FIA Responds To Red Bull AlphaTauri Collaboration Rumors

Friday, 08 December 2023 at 23:00

The Head of Single Seaters at the FIA, Nikolas Tombazis, discussed the collaboration between Red Bull and AlphaTauri, which made significant progress in 2023.

Scuderia AlphaTauri made great progress towards the end of the 2023 season as the team climbed up from last place to eighth place in the Constructors' Championship and almost snatched seventh place from Williams.

While AlphaTauri isn't the only team that made significant gains during the 2023 season, rumors started circulating, saying the team's performance improved because of its close collaboration with Red Bull.

Red Bull Racing F1 team principal Christian Horner stated that AlphaTauri only receives transferable components from his team that are well-defined within the regulations.

The Head of Single Seaters at the FIA, Nikolas Tombazis, recently said there is no evidence of direct collaboration between the two teams and pointed out that the FIA also needs to look into collaboration between different teams. As quoted by Motorsport-Total, he said:

"It's not just a problem between these two teams, but also between other pairs of teams. We believe that AlphaTauri has completely different aerodynamic solutions to the other team and we don't believe there is any evidence of direct collaboration."

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AlphaTauri went from achieving 10th place twice in the first half of the season to two 8th, one 9th, and one 7th place in the last five races of the season. Tombazis continued:

"It is clear that they are working hard and have made a step forward. But I don't believe that this is due to a collaboration."

The Head of Single Seaters also noted it is not an easy task to ensure that teams do not share valuable information with each other.

"One of the most difficult aspects of monitoring is cooperation and ensuring that this doesn't happen. We have to check and make sure that all these teams are well separated and so on,"

On the other hand, FIA is also preparing guidelines for the teams that they should follow to be able to convince the organization they aren't cheating.

"And we will be issuing further guidelines shortly to give the teams more information on how they can convince us that nothing like this is happening."