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Red Bull’s Alex Albon says other F1 teams would have found out about Mercedes’ DAS system, even if it wasn’t made public.
Mercedes’ innovative Dual Axis Steering system was revealed on the live broadcast of day 2 of pre-season testing and immediately left the teams and the public scratching their heads.
Alex Albon says that even if the onboard cameras didn’t catch the pulling of the steering wheel, the teams would have found out about this innovation.
“Maybe we wouldn’t have seen it in so early in testing,” said Albon.
“It’s quite nice to have all these on-boards and all that, but at the same time, teams nowadays, they have photographers everywhere.
“Maybe we’d have known about it and you guys wouldn’t have.
Albon added that his team was debating how drivers would respond to the pulling and pushing of the steering wheel, required to operate the system.
“We were speaking about it with the team – just how would that feel just as a driver; moving the steering wheel must feel very strange.
“But that’s what testing is about and that’s what simulators are about as well. So, I’m sure they’ve tried it before.
“But it is sneaky. To be honest, I don’t really know what it’s being used for.
“I was driving the whole day [when the system was first revealed]. So I just came back without a debrief and suddenly there was this thing on the screen all the time – replays showing the steering.”
Albon was asked if there is any concern at Red Bull about not having the system themselves.
“No – we’re focused on ourselves at the minute.
“Of course maybe that’s a future thing but for the moment we’ve just been doing our runs, getting the laps in, getting miles in.
“There were a couple of things [to sort out], obviously like minor things, as always, tuning our car, and then we’ll worry about it when we come to Melbourne.”
Source: autosport.com
