this is a story of one of f1's biggest cheating allegations and I spoke with someone at the team to find out what actually happened after Aon Senna was hit by mkah Hainan at the start of the 1994 Pacific Grand Prix he ended up in the gravel with the broken front wheel and out of the race Senna then watched the rest of the race from the side of the circuit but as he was watching he noticed something very unusual about two of the cars the beneton then driven by Mich schumacker and yoser stappen were making an
unusual sound now normally that might mean an imminent engine failure but on this occasion Senna thought that what he was hearing was the soft cut of traction control something that was illegal in Formula 1 in 1994 he could hear a misfire from the engine especially coming out of Corners he went back to his team and said have you boys been listening then then the allegation started that's William to it he was head of aerodynamics at the Benetton team in 1994 and I interviewed him to understand what was going on in the team at the time
whether the allegations of cheating with traction and launch control were true and what was really going on underneath the beneton engine cover to really understand the 1994 beniton Scandal we need to look back at the state of Formula 1 just a year earlier the 1993 F1 seasons are arguably the most technologically advanced cars the sport had ever seen teams like Williams ran cars equipped with all sorts of driver a such as active suspension traction control and even ABS the active suspension huge impact active suspension allowed us to have effectively softer setups that gave us great
mechanical grip it allowed the cars to adjust their suspension settings in real time optimizing the car's ride height for better handling on different parts of the track this meant that the car could be set up to provide maximum downforce and grip in the corners while minimizing drag on the straights while it was very quick the software and Hardware was difficult to refine and it didn't always work perfectly remember this was 1993 and computers still look like this I've actually seen a 93 Ferrari without the Bodywork on it and it was covered in so much wiring
and about 12 floppy drives anyway 1990s software and F1 didn't always mix that well and the active suspension caused some Monumental crashes like this one where hard Berger's Ferrari decided to turn itself left when exiting the pit Lane into the barrier and out of the race the Ferrari came in for a pit stop came out of the pits put his foot down and he was in low drag setup because the computer said you are on the straight and the car just suddenly turned left and crashed into the barrier and that was caused by not having
a full control and understanding of of what mode you're selecting and there were more like this one where Alex sard's active suspension glitched and sent him into the wall at radon and here at Spar on Friday we had a sobering reminder that motor racing is indeed dangerous and if you follow me on Instagram you'll know that I was fortunate enough to drive that 93 Lotus just a few weeks ago and luckily it had been put back together in 93 Benetton had a manual active suspension system that was triggered by the driver this picked up the
nose and dropped the rear of the car to minimize drag on the Straits when we first gave it to say Michael schumacker for testing um uh he complained that when he came off the button it was too slow to go back to the high down Force setting for braking um so we had to speed it up a little bit active suspension was simply too hard to manage and it meant the cars were getting too quick for the circuits and the crazy technology didn't stop there either Williams even tried out a CVT or constantly variable transmission
meaning that the car had no normal gears and the engine stayed at the same RPM no matter what the speed was the CVT was never used in a race but traction control and abs made the cars remarkably stable and potentially too easy to drive and unfortunately they removed a chunk of the raw skill required to drive a Formula 1 car quickly but then came 1994 and the FIA were concerned about the role of computers in driving Formula 1 One cars and increasing speeds and so decided to ban many of these driver AIDS including traction control
and active suspension they wanted to bring back the driver's skill as more of a differentiator and also make the sports safer and this is something that I think was correct formula 1 should be difficult for the drivers and you should be able to see the difference between the good and the great because the driver AIDS did make a big difference traction control meant the driver could just slam his foot on the accelerator whenever he wanted a little bit of power and the computer would sort it out anyway in '94 that was all gone and with
any big rule change there was an opportunity for a change in the order of the grid the 93 world champion was Alan Prost in the Williams second was Center in the McLaren and third was Hill also in a Williams the Benetton were fourth and fifth with schumacker and petrac respectively it was a decent year but they were hoping for much more in 1994 and luckily the beniton felt fast from the first test Schumer would always be the one who'd step forward and ask I want to do the first test I I I want to see
what the car's like and in 93 when he stepped into the car it was like yeah it's a bit better but when he stepped into the 94 car it was who Boys you've made a big step here so onto the first race at inter lagus and schumacker was right the beniton was quick and he wins it by an entire lap after his only Contender Senna span out and this is a race in which the famous incident between brundle vapen Irvine and Bernard happens so the car was quick so quick in fact that at the next
race the Pacific Grand Prix Sena started to talk about the Benetton possibly having traction control even though that was now illegal so what were Benetton doing well before we get into that I need to tell you about today's sponsor ground news the media we encounter often misses the technical precision and the depth that we're after misinformation can spread like wildfire on social media making it tough to separate the real insights from the noise ground news created by a former NASA engineer gathers and organizes global news so you can compare how different sources cover the same
story revealing biases ownership and factuality for example let's take a look at this article on Carla science joining Williams there are over 50 articles covering this story using the biases distribution chart we can see that 57% of the sources reporting came from the left we can also see the total factuality and ownership of the reporting Outlets ground news makes it easy to compare headlines to see how this bias might affect framing look at this headline from the left to the right one headline suggests a straight swap while the other dives into the Strategic shift and
implications for science's future it's all about understanding the full picture not just the surface story if you're all about Precision ground news is a game changer it's like having Telemetry for your news for 40% off and limited access to all features using the Vantage plan check out the link in the description or the QR code on screen now back to the video what exactly were Benetton up to well we need to understand the previous tract Control Systems from 1993 now of course they differed from Team to team with the Williams FW 15c probably being the
most advanced but but the basic principles of how they work is all the same and you can hear the differences between the systems first just listen to this car that doesn't have traction control then listen to this Ferrari that seems to have a fairly refined [Music] system you can hear the engine being cut a little especially in the traction Zone but just listen to this car that has a much less refined system [Music] so how does it work first the system relies on wheel speed sensors on all four wheels it starts by taking the average
speed of the front two wheels which aren't driven this average gives a baseline for the car's actual speed then it Compares this Baseline to the average speed of the rear wheels so if the rear wheels are spinning faster than the front ones it means there is wheel spin and the car's losing grip the difference in wheel speeds then gets sent to the ECU the car's computer and the ecu's job is to adjust the engine's power output to bring the rear wheel speed back in line with the fronts to reduce power and therefore regain traction the
ECU can use several methods one is by retarding the ignition timing which means delaying the spark in the cylinders this reduces power and so helps the tires regain grip another method is cutting off the fuel supply to certain cylinders which momentarily drops the power and the most direct method is to complete cut the spark in the cylinders which immediately reduces the engine power and in some systems such as the Williams the ECU could also apply the brakes to individual Wheels to control wheel spin even further for the driver this all happens in a fraction of
a second smoothing out power delivery so they can stay flat on the throttle with less risk of going off so beniton wanted to keep any advantage that they could they wanted to keep tra control but it was banned so the headline says traction control is banned so intelligent human beings will always look for a way around any regulation in Formula 1 there is no spirits of technical regulations you find a cever workaround we have a workaround that is 100% defensible but we're not going to explain it even to the r makers because if we explain
it to the r makers they are human beings someone's going to talk in the pub and the News will get out so the ruem makers banned the use of the sensus that Ena the traction control control to function that meant that the wheel speed sensors the gear position sensors and software that could manage power delivery based on Wheel speeds or acceleration rates were all gone the car couldn't compare wheel speeds front to rear and the car simply didn't know if it had wheel spin but Benetton managed to find a loophole so how the hell do
you work out how to limit the acceleration of the engine well the first thing you do is you say okay we limit the acceleration of the engine so that only in first GE we control the rate of acceleration so that it doesn't wheel spin now the important thing to note here is that it was legal to limit the power of the engine in order to protect it just like a normal rev limiter and what William is saying here is that they would add the rev limiter at the point where they expected the car to get
wheel spin in only first gear so it wasn't traction control in the traditional sense which is a system that's Dynamic and can adapt depending on the driver's right foot or the A Ware of the tires this was more of a static system they set it up expecting wheel spin at a certain power and then limited the RPM to that but having some form of traction control just in first gear wasn't too much of an advantage so as Engineers do they push things further then you could also say why don't we look at where around the
lap we get the maximum benefit then the next thing you think where are we going to get the biggest race time gain so the team decided to tune the system for use in second gear typically an F1 car will only use first off the line and most hairpins and tight Corners would be second gear so there would be much more opportunity for gaining time and this was better but the team still thought the system could be improved and one of the key issues was that the system didn't know what gear it was in so if
the engineers could figure this out they could use a form of traction control in all the gears and gain a load more time well they came up with a genius solution as an F1 car moves through the air air is rammed into the airbox and there's a sensor in there that tells the engine what the pressure is so it can change things like the mixture so as the car moves faster the pressure in the airbox increases and the team could use this information to understand how fast the car was going and therefore which gear it
was in all completely legal so you check the atmospheric conditions at a start you what happens as the car goes through the gears you correct for the air pressure so now the system knew which gear it was in and it could be tuned for the best Traction in all gears but the system did have its flaws it had to be set up at the beginning of every race and it was sensitive to a number of conditions from the state of the tires to whether it raining or not as it only worked on a fixed condition
you would tend to set it up for when the tires are at their best and then you get a reduced benefit as the tires age because if your lap time is limited when the tires are at their best it's very frustrating for a driver knowing there's extra grip there the car when you go for a Full Throttle coming out of a corner the tail of the car is not sliding out it's sitting there Rock Solid where you you got traction so it wasn't perfect but it was good enough for Benetton to use throughout the entire
season and gain some kind of Advantage until eventually the other teams worked out what they were doing and did it themselves and so the cycle continues but the allegation of cheating didn't stop with traction control by the way sales open this Sunday the 18th of August for our luxury wallet that has a piece of F1 carbon fiber embedded in it there are only 279 available so join the wait list to get all the details of exactly when this incredible piece goes on sale after senna's death in the May of 1994 there was an investigation where
R makers found code in beniton software called launch control this system could automate the St part of a race controlling the clutch the gear shift and the engine speed fully automatically to a predetermined pattern this was technically a driver Aid and so 100% illegal so I asked Willam the question but he didn't know anything about that yeah I don't know anything about that that would have been something they tested on a Friday bennetton claimed that the launch control feature was only used during testing and that it required recompilation of the code to activate which they
said was not done during the race and some bits of code were useful during free practice where teams were allowed to have extra sensors in the car then they would have or maybe should have removed the code for the race but it was feasible that some lines of code would get left in anyway and just not used because removing the code could cause some bugs again remember this was 1994 when F1 games look like this I love that one so much so the FAA fan that bennington's launch control could be activated using a laptop connected
to the car's systems without the need for recompilation it could be toggled in the ECU as a secret option as it had at first only 10 items in its menu list and once it was chosen it would be displayed on screen as only option 13 but even though they had the software there was no way to prove they used it during the races and as the issue was precisely that Benetton couldn't be proven guilty the software's existence by itself wasn't illegal thanks to a technical loophole still Benetton was F $100,000 and that wasn't the end
of it for Benetton you'll have likely seen this incredible image before it's yoser stappen at the German Grand Prix Bennett and were found to have removed a filter from their refueling rig something that was against the rules in 1994 refueling had been reintroduced to Formula 1 allowing cars to run with a smaller and light a fuel tank the FAA contracted a company that made aircraft ref fueling rigs to supply the equipment so the team teams didn't need to develop their own despite this Benetton still had big issues with their refueling rig their main problem was
getting the refueling rig to connect properly with the car often the connection wasn't fully engaged and so no fuel would flow and it seems that Benetton issues stemmed from manufacturing tolerances every part is manufactured with a tolerance it can be a micron or it can be 0. one of a m or even a millimeter but the AG part has a limitation and we were unlucky that we got parts that were very tightly toleranced the tolerances worked out that the the outer was small and the inner was large and further test by Benetton showed that a
small rubber tire marble could disrupt the Seal of the nozzle something that was feasible during a race and this would potentially allow fuel to spray out we found if we put a little marble of rubble in two or three different places around the refueling nozzle on the car part a little rubber marble would prevent the seal but allow the center power to open and fuel to flow although Benetton did remove the filter to try and speed up the refueling Benetton test showed almost no difference in the speed and no reason why the removed filter could
cause a fire so they argued the issue was related to the rubber marble not the filter we were not to blame we absolutely knew we were not to blame however to avoid severe penalties and disqualification team principal Flavio briori plad guilty and and the team would find $500,000 for removing the filter it was an expensive year on penalties flavio's job in at that time was to minimize the cost of running a Formula 1 team to the Benetton family was employed by them and if possible even make it make a profit for the family there were
even more controversies surrounding beniton in 1994 alongside other tragedies in Formula 1 the year was incredibly volatile marked by allegations technical disputes and the Heart breing loss of Aon Senna and Roland renberger despite the chaos Michael schumacker and Benetton triumphed clinching both the drivers and Constructors World Championships so thank you very much to William he has some fascinating articles on his LinkedIn profile about his time in F1 so go and check him out there now imagine a race where all F1 drivers were in the same car well that's already happened and Senna won you can
watch that video just up here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time
