull chassis for 2008, in a season which memorably saw Sebastian Vettel pilot his Red Bull-derived Toro Rosso STR3 to victory at Monza.
To those opposed to teams sharing car designs, this only strengthened their resolve, and it also seemed to trigger something of a re-evaluation from the FIA.
It was announced to the surprise of some towards the end of 2008 that from 2010 onwards sharing of designs like was being done by Red Bull and Toro Rosso would no longer be allowed, with teams having to go it alone by constructing certain key elements of the car entirely unassisted.
While there was naturally some pushback from the teams which had benefitted from being able to run the same chassis as their parent team, the FIA taking a firm line seemed necessary in the wake of the continual scandals which had shaken the sport in the late 2000s, and most eventually acquiesced to the changes.
The first half of the 2010s therefore saw some level of clarity return to the regulations arguably for the first time since the 1980s, with even the Toro Rosso team which had been at the centre of the debate in the late 2000s proving plenty capable of designing their own car.
However, while the specific loopholes which Toro Rosso and Super Aguri had used to run identical cars to what their parent teams had run were closed, the FIA had still not expressly prohibited large-scale copying.
It was therefore only a matter of time before controversy emerged once again, and for many the poster child of this new wave of acrimony over potential copying was the Haas team which arrived in F1 in 2016.
When Haas joined the sport, they brought with them an operational model which was in many ways new. Their team was built around a close working relationship with Ferrari, and as part of that deal they purchased a great number of components for their car from Maranello.
This was completely legal, with the very same rules introduced in 2010 that designated certain “listed parts” which teams must design themselves also stipulating an array of components which teams were free to purchase from other constructors. Haas were however the first team to take this to its logical extreme by purchasing the absolute maximum number of non-listed parts from Ferrari.
The team also outsourced manufacturing of its chassis to Italian firm Dallara, which was also perfectly legal because Haas did the actual design work of the chassis themselves, and therefore retained the intellectual property rights to it just as had been stipulated all the way back in 1981.
The thought process was that by outsourcing as much of the work on the car as was allowed, Haas would be able to punch well above their weight on a relatively slender budget, which quickly proved to be true when the team scored points on debut, and placed a strong 5th in the constructor’s championship by the team’s third season in 2018.
That did not stop controversy arising once again though, with many noting as years went by that Haas’ cars often closely resembled the previous year’s Ferrari beyond just the areas where they purchased components from Maranello.
Such complaints only grew louder whenever Haas had notable success such as in 2018, which went some way toward demonstrating the level of opposition that still existed within F1 to the concept of outsourcing and copying. Haas had complied with every facet of the regulations as they existed at the time, but even the suggestion of large-scale copying was enough to arouse suspicion from many teams, and even some fans and pundits.
It took another scandal for the rules to change once again though, but to the surprise of some it wasn’t Haas at the centre of the furore. Instead, it was the Racing Point team owned by billionaire Lawrence Stroll which set off arguments the moment they unveiled their 2020 “RP20” chassis.
Racing Point came into existence in 2018 after Stroll purchased the cash-strapped Force India team after it went into liquidation. Force India had a reputation for doing remarkably well with relatively little budget, but with the new ownership and injection of cash that came with it, they were looking to take things to the next level.
Racing Point’s technical team therefore decided to produce a wholesale copy of the previous year’s double title-winning Mercedes W10 chassis, using photographs and advanced computer analysis of the Mercedes car to produce what they readily admitted was a copy of the previous season’s dominant machine.
Almost as soon as the car was unveiled though, rival teams grew suspicious that the resemblance between the RP20 and the Mercedes was more than skin-deep. While copying a car based on photos was legal at the time, some teams suspected that Racing Point had access to design documents of listed parts in order to copy them, which was very much not allowed.
Renault were the first team to launch a formal protest, which they filed after just the second race of the season. Further protests followed at round 3 and round 4, and it soon emerged that their suspicion was not unwarranted.
FIA analysis of the Racing Point and the previous year’s Mercedes determined that the rear brake ducts of the RP20 were identical to those of the 2019 Mercedes.
The significance of this was twofold. Firstly, the rear brake ducts were one of the listed parts which teams must design themselves according to the regulations. Secondly, the brake ducts are a part of the car which is not visible from the outside, meaning it was impossible for Racing Point to have copied the design from photographs. Instead, it emerged that Racing Point had been given access to the Mercedes brake duct designs the year prior when they were not counted as a listed part, but had not opted to use them until 2020, by which time their status had changed to being a part that must be designed in-house.
As a result, Racing Point were fined €400,000 and docked 15 points in the championship — a punishment which several in the paddock opined was too light. More pertinently though, the scandal led to further rule changes aimed at curtailing the kind of copying which Racing Point had undertaken.
“Reverse engineering” of listed parts through photographs and computer analysis was specifically outlawed, while several more categories of part beyond just the “listed” parts which were seen from 2010 onwards were introduced, and definitions of these parts were tightened up to give less grey area for teams to potentially exploit.
Nevertheless, arguments about the level of independence of teams during the design process have persisted even after this tightening of the rules. Just this year, Red Bull’s sister team has made headlines after moving back towards a closer relationship with its parent outfit by mirroring Haas’ model of buying the maximum number of components from Red Bull that are allowed in the rules.
It is clear that some figures in F1 see almost any amount of copying or collaboration between F1 teams as being against the spirit of the sport. However, as this article has illustrated, examples of teams doing just that go back a very long way into the sport’s history, and competitors have continually adapted in order to slip past any regulations that were put up to prevent such similar cars from being allowed –just as is the case for almost any technical regulation that F1 teams are faced with.
F1 is about innovation, and the idea of copying another team’s car does seem to fly counter to that. At the same time though, teams coming up with creative new ways to be able to clone rival teams’ developments, or even to copy their whole car through complex photographic and computational analysis seems pretty innovative to me, and it’s hard to deny that it’s part of the fabric of F1 when this cat-and-mouse game has been going on for nearly half a century…
