At the end of the Melbourne event, both Kamui Kobayashi and Sergio Perez were disqualified by the FIA stewards due to the fact that the uppermost element of their cars' rear wing had contravened the current technical regulations.
The Swiss team quickly launched an internal investigation and admitted to the wrongdoing, although insisting that the mistake did not enhance performance significantly on the Albert Park Circuit. Afterwards it was discovered that a human error led to the wing's illegal construction, and the team moved quickly to correct it.
Following the unfortunate mistake, Sauber's managing director Monisha Kaltenborn confirmed that the Swiss organization has made significant changes to their legality-check procedure in order to avoid such situations in the future.
“We focused on basically looking at the legality-check procedure we had and see how it could happen there,” said Kaltenborn. “We reinforced measures, we added a few other measures to really have a robust system. So we concentrated on that and we are sure now the measurements are right.”
“You have a lot of things connected when you are designing, and so one change or modification can have effects on other things, and this is where simply a human error happened, and it slipped through the system,” she added, after which she made it very clear that James Key's position (technical boss) within the company was not in danger at any time.
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