The dismal entertainment of Formula One's latest technical row will continue for some time yet, after a meeting of the teams at Silverstone on Sunday morning failed to yield a unanimous agreement on the future path of the rules.
The teams called the meeting after the FIA offered them the chance to drop the ban on off-throttle blown diffusers on Saturday. The governing body said that the ban could be dropped for the rest of the year if the teams reached unanimous agreement on the issue.But according to reports from Silverstone, no such agreement was reached, and the debate over the future of the engine mapping will now continue on into the coming weeks.
Initial reports from yesterday evening suggested that it was Williams and Sauber who were still unconvinced by the need to drop the ban, but the Autosport website cited sources as claiming that it was actually Ferrari and Sauber who voted the plan down.
The revelation that the Italian team and one of their engine customers were the ones that blocked the decision to drop the ban will not come as much of a surprise.
After the early action at Silverstone, the first weekend where teams have had their mapping limited by the new ruling, the Italian team appears to have made the most significant performance gains.
Cosworth-powered teams, largely Williams, were also looking like benefitting from the ban, but Williams reportedly voted along with the rest of the teams.
The debate over the rules has overshadowed the Silverstone weekend so far, with Red Bull boss Christian Horner and McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh clashing in the Friday press conference.
Horner and Red Bull then reacted unhappily when the FIA chose to uphold concessions to the limits of the ban for Mercedes-powered teams, but not for Renault-powered squads such as themselves.
The rapidly worsening situation led to an emergency meeting of the Technical Working Group, where it was proposed that from the next race in Germany the rules could return to those in place for the European GP two weeks ago.
That saw teams allowed to run unrestricted mapping in the race, but forbidden from running a qualifying-spec map for Saturday.
Discussions will now likely continue on towards the next race of the championship, the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring.
Earlier on Sunday, Renault team boss Eric Boullier had, unsuccessfully as it turns out, called for the teams to come to a quick and decisive resolution to the whole mess.
"We have to fix this," Boullier was quoted as saying by Autosport, "It is not good to be seen again as a mini war in the paddock – and F1 does not need this wasted debate."
He added that the ban should be dropped, with the overall ban on blown diffusers for 2012 meaning that the technology has a limited lifespan anyway.
"Everyone accepted it, ran it, and it was reliable and safe," he pointed out, "We should freeze the rule until the end of the year as it was. That would be a fair compromise for everybody."
He added: "We are already in the middle of the season so I don't see many teams spending millions to develop onwards, especially for next year when it [blown diffusers] is banned."
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