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F1 Drivers Complain about 2010 Mirrors

This weekend’s Australian Grand Prix has been full of controversial moments, among which we’d reported Michael Schumacher’s public frustration about Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso blocking him in qualifying. During the last practice session on Saturday, Pedro de la Rosa was also fined by the FIA for impending another driver.

However, it seems that those incidents did not happen because of the drivers’ will to slow down their rivals, but because the visibility in the new mirrors fitted to the 2010 single-seaters is rather poor. And former Grand Prix Drivers Association (GPDA) chairman Pedro de la Rosa was the first to speak publicly about it.

Everyone has got a problem with mirrors. The reality is that the mirrors on the sidepods, they give you very small vision of what is happening behind and they vibrate a lot so you see very little. So if you don't have a lot of information coming from the radio, then you have a problem,” said De la Rosa on Sunday, according to Autosport.

You can see when you have a car straight behind okay, but when it is two seconds behind you have no idea where it is. Everyone has the same problem, but since the mirrors have gone outboard this is a problem – as they are aerodynamic devices now,” added the Spaniard, who insisted that the mirrors should “come back to the monocoque, with the old style.

Veteran driver Rubens Barrichello pointed to the same problem on Sunday, while revealing that all the drivers would like the mirrors to be fitted onto the car the old way, except for Lewis Hamilton.

I hope we put a proposal as the GPDA to see if we can have the mirrors back to where they belong – and it is something we mentioned in the drivers' briefing on Friday. We have all been quite honest and said that we all have difficulties – apart from Lewis. The problem for me is that we are driven by the aerodynamics, but the mirrors situated on the aero stuff vibrates.”
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