RB Formula 1 boss Laurent Mekies has defended the team’s close collaboration with Red Bull amid continued vehement criticism from several rival counterparts.
Amid a troubled start to the previous campaign, it was announced that the team then known as AlphaTauri would forge a closer technical alliance with Red Bull.
That extended to AlphaTauri adopting Red Bull’s rear suspension in the closing stages of the campaign which inspired the side to climb to eighth in the standings.
Although fears that the rebranded squad would unveil a clone of Red Bull’s title-winning RB19 were dispelled, question marks over the collaboration have remained.
RB have inherited the front suspension that the parent outfit utilised last term, while it is also relocating to a base in Milton Keynes where Red Bull’s setup is based.
But when offered the chance to respond, Mekies, who has replaced the retired Franz Tost at the helm, asserts that the FIA has clarified that RB’s operation remains legal.
“I think first, there is a clear set of regulations today, and we operate 100% within that set of regulations, and we take every single extra precaution with the FIA to make sure they have zero doubt about how much we operate in within these regulations,” Mekies explained.
“And I invite anyone, if they have any doubt on sporting, technical, financial regulations do we comply with them? They can go to the FIA and ask them to further investigate anything So would we show this is a state of play in term of how clear the regulations are today?
“I’m not saying that they are right or wrong, but certainly I’m saying here that we are operating in a black-and-white manner within this regulations.”
RB announced last month that it had hired several new recruits, including Red Bull’s Guillaume Cattelani to work in the new position of Deputy Technical Director.
Mekies has denied that such a switch has been done with the intention of circumventing the rules regarding shared intellectual data between two separate teams.
When prompted on the matter of engineers transferring from Red Bull to RB, Mekies replied: “So unlike what you may have heard, the regulations are clear also for that. You cannot use personal movement to go around the regulations of the IP of the technical parts, you cannot do that.
“So how is that practically applied in a fairly simple way? When we hired somebody from Red Bull in that case, we go to the FIA, we say, ‘Look, we are planning to hire that person’. You guys need to define what you feel the reasonable garden leave is for that person, and we stick to it.
“In the other direction, I think it never happened that one of our guys went back or if he did it, we will have to follow the same process.
“So ironically I can agree with Fred to get one of his guys probably the next morning if we find an agreement, probably we won’t find an agreement, but we could.
“We cannot do that with Red Bulls because we are over-respecting the regulations and making sure that the FIA is on board on every single of these calls.”
Brown has issued on numerous occasions that the introduction of a budget cap into F1 from 2021 has reduced the need for one organisation to own two teams.
However, Mekies has argued that stronger ties to Red Bull have been implemented to pave the path for RB to operate in a more independent fashion in the future.
“Then as the regulations fit for the sport well… these regulations today, they mean for us that we are an independent team, that all the development we are doing to make the team stronger tomorrow with that set of regulations is to make the team more independent,” he continued.
“So we are growing the team, we are growing our infrastructures, we are growing our facilities in order to be more and more independent tomorrow because that’s the way we go faster.
“We are here to compete with the nine other teams. Let them be owned by the same shareholders or not, we will compete as high as our competitiveness will allow us to do so.”
Mekies believes that a reversal on permitting two-team ownership would be detrimental to the sport and would set a precedent for all teams to work without outside help.
He added: “Then are the regulations fit for purpose? Again, we said many times why we can today share some components. We can share components in order to avoid to have too much of a spread between the guys at the top and the top and the bottom two, three, four teams.
“And we share some components in order to make sure that we have a more sustainable business models for the guys that are at the bottom.
“As Zak said, for those who are at the bottom, it is a very different equations in terms of balancing the accounting.”
“If they will change tomorrow, if we think that we don’t want any more close racing, that it’s okay to have a more spread field.
“And if we think that the business is so good, as to ask every single team to be bigger tomorrow, because today we are already between 500 and 600 people in Faenza.
“So if we want to say, look, we think Formula One teams should be even bigger because they should do everything, suspensions, gearbox, PU, that’s the decision that will be at a Concorde Agreement level. It feels strange to be that optimistic about the economics of the years to come.”
