F1 2022 thread - see post 1 for rules

To be fair, there isn't a championship fight to talk about instead. This story was always going to get disproportionate coverage

That might be how the narrative will go. I'd just assumenits actually very hard to prove a breach so I doubt much will come of it. I wouldn't jump straight to a conspiracy.

Where's the thread's resident red bull apologist?

Good to see Steve Jones, Billy Monger and Mark Webber all have commen sense and agree that the sprint races are just a silly gimmic and so do the majority of fans. Good to know.

That narrative isn't any better. So some people will think it's an FIA cover up, and other people like yourself will say the only reason Red Bull weren't caught were because it's hard to prove.

Toto Wolff knows exactly what he's doing with this. Tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough and the truth will cease to matter. You don't need a single shred of evidence, enough suspicion has been cast.

I think this is why the FIA have felt the need to come out so strongly with a press release to say that these rumours are completely unsubstantiated and why Red Bull are going so far as to talk about suing Wolff for defamation. The truth matters, and when you've got F1 media dominated by Sky F1 who have a complete disregard for facts in their coverage, sometimes you have to go further. They've dealt with enough completely unjustified slander throughout last season from Mercedes PR machine and the British media and even though it's all completely divorced from reality I'm sure it must impact their sponsor relations for example.

I'm amazed Toto's continued pettyness has been allowed continue by Källenius.

Its embarassing for Mercedes.

How about waiting until the FIA actually publish the results instead of sticking Toto in front of a camera and asking him what should happen to Red Bull before we actually know anything?

If RB have exceeded the limit, then yeah, let’s see how they exceeded it and what their punishment is, and I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. Having a rival pontificate on the punishment as if he has the RB figures himself is a bit suspect.

Ah, you can't take either Toto or Christian's word for it just because they appear emphatic or confident. Thats not really evidence one way or the other. We don't have any real evidence to make a judgement. The only people who will see the evidence are the FIA's auditors.

Making a judgement without real evidence is silly. It's not our job to reach a judgement. I'll just wait and see what the investigation concludes.

Bottas. He is having a terrible second half of the season compared to the first half.

The FIA haven’t even finished their reviews yet, Sky were talking about the fines and you could hear them frothing at the mouth over it.

5% allows for 7m in overspend and be classed as a minor breach but that could still carry drivers points deduction.

How many points? More than 8? Is a points deduction if you are >4% over? Is it applicable to this year or last year?

The ability to lower a cap on a team half way through a season doesn't seem right, what if you already hit the cap and stopped development and then the FIA lower your cap forcing you into noncompliance again.

There isn’t much information regarding the specifics of the breach, but from comments on twitter etc, it appears it was confusion with salaries paid to workers who were off sick (covid maybe?)

Red Bull continued paying those workers in full thinking that as the the payments didn’t come under the budget cap, whereas the FIA say that’s not the case. So it’s not development issue at all and merely an accounting error. If that’s what actually happened.

Edit: Although still not clear, this article from the Mail appears to support the above theory. (I’ve edited above to reflect the workers being sick and not laid off)

I think now is a good time for Christian Horner and Toto Wolff to do another joint press conference.

Listening to the BBC Chequered Flag podcast this morning, Jennie Gow mentioned that Pierre Gasly was tearing Alpha Tauri a new one in the media pen. Speculating that he knows he's on the way out.

De Vries is heading there.

How did they Let Him down?