The halo cockpit safety system – set to be a mandatory requirement for future Formula 1 cars starting in 2017 – is in the final stages of being tested by the FIA this week and by all accounts will look similar to the version tested by Ferrari earlier this year.
Laurent Mekies, General Manager Research for the FIA’s Global Institute, told ESPN, “There is still a lot of work to make it happen. We still have testing going on, we still have meetings with the teams coming up and there is the implication for the chassis designs.”
“There are deadlines we cannot move forever and therefore it is still on a high-pace development right now. We have the final tests [this week] and we will meet with the teams again early in July and look at the results.
“After that there are implications for chassis design and you will be eating into the time where some teams start to freeze their chassis design, so we don’t want to run into that.”
Mekies said the final shape of Halo was similar to the concept tested by Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel in March, “From a general shape point of view it is close, but the geometry is a bit different because it’s a result of the work we have been doing between Barcelona and now. But that is the general concept.”
The halo is set to be a mandatory component in 2017, with the Red Bull developed aeroscreen concept on the back-burner for now.
“I think the freezing of the aeroscreen is only as far as 2017 is concerned,” Mekies explained. “Because you have to meet a deadline and if we kept on with two projects we would have struggled to do so.”
“At some stage you have to estimate whether or not you are going to be able to make it and it was estimated that we couldn’t make it with the aeroscreen, which is why we froze that part until we get the Halo on the right path for 2017.”
“But once this is done, I’m sure everybody, Red Bull and the teams, will continue with the great contributions they have made. Nothing is dead forever, it is only a pure project planning choice in order to make one of the two solutions to the grid for 2017,” added the FIA official,
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