Red Bull F1 team receive $7m fine & 10% aero research reduction

Red Bull have been hit with a $7m (£6.07m) fine and a 10% reduction in permitted aerodynamic research for breaking Formula 1’s budget cap.

Their financial punishment is not a reduction in their permitted spend next year, when the budget cap is $135m.

The 10% cut is in the time they can spend using their wind tunnel or computational fluid dynamics to design their car.

“We have been provided a significant financial and sporting penalty – $7m is an enormous amount of money and the more draconian part is the sporting penalty, which is a 10% reduction in our ability to use our wind tunnel and aerodynamic tools,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said.

“That is an enormous amount. That represents between 0.25secs and 0.5secs of lap time. It comes in from now and will be in place for a 12-month period and will have an impact on development of our 2023 car.”

The punishment comes after Red Bull acknowledged they were at fault and entered into a so-called “accepted breach agreement” with the FIA.

“Why have we accepted it? We felt it was in everyone’s interests to close the book. We accept the penalties – begrudgingly, but we accept them,” Horner added.

Horner insisted that the overspend would “absolutely not” tarnish Max Verstappen’s 2021 title.

“Verstappen [was a] hugely deserving champion,” he told BBC Sport’s Laura Scott. “[There will] inevitably [be] partisan support on either side but the reality is he did the job, he won the race at the final GP of the year and 2021 is now confined to the history books.”

Horner admitted that Red Bull had not taken up the opportunity to do a dry run of the cost cap in 2020, which many other teams did.

He said they considered their interim submission in April 2021 as their dry run, and that they had had no feedback from the FIA on that.

The FIA had previously said only that Red Bull had committed a “minor” breach, which is anything up to 5% of the cap, or $7.25m in 2021, when Verstappen won his first title, with no further details.

A statement by the FIA detailing Red Bull’s errors said the team had “inaccurately excluded and/or adjusted costs amounting to a total of £5,607,000” in 2021.

The team’s overspend breach of relevant costs adjusted by the FIA was £1,864,000.

This amounts to an understatement of accounts of nearly 5% and an adjusted overspend of 1.6%.

A total of 13 points of non-compliance included an understatement related to their new power-unit business and fixed costs, and costs relevant to catering, social security, apprenticeships, inventory (unused parts) and non-F1 activities.

The fine has to be paid within the next 30 days.

The FIA said that had Red Bull applied the correct treatment to a notional tax credit, the team would have exceeded the cap by only £432,652.

Horner pointed out that this was a “0.37% overspend” and that therefore the “10% reduction is pretty draconian”.

“There is no accusation or evidence that Red Bull Racing has sought at any time to act in bad faith, dishonestly or in a fraudulent manner, nor has it wilfully concealed any information from the Cost Cap Administration,” the FIA’s statement added.

McLaren’s chief executive officer Zak Brown welcomed the punishment handed down to one of their rivals but called for the FIA to go further with any future sanctions against those that “wilfully break the rules”.

‘We appreciate the cost cap investigation is a complex process which the FI have conducted in a thorough and transparent manner,” Brown said.

“I’m pleased the truth is out there now and it is the result is as we expected – there was a breach of the cost cap by one team, with the other nine operating in line with the rules. It is therefore only right that punitive action is taken.

“If the FIA is to be most effective and its punishments serve as a lesson to others when rules are broken in this way, the sanctions have to be much stronger in the future.

‘We hope that the lessons learned through this process will now mean all teams have a clear understanding of the rules in order to avoid any future breaches. While we are pleased to see them act, we would hope the FIA take stronger action in future against those that wilfully break the rules.”

Ferrari are not happy with the outcome of the FIA’s investigation and do not feel the penalty is sufficient for the infringement.

Meanwhile, Aston Martin have been fined $450,000 (£388,200) for a procedural breach of the financial regulations.

The FIA said Aston Martin were within the cap but had misreported 12 different items, including the costs of their new factory, wind tunnel and simulator.

Red Bull already had the lowest permitted aerodynamic research time for the first half of 2023 as a result of winning this year’s championship.

Last year, F1 introduced a sliding scale of aerodynamic restrictions in an attempt to close up the field, giving the lowest team in the championship the most research time and the highest the least.

“By winning the constructors’ championship, we become victims of our own success by having a 5% incremental handicap compared to second and third places,” Horner added.

“So we will have 15% less than second and 20% less than third, that will have impact on our ability to perform on track.”

However, rival teams will still have questions as to whether the punishment is appropriate, particularly over whether the fine will have any effect on a vastly wealthy global corporation, and also as to why the amounts published are different from those that were doing the rounds of the F1 paddock at last weekend’s US Grand Prix.

They will also likely point out that the areas of the overspend are irrelevant because they, too, could have chosen to spend more in such areas, but that would have meant spending less on engineering and car design. (Courtesy BBC)