How the Racing Point F1 team got nicknamed ‘Tracing Point?’
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Racing Point F1 team was named Tracing Point after the team copied Mercedes
Lawrence Stroll rebranded the Force India Formula 1 team as Racing Point after acquiring the financially struggling outfit in 2018. After two ordinary seasons for the Silverstone-based team, the team needed to perform in the 2020 F1 season to ensure its new owners about its chances. But when the RP20 drove out of the pits during the first pre-season test in Barcelona, all eyes were on the car’s rather familiar seeming design, giving it the name Tracing Point.
Racing Point had done well to keep its new car under wraps till the last minute, after only presenting a livery unveil before testing. The reason for this became obvious for the whole paddock and the fans as the RP-20 looked like a Mercedes W10 replica even calling it the “Pink Mercedes”. The resemblance was uncanny, every bit of the car from the front wings to even the sidepod intakes, the Silverstone team’s car was a carbon copy of the 2019 title-winning Mercedes.
The whole endeavor was a supreme effort by Racing Point (now rebranded as Aston Martin), with the team advocating no breach of Intellectual Property Rights or the regulations of the sport, which Mercedes reciprocated. The team used pictures of the W10 by 3D cameras along with using Computational Fuel Dynamics or CFD to understand the low-rake concept of the Germans as opposed to the team’s conventional high-rake cars. The Mercedes engine and gearbox supply to Racing Point further complimented the harmony in replicating the design.
When Racing Point was fined for copying Mercedes albeit only for the brake ducts
Despite the blatant copying by Racing Point, no team was able to protest during the Pre-season tests because of a lack of proof to justify this to be illegal. Thus the RP-20 competed for the entire season and brought home the team’s first and only win in its history at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix after Sergio Perez brought home the car in P1 recovering from being last at the end of Lap 1. However, the Renault F1 team was at the forefront of bringing light to the FIA about this activity and lodging official protests regarding the similarity of the RP-20 brake ducts to the W10 on three different occasions.
Finally, after the British Grand Prix, the FIA upheld the protest, fining the Silverstone-based team €400,000 and deducting 15 of its points from the constructor’s championship, as a result of the design process for the rear brake ducts being a breach of the sporting regulations. This 15-point deduction would later become significant as Racing Point (195) lost out to 3rd place in the team’s championship to McLaren(202) by a gap of just 7 points. However, in 2021, the FIA changed the regulations to prevent something like this from happening in the future.
Thus looking back, the Tracing Point debacle exposed the lengths to which a team can go to be competitive over a decade after the SpyGate scandal in 2007. Although copying certain design elements of a rival is done commonly around the paddock, a situation like this was never seen in recent times. Of course, the RP-20 was legal, without any sketchy activities behind the scenes but it went against the spirit of Formula 1, the essence of innovation, the work done by the geniuses to get even a tenth faster than their rivals. All of it goes away when a team can simply copy the whole car of a championship-winning team.
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