Formula One team Mercedes pleaded for leniency from the governing body of motorsport on Thursday, saying it deserves no more than minor punishment for taking part in tyre-testing that rival Formula One teams claimed was unfair.
Lawyers for Mercedes, tyre manufacturer Pirelli and the International Automobile Federation (FIA) rifled through thick binders of evidence at a six-hour disciplinary tribunal hearing in Paris.
A thrust of the FIA’s argument was that the 1,000km of private testing with Pirelli in May in Barcelona offered an advantage to Mercedes that other teams didn’t get. F1 bans the use of current-season cars for track tests.
In response, Mercedes portrayed itself as having done a service to the whole of F1 in helping Pirelli make its tyres safer.
The tyre manufacturer, for its part, outright rejected the FIA’s case.
Immediately at stake was whether Mercedes and Pirelli would be sanctioned.
A longer-term worry for F1 was whether the case risked antagonising two big players in the sport – the German auto manufacturer that also supplies engines to other F1 teams and Pirelli, which supplies all of the tyres for motorsport’s premier series.
“Pirelli cannot accept and will not accept that its image and the quality of its products and its credibility be tarnished because of a case which is not admissible and which is unfounded,” lawyer Dominique Dumas, speaking for the manufacturer, told the panel of four judges and a hearing president.
For the FIA, lawyer Mark Howard said: “By testing the Mercedes car for three days, the 2013 car, with the current drivers and the current engineers, Mercedes may be said to have obtained an unfair advantage.”
Howard noted that Mercedes has suffered with the wear and failures of tyres this season.
Red Bull and Ferrari protested about the test after it happened.
Mercedes lawyer Paul Harris insisted the German team got no sporting advantage, not least because they didn’t know what tyres Pirelli had put on their cars.
He argued it was purely and simply a Pirelli test: “They did it all, they were in charge of it all.”
The hearing president, Edwin Glasgow, promised the FIA tribunal’s decision by Friday.
