Mexico City Grand Prix: Ferrari ‘not happy’ with size of Red Bull budget cap penalty

Ferrari say they are “not happy” with the penalty imposed on rivals Red Bull for breaking Formula 1’s budget cap.

Ferrari racing director Laurent Mekies said Red Bull’s breach was “a significant amount” and that “the real effect of the penalty is very limited”.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner described the penalty as “draconian”.

Horner claimed that the effect of the aerodynamic reduction on Red Bull’s car “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”.

Horner also pointed to a line in the FIA judgement that said had Red Bull applied the correct treatment to a notional tax credit, the team would have exceeded the cap by only £432,652. This, he said, reduced the overspend from 1.6% to 0.37%.

But Mekies questioned Horner’s assessment of the net impact of the penalty.

In an interview with Sky Sports Italia, he said: “We at Ferrari think that this amount (of overspend) is worth around a couple of tenths (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.

“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 ATA (aerodynamic research allowance) can correspond to the same amount of lap time that we mentioned earlier.

“Furthermore, there is another problem in that, since there is no budget 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.”

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports: “Overall, it’s good to see that there is a penalty, whether we deem it too low or too high.

“I think what you see is that beyond a sporting penalty and financial fine, it’s also reputational damage,” Wolff said.

“In a world of transparency and good governance, that’s just not on anymore.”

Mekies’ comments follow those from McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown, who told BBC Sport on Friday: “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.”

Horner said in an interview with BBC Sport: “For a 0.37% overspend, I think a 10% reduction is pretty draconian, that’s worth potentially quarter to half a second of a season’s development, has an impact on our performance next year and makes our challenge even greater as we head into 2023. It’s applicable from now so it affects next year’s car.

“Anyone who diminished that penalty is uneducated in terms of what the actual value of it in terms of performance.”

He added that the lost time was “an enormous handicap”.

Horner said: “We didn’t spend one penny of this money on making the car go faster.”

He added: “The FIA have been harsh, they stand by their budget cap, it was important for them.

“I believe in now drawing a line under it, take the hit, performance hit. We’re going to have to work harder and smart within the time we have in the winter, which is our primary development time.”

He rejected suggestions that Red Bull driver Max Verstappen should be stripped of last year’s title, won in controversial circumstances at the final race of the season after a tight battle with Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton.

“We feel we’ve been chastised enough,” he said. “We feel the public slating we had through mud being slung by some of our competitors is penalty enough.

“Time to move on – Verstappen is 2021 World Champion, our focus is very much now on (this weekend’s) Mexican Grand Prix and trying to finish the season off in a high.”

And he denied that there was now an asterisk against Verstappen’s first title, won after the race director applied the rules incorrectly during a late safety-car period in the final race of the season and in a year in which his team had broken the rules on spending.

“Absolutely not,” Horner said. “Last year went down in history as one of the most titanic battles in F1 history. Verstappen was a hugely deserving champion. Inevitably there will be partisan support on either side but the reality is he did the job, he won the race at the final Grand Prix of the year and 2021 is now confined to the history books.

“People will choose a narrative at the end of the day. I think Max did absolutely nothing wrong last year. He won the race fair and square, as a team we performed out of our skin to break the domination of one team that has dominated in the last seven years, nothing can diminish from what he did last year and that’s obviously backed up again in 2022.”