Are Red bull cheating?

Are Red bull cheating?

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simon_harris

1,827 posts

42 months

Saturday 19th October
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Hustle_ said:
I guess it stands to reason that Red Bull / Verstappen fans don’t mind how he wins.

They seem to be taking their lead from Horner, just generating noise and misdirection to obfuscate the topic. Pretending they don’t understand the rules and / or the allegations.

Have so many instances of cheating by an individual team over a sustained period ever gone over with quite such a lack of consequence? The whole team stinks and most of us clocked it like five years ago.

The fandom are in too deep.
May I point you at Ferrari of old….

honda_exige

6,658 posts

214 months

Saturday 19th October
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TheDeuce said:
Zero evidence... Ok. They designed it that way because it made sense in some other way?

As details have emerged anyone useful with a spanner can imagine exactly what they were thinking, and they would only have done that if thinking= doing.

If you want evidence before considering risk, good luck crossing the road. Your opinions are your own, mine are often flexible but not when it's become so obvious what they were up to on this occasion!
For the sake of our justice system I hope you don't get called to Jury duty hehe

TheDeuce

25,406 posts

74 months

Saturday 19th October
quotequote all
simon_harris said:
Hustle_ said:
I guess it stands to reason that Red Bull / Verstappen fans don’t mind how he wins.

They seem to be taking their lead from Horner, just generating noise and misdirection to obfuscate the topic. Pretending they don’t understand the rules and / or the allegations.

Have so many instances of cheating by an individual team over a sustained period ever gone over with quite such a lack of consequence? The whole team stinks and most of us clocked it like five years ago.

The fandom are in too deep.
May I point you at Ferrari of old….
That's the point though.. back in the day, we didn't have the same level of media coverage, networking, social media - essentially the ability to pool observations and opinions.

Back then you knew certain teams were dirty but you couldn't piece it together, not could you discuss your suspicions with a wider audience of other keen eyed F1 geeks! It was pub chatter at best.

Things are less opaque these days, and RBR are being shown up to be pretty dirty. All of the various potential transgressions can be generously explained away with counter theories... But the fact it's always RBR, combined with the fact they've previously enjoyed a huge advantage over the rest of the field becomes a mountain of awkwardness to explain away.

The team obviously has it's die hard fans, but at the end of the day fandom shouldn't overrule sensible judgement. Have they been winning in merit, within the rules? I personally seriously doubt it.

Forester1965

2,954 posts

11 months

Sunday 20th October
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Nothing's going to outwardly happen to any team who cheats. It would devalue the sport as a whole and the teams themselves. Nobody who owns F1 or a team will want to diminish their balance sheet value. That's why Mercedes dropped the '21 complaint.

It's why Ferrari got away with it and red bull will continue to do.

Either accept you're watching a manipulated entertainment show with limited sporting integrity or ditch it and do something else.

PhilAsia

4,971 posts

83 months

Sunday 20th October
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Forester1965 said:
Either accept you're watching a manipulated entertainment show with limited sporting integrity or ditch it and do something else.
Why should we accept it? So that people that seemingly condone/laud cheating, like honda, can enjoy F1WWE?

You are correct in that it is getting more accepted to have no sporting integrity, primarily led by a toxic taurine-fuelled drinks company that has no marque in the automobile industry to consider. But F1 will end up with a maga-type fanbase, with stupidity as its lowest common denominator. Will MB, McL, AM and, to a lesser extent, Ferrari, still be interested then?

TBF you make all the right arguments for not continuing to watch though, and the bias is getting more in favour of ditching the bks permanently!

It makes the efforts of all the team members a trivial insignificance, not the pinnacle they aspire to.



Megaflow

9,978 posts

233 months

Sunday 20th October
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I watched and interview with Horner, Brundle, Button and someone else.

Even by Horner’s slimey standards he was struggling to defend it, says everyone has got something similar, but don’t seem to have an answer for why the FIA only wanted to put an anti tamper seal on just the Red Bull.

Roofless Toothless

6,158 posts

140 months

Sunday 20th October
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PhilAsia said:
Forester1965 said:
Either accept you're watching a manipulated entertainment show with limited sporting integrity or ditch it and do something else.
Why should we accept it? So that people that seemingly condone/laud cheating, like honda, can enjoy F1WWE?

You are correct in that it is getting more accepted to have no sporting integrity, primarily led by a toxic taurine-fuelled drinks company that has no marque in the automobile industry to consider. But F1 will end up with a maga-type fanbase, with stupidity as its lowest common denominator. Will MB, McL, AM and, to a lesser extent, Ferrari, still be interested then?

TBF you make all the right arguments for not continuing to watch though, and the bias is getting more in favour of ditching the bks permanently!

It makes the efforts of all the team members a trivial insignificance, not the pinnacle they aspire to.

I have followed motor racing for almost 70 years. I can assure you that cheating takes place at every level. From my days marshalling and talking to scrutineers at club and national events, even down to my experiences as a Cadet Kart dad. I have stories of the latter that would make your hair stand on end. Cheating is endemic to all types of motor sport at all levels, and as you pass up through the series, it merely gets cleverer. Are we mugs to watch it? Probably.

Forester1965

2,954 posts

11 months

Sunday 20th October
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You accept it because you don't have a choice. The owners and the corporates now own F1. It's an entertainment business with cars. It's theirs, not ours.

It was bent in the old days, too. Mustn't forget that. If you weren't flavour of the month with Balestre or Max/Bernie you were at risk. Remember back then, though, these things would rumble on and even end up in the courts because the people founded and owned teams to win on the track. They spent every penny they could get their grubby hands on in that pursuit and had nothing left at the end. F1 was about being the fastest race driver and team in the fastest race series.

I'm afraid now it's about building the highest value asset you can whilst profiting from a marketing machine. The model is totally different. It ultimately leads to spec cars racing around spec locations.

Look at the price cap, for example. How was that
justified? It was on the basis teams were spending an unustainable amount on development of new things. The regs were increasingly restricted on the basis it prevented spending wars. We were told if the spending wasn't halted the teams could no longer continue.

A spending cap was introduced. The top teams lost 2/3s or so of their budget. Were the regs then opened up? Surely they no longer need to be as tight because the cap prevents runaway spending. True innovation can than flourish. Of course they weren't.
They continue to be tightened. Why? The budget cap wasn't to prevent runaway spending. It was to make F1 even cheaper for incumbents and especially incoming investors, sorry, team owners. The budget cap gives an immediate and sustained boost to the balance sheet value of every team. You're no longer buying an asset with an open ended cost base. It's fixed by regulation. Liberty then control the market value of the teams and wider sport by limiting availability on the grid. Hence Andretti can't get on it.

The pitch to the corporate world is an F1 team offers a marketing machine generating more in exposure and sales than it costs in operation (see Mercedes in the Wolff era). Unheard of. Access to the opportunity is restricted to buying an incumbent, and there are only 10 of them in the world. This massively increases the value of each team. For example Red Bull have probably got £4bn worth of teams on the grid. It cost them an absolute fraction of that to create and look at the marketing exposure from it, when all their other marketing activities actually cost them money rather than make it.

All which is why nobody- Liberty, the FIA, the teams or the people employed by or sponsoring them and especially the team owners, are really going to do anything that jeopardises the value of those assets. There is a huge financial shock to ANY business where an asset on your balance sheet goes from being worth £1bn to half that because it's tainted. The boards at Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault, Red Bull, Dorilton, VAG, Mumtalakat, Gene Haas or Lawrence Stroll are not going to take a multi billion dollar balance sheet hit to give some ungrateful driver they have to pay $30m a year another tick in their stats. So bloody what! They're in it to make money not win at sport.




WPA

10,309 posts

122 months

Monday 21st October
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honda_exige said:
MarkwG said:
lambosagogo said:
So really what this boils down to is that every team has a way of adjusting the bib height of their car. While most teams do this in a way that would be obvious, Red Bull put in a device to allow them to adjust it easily and did so in a place where it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for a scrutineer to spot it in parc ferme when engineers will often be working around that location.

Is that the basic summmary?
...which has the potential to allow adjustments outside parc ferme rules, unlike the other teams where any adjustments would be very obvious; which has lead to suspicions that's what they've been doing. Since they have a history whiter than the finest Persil hot wash, I can't imagine why anyone would have those suspicions, but there you go...
Yes this isn't obvious at all. rolleyes The FIA have all the footage from the CCTV this year from the cameras directly over the car. It's fairly trivial to go back and review.

I still cannot see how this is the actual way it is adjusted, this more RB making it look difficult for the camera, suspect it really is a lot easier if needed.

As other people have said why would design this in such a way if it did not have a purpose.

But it is RB and yet another tainted championship is on the cards for them, crazy really.

Stealthracer

7,941 posts

186 months

Monday 21st October
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I'm beginning to wonder if any of their championships have been won fairly.

simon_harris

1,827 posts

42 months

Monday 21st October
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There were lots of allegations around traction control and ABS with Vettle iirc

DOCG

706 posts

62 months

Monday 21st October
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Ferrari must be cheating as well now. There's no other way they could finish above a British driver unless cheating is involved!

TheDeuce

25,406 posts

74 months

Monday 21st October
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Stealthracer said:
I'm beginning to wonder if any of their championships have been won fairly.
It's impossible to know, unless you're Christian Horner - and his definition of 'fair' is highly questionable!

One problem is that we don't even know how long certain 'cheats' were in use for. That's not helped by the fact the FIA seem to prefer to make certain things stop by coming to some sort of deal with the team, rather than actually carrying out a full investigation, I imagine that's because they don't want to open a big can of worms and have to consider awkward questions such as the validity of past seasons titles...

How long did they have the brake bias cheat in use for? For how many seasons have they been happily adjusting their cars front bib height against parc ferme restrictions? We don't know because the FIA haven't dug up those answers, because they really, really don't want those questions answering.


confucuis

1,313 posts

132 months

Monday 21st October
quotequote all
WPA said:
honda_exige said:
MarkwG said:
lambosagogo said:
So really what this boils down to is that every team has a way of adjusting the bib height of their car. While most teams do this in a way that would be obvious, Red Bull put in a device to allow them to adjust it easily and did so in a place where it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for a scrutineer to spot it in parc ferme when engineers will often be working around that location.

Is that the basic summmary?
...which has the potential to allow adjustments outside parc ferme rules, unlike the other teams where any adjustments would be very obvious; which has lead to suspicions that's what they've been doing. Since they have a history whiter than the finest Persil hot wash, I can't imagine why anyone would have those suspicions, but there you go...
Yes this isn't obvious at all. rolleyes The FIA have all the footage from the CCTV this year from the cameras directly over the car. It's fairly trivial to go back and review.

I still cannot see how this is the actual way it is adjusted, this more RB making it look difficult for the camera, suspect it really is a lot easier if needed.

As other people have said why would design this in such a way if it did not have a purpose.

But it is RB and yet another tainted championship is on the cards for them, crazy really.
If they have another way of adjusting it than what was shown to the FIA scrutineers, then that would mean they've lied to the FIA.

It's quite simple to me really. If they way the adjust it is so obvious that it would be impossible to hide if done in parc ferme, there should then be plenty of video evidence of it being adjusted legally in the garages!

Jasandjules

70,545 posts

237 months

Tuesday 22nd October
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confucuis said:
It's quite simple to me really. If they way the adjust it is so obvious that it would be impossible to hide if done in parc ferme, there should then be plenty of video evidence of it being adjusted legally in the garages!
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?

Teatowell

1,415 posts

191 months

Tuesday 22nd October
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Jasandjules said:
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?
Why would they, all sorts of things go on in parc ferme. You think they’re using cctv to pick up millimetres of floor movement?

TheDeuce

25,406 posts

74 months

Tuesday 22nd October
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Teatowell said:
Jasandjules said:
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?
Why would they, all sorts of things go on in parc ferme. You think they’re using cctv to pick up millimetres of floor movement?
Also because, they won't want to know. They'll be confident they'd said enough internally to the team to prevent any possible future use, and are also probably working on a regs update to stop any future such developments.

Why would they want to fully investigate? There's a real risk such an investigation could uncover actual usage of the device and would invalidate previous sporting results.

The reality is, the FIA will avoid that at all costs.

thegreenhell

17,383 posts

227 months

Tuesday 22nd October
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Teatowell said:
Jasandjules said:
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?
Why would they, all sorts of things go on in parc ferme. You think they’re using cctv to pick up millimetres of floor movement?
No no, they'd be looking for them using a ratchet gun with a two foot long wobbly extension on it. This is the only thing that would be used for on an F1 car so it would be easy to spot...

MarkwG

5,151 posts

197 months

Tuesday 22nd October
quotequote all
thegreenhell said:
Teatowell said:
Jasandjules said:
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?
Why would they, all sorts of things go on in parc ferme. You think they’re using cctv to pick up millimetres of floor movement?
No no, they'd be looking for them using a ratchet gun with a two foot long wobbly extension on it. This is the only thing that would be used for on an F1 car so it would be easy to spot...
A conspiracy theorist might say that's part of the RB smoke & mirrors: they maintain that's the adjustment method, but the complaint was that the same adjustment could be made within the footwell, as I understand it, using a different tool. So you won't see the two foot long extension, however hard you look, therefore demonstrating that it wasn't adjusted during parc ferme...

MustangGT

12,334 posts

288 months

Tuesday 22nd October
quotequote all
TheDeuce said:
Teatowell said:
Jasandjules said:
And yet the FIA are not bothering to look at the CCTV... Why not?
Why would they, all sorts of things go on in parc ferme. You think they’re using cctv to pick up millimetres of floor movement?
Also because, they won't want to know. They'll be confident they'd said enough internally to the team to prevent any possible future use, and are also probably working on a regs update to stop any future such developments.

Why would they want to fully investigate? There's a real risk such an investigation could uncover actual usage of the device and would invalidate previous sporting results.

The reality is, the FIA will avoid that at all costs.
Fully agree with TheDeuce. The FIA go to extraordinary lengths to avoid making changes to published results, even if it is 100% obvious it is wrong. My personal opinion is that by not changing the result they are doing more harm than changing it.