Just found this out… Remember that Perez retired early for no apparent reason!? (He was out of fuel).
Well it appears that he was only part filled with fuel, so that he could hamper Lewis once he’d stopped for tyres (which he did very well if you can recall!). So while not strictly illegal, you could argue that it wasn’t in the “spirit” of him trying to win the GP..
Hi James,
That is just plain wrong!
All teams have to let the FIA know how much fuel they have put in the car for the race. All cars are weighed before the race on the FIA weighbridge. The cars are in parc ferme and the teas cannot do anything to them as an FIA scrutineer is there to check what happens and inform to the stewards.
There is no way that PER could have been racing with 3/4 of a tank of fuel, lap as fast as he did during the race (he was much faster than BOT and everyone else apart from Lewis or VER) use the high power engine modes to keep Lewis behind for many laps and then get to 4 laps from the end.
All RBR could have done to make the car lighter later in the race is burn more fuel. They would do that by getting the driver to select the higher power modes. Which would have helped a bit to keep Lewis behind in the middle of the race. But the bigger factor in keeping Lewis behind would have been energy harvesting, targeted energy use and PER race craft in knowing where to put the car and when. Far more significant and difficult than just selecting the highest power engine mode which they can only use for a certain amount of time before the engine starts to lose performance.