Red Bull to Feel the Heat of Budget Cap Penalty, Says F1 Engineer Pat Symonds
Pat Symonds: Red Bull Racing to feel impact of $7m fine and 10% wind tunnel reduction for breaching 2021 cost cap. Team will have to work harder to overcome penalty
Former Formula 1 engineer Pat Symonds believes that Red Bull Racing will feel the effects of the penalty they received for breaching the 2021 cost cap, according to an interview with Total-Motorsport.com.
Red Bull was handed a $7m fine and a 10 percent reduction in wind tunnel time for this season, which comes off the back of having the least amount of wind tunnel time for winning the constructors title this year.
This means Red Bull will have 12 percent less time in the wind tunnel than Ferrari and 17 percent less than Mercedes.
Symonds, who has worked with teams such as Williams, Renault, and Manor Racing, explained that it would be difficult to calculate the exact effects of the penalty on Red Bull but emphasized that they would definitely feel it.
“It would be quite hard to calculate because when you have a new set of regulations, then the rate of development is very high”, he said.
“So every 100 wind tunnel runs you do, you expect a couple of points of downforce normally and probably more than that in the regulations. So yeah, they will feel it definitely.”
Symonds also believes that Red Bull had only themselves to blame for the penalty, stating that they had the opportunity to do a dry run but chose not to.
“Red Bull got a few things wrong, but every team was given the opportunity to do a dry run,” he said “Red Bull chose not to, and that’s probably why they made mistakes.”
Despite this, Symonds does agree that it would be beneficial for the teams and fans to see how the teams’ finances change over the season, but he admitted that it would take some time before a system is implemented.
“I do agree that it would be really nice if we absolutely knew the budget numbers looked like in real-time,” he added. “Maybe we can get to that it’s not quite there yet.”
It remains to be seen how the penalty will affect Red Bull Racing's performance in the upcoming Formula 1 season, but the team will have to work harder to overcome the reduction in wind tunnel time.
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