Red Bull fined 7 million and 10% development restriction

Red Bull Racing has reached a plea agreement with the FIA ​​for exceeding the budget limit for the 2021 season.

The team from Milton Keynes accepted the blame for going over budget by $2,2 million, although the FIA ​​admitted that if taxes had been properly accounted for, the overrun would have amounted to just under $0,5 million, or 0,37%.

The current constructors' champions will pay a $7 million fine for the violation, and they will have 2023% less time than their rivals when developing a racing car for the 10 season.

The penalty that the team will pay does not fall under this year's budget, so they will feel all the more the limitation of the development of the racing car in the wind tunnel and with computer simulations, where for the next 10 months they will have 10 percent less time at their disposal than the rest of the competitors, and already according to the rules, which give better teams less time to develop than the worse, the constructors' champions had 70 percent of the time allowed, which amounts to about 40 simulations per week.

Red Bull will therefore only be able to develop its racing car 10 percent of the time in the wind tunnel over the next 63 months, while Ferrari will be able to spend 75 percent and Mercedes 80 percent.

In a long-awaited public statement, the FIA ​​explained that Red Bull's original settlement was actually $4.6 million under the $145 million budget cap, but that 13 different items were improperly included or excluded in the settlement, totaling around $6.5 million. Among them were the costs of catering, sick leave, and the price of unused spare parts of the racing car, which were said to amount to around 1 million dollars.

After a more detailed review, the FIA, together with Red Bull, who cooperated with the authorities throughout the process, concluded that the overshoot was not a deliberate or unfair operation in any way, nor was the team hiding any important information. In the end, the FIA ​​concluded that Red Bull exceeded the budget by 2.2 million dollars, which is considered a minor offense, but if the Austrian team had correctly calculated the allowed tax deductions, they would have exceeded the budget cap by a good half a million dollars, or 0.37%.