Red Bull’s chief technical officer Adrian Newey has taken aim at the FIA over the lack of progress made by this year’s wholesale regulation changes to resume the war of words between the Austrian team and world motorsport’s governing body. Relations between the two entities have seemingly become strained in recent months after Red Bull were hit with a multi-million pound fine and a reduction in testing time as a consequence of breaching the strict budget cap rules in 2021.
Team principal Christian Horner and chief advisor Helmut Marko both expressed a dim view of the sanctions handed down to Red Bull earlier this year while insisting that no rules were broken in spite of the FIA’s conclusive verdict. Newey has since aimed a fresh dig at the governing body by questioning the success of the current technical regulations, which were designed to reduce the level of aerodynamic downforce on cars with the intention of tackling the effect of dirty air to encourage closer racing.
“Our cars have become bigger and heavier and are not particularly efficient from an aerodynamic point of view because they have a lot of resistance,” he told Motorsport Magazine.
“I think it’s a bit of a shame that Formula One has gone down this path, especially because right now there is a need and opportunity to do exactly the opposite. It is clear that this wrong direction is the same one that the general car industry has taken recently, bigger and heavier cars and people’s obsession with running on batteries or petrol.
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“The biggest problem is the amount of energy needed to move the damn thing, regardless of where that energy comes from. It seems Formula One’s technical regulations don’t understand that, because the big car manufacturers obviously don’t want that.”
Newey went on to hammer home his point that F1 and the FIA should be setting the industry benchmark in terms of both performance and sustainability, with many cutting-edge technologies to have been trialled on the grid in previous years having been adopted by production car manufacturers as of late.
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“Formula One can and must play a role in that, but there’s all this discussion about where the energy source should come from, electric, biofuel, synthetic fuel, hydrogen,” he added.
“There’s a lot of misinformation floating around on the subject, especially the electrical side. People are starting to realize that the carbon footprint of producing an electric vehicle is much larger than that of a petrol vehicle.
“Some changes in Formula One are also the result of lobbying. I think we need smaller, lighter and more energy efficient cars.”
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