F1 News: Red Bull saw new cheater Flexi-Wing clampdown coming

(GMM) A leading Dutch journalist thinks he knows why Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko left Australia with a smile on his face.

Describing Max and father Jos as “pessimists” and himself an “optimist”, Red Bull advisor Marko said he thought the team could close a quite substantial pace gap to early championship leaders McLaren within five races.

Journalist Erik van Haren suspects that Marko, 81, might even have been predicting a faster turnaround even than that.

“On Sunday, insiders were already reporting that the FIA would be checking rear wings more strictly from now on,” he wrote in De Telegraaf newspaper.

In Melbourne, the sport’s governing body installed ultra-HD cameras on the cars in practice to monitor rear wing flexibility – the kind that pundits dubbed a ‘mini-DRS’ on the McLaren last year that the FIA made illegal over the winter.

“Having analyzed footage from the rear wing deformations combined to the static deflections measured inside the FIA garage in Melbourne, the FIA has concluded that sufficient grounds exist for a tougher test to be introduced from the forthcoming Chinese GP on the upper rear wing,” the FIA has now confirmed.

After the pre-season test in Bahrain, Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache said: “I think Ferrari and McLaren are still using the cheater Flexi-Wing mini-DRS. It’s still going on.”

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff declared in Melbourne that he doesn’t think wing flexibility is the reason for McLaren’s current advantage.

However, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said after the checkered flag: “What’s quite strange is that they (McLaren) get great (tire) warm-up, but also very little degradation.

“Normally, one comes at the expense of the other. You can have one, but you can’t have both.”

Editor’s Note: Last year McLaren was accused of adding water vapor to the air in their tires to control the overheating and enabling them to lap fast for a long period of time.  If not water vapor, what gas might they be adding to the air this year to help with overheating of the tires?

Red Bull will be hoping that the likely loss of the mini-DRS effect from Shanghai this weekend will erode some of McLaren’s advantage. Van Haren suspects the team knew the FIA’s clampdown for China was coming.

“It is one of the reasons that he expressed himself rather optimistically about closing the gap with McLaren, which is clearly too fast at the moment,” he said.

“Within Red Bull, they think that the new guidelines of the FIA will certainly affect the competition.”

Amid his optimism, however, even Marko has his doubts about whether the FIA really can curb ingenious F1 engineers who find ways to swerve around the rules.

“The teams simply have much more manpower than the FIA,” he told Servus TV. “So in my view, what cannot be verified cannot be permitted.”