Parr responds to Domenicali comments

Adam Parr, Chief Executive Officer of the Williams team, has replied to comments made earlier by Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali. During the FIA's hearing for double diffusers in Paris on Tuesday, the Williams man allegedly referred to a feeling that the Italian team has won titles in recent years with illegal cars.

As the issue of using a (now legal) double diffuser was talked about by the seven teams present on Tuesday, Parr reportedly mentioned that Ferrari – by using barge boards with multiple layers – was doing so against regulations on their way to winning championships in recent times.

"I think that there has been a very fundamental misunderstanding of what happened in the court on Tuesday," Parr said on practice day in Shanghai. "Part of the case presented against us related to what we call as the use of multiple vertical transitions; essentially, you have to have a reference plane, which is like the plank, and 50mm above that you have the step planes. One of the key issues in the case (for double diffusers) was, when do you have to have a transition between those two?

"Essentially, you have to have a vertical transition between the two when the step plane is visible directly above the periphery of the reference plane. Where you don't, it is explicit that you don't have to have one, so one of the key issues in the case was that, if you don't have to have one at certain points, then by definition you can have many transitions.

"Ferrari's case was that you could only have one or, at best, only one on each side," Parr continued. "The problem that they had was that, for many years, cars have had multiple vertical transitions because at the front – where they have turning vanes or bargeboards – they have had a slot in that transition that creates more than one (transition).

"To be absolutely clear, it was never our case that their cars were illegal; it was, if anything, their case so we rejected that as being quite wrong. I want to be absolutely clear, on the record, that we have never said and we do not believe that for one minute that either the Ferrari cars, or Renault cars, or anyone else's cars for the last eight years, have been illegal."