Ferrari and McLaren react to potential FIA rule changes to slow Red Bull

Thomas Maher 02年9月2023 8时15分

Italian Grand Prix: Red Bull's Christian Horner, Ferrari's Fred Vasseur, McLaren's Andrea Stella, and Pirelli's Mario Isola speak to the media.

Two of Red Bull’s chief rivals have no interest in having the FIA intervene to help their pursuit of the World Champions.

Red Bull’s dominance shows no signs of slowing down in the second year of the ground effect regulations, with their advantage over the rest of the field arguably at its greatest since the start of 2022.

With Max Verstappen closing in on an uncontested third consecutive title, the Dutch driver looks set to rack up his 10th consecutive race victory this weekend – setting a new F1 record in the process.

Other teams don’t want help catching up to Red Bull

The extent of Red Bull’s dominance has led to unsurprising calls from fans on social media for a rules intervention in order to change things up, given that the current ruleset is set to remain stable until the end of 2025.

Given the tight budget cap that restricts team’s abilities to spend their way to additional speed, there’s little evidence of teams finding a ‘magic bullet’ that could close the gap to Red Bull and end their uncontested run.

F1的当前航空测试规则意味着红Bull have the fewest wind tunnel testing hours, as well as the least hours permitted for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), with the sliding scale down the grid order meaning slower teams have additional development opportunities.

It’s for this reason that Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team boss, isn’t in favour of getting any hand-outs from the FIA.

“I’m not a big fan of the balance of performance or any kind of artifice like this,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com, when asked about whether a rules shake up is needed, or if the FIA need to intervene.

“It’s not the DNA of Formula 1 and, on top [of that], we already have the wind tunnel allocation with a kind of balance – not balance of performance but balance of allocation, and it’s enough.”

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella, who has overseen his team’s recent huge step forward through canny upgrades, backed Vasseur’s statements.

“Yeah, I agree. We don’t want to have any help,” he said.

“We want to close the gap by our own means, and we like this challenge and that’s what we want for the next couple of years.”

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Christian Horner doesn’t fear ‘draconian’ rule changes

As for whether Red Bull themselves are living in fear of the FIA attempting to shackle their speed through a rule change, Horner dismissed it.

“The regulations are pretty stable and we have three sets of regulations now – technical, sporting, and financial,” he said.

“The technical and sporting play fields seem to be reasonably content, the financial one seems to be a little bit of maneuvering now and again but I think that the regulations are stable for the next couple of years and we fully expect our competitors [to close the gap].

“Look at the jump that McLaren made recently, we fully expect there to be convergence, even this year, before we head into 2024. So I’m not aware of any draconian, significant regulation changes in the pipeline. We have that already for 2026, which will be a complete reset.

“Despite the fact that we’ve done a lot of winning this year, a lot of the races including last race was was pretty entertaining. Certainly from where we were sitting, it was so, yeah, I don’t think that the sport is lacking entertainment at this point in time.”