Ferrari believes Red Bull’s penalty for breaching the 2021 budget cap does not do enough to address the performance gains the team could have made from overspending.
Red Bull accepted the FIA’s accepted breach agreement of $7 million and a 10 percent reduction in wind-tunnel development.
The FIA found Red Bull had been in breach of the cap by £432,652 ($0.5 million) once an unclaimed UK tax credit of £1.4 million ($1.6 million) was taken into account.
Red Bull boss Christian Horner called the penalty “draconian“, with his team already due the least amount of wind-tunnel time in 2023 after winning this year’s championship.
Horner insisted the overspend was not from car development, but Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies has dismissed this idea.
“We have talked a lot in recent weeks about what one can do with half a million more, or a million or two or three,” Mekies told Sky Italia. “Two million is a significant amount and we have given our opinion several times on this topic.
“We at Ferrari think that this amount is worth around a couple of tenths [of a second per lap] and so it’s easy to understand that these figures can have a real impact on the outcome of the races, and maybe even a championship.”
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff suggested the reputational damage done to Red Bull over the last few weeks is enough of a deterrent for other F1 teams in future, but Mekies does not believe the FIA’s penalty is harsh enough.
“As for the penalty, we are not happy with it, for two important reasons. The first is that we at Ferrari do not understand how the 10% reduction of the ATR can correspond to the same amount of lap time that we mentioned earlier.
“Furthermore, there is another problem in that. Since there is no cost cap reduction in the penalty, the basic effect is to push the competitor to spend the money elsewhere.
“It has total freedom to use the money it can no longer spend on use of the wind tunnel and CFD due to the 10% reduction, on reducing the weight of the car, or who knows what else.
“Our concern is that the combination of these two factors means the real effect of the penalty is very limited.”
Red Bull has 30 days to pay its penalty, while the wind-tunnel penalty will cover the next 12 months.
Source: www.espn.com