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FIA Chief Technical Officer Pat Symonds explains why Red Bull will “definitely” feel the effects of their 2021 budget cap breach penalty, but says it’s “hard to calculate” how much.
Back in October of 2022, Red Bull has been penalized for their 2021 budget cap breach. The team was handed a $7m fine and a 10% aero testing reduction.
Red Bull already has the least amount of aero testing time in 2023 anyway, due to finishing first in the 2022 Constructors’ Championship, so the team will ultimately have 12% less aero testing time than Ferrari and 17% less than Mercedes.
Total-Motorsport.com caught up with FIA Chief Technical Officer Pat Symonds, and asked him how much the penalty will affect Red Bull’s performance.
“It would be quite hard to calculate because when you have a new set of regulations, then the rate of development is very high”, Symonds said.
“So every 100 wind tunnel runs you do, you expect a couple of points of downforce normally and probably more than that in the regulations. So yeah, they will feel it definitely.”
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Symonds then said Red Bull has nobody to blame but themselves for the breach.
“Red Bull got a few things wrong, but every team was given the opportunity to do a dry run. Red Bull chose not to, and that’s probably why they made mistakes.
He also added that it would be better to be able to oversee the teams’ finances in “real-time”, instead of after the season has finished, but it is not possible for now.
“I do agree that it would be really nice if we absolutely knew the budget numbers looked like in real-time.
“Maybe we can get to that it’s not quite there yet,” Symonds concluded.
