‘It is clearly illegal to change the height of the car in the parking brake’

As the topic of Red Bull’s mechanism to change the ground clearance of the RB20 in park-and-hold mode is growing (read the details here), Oscar Piastri said that if such a thing were to happen constitutes a flagrant violation of Formula 1 regulations.

Red Bull has admitted that it has this mechanism, but stressed that the mechanism can only be used when the car is locked in the garage – and thus not in park-and-ride mode, between qualifying tests and the race, which expressly prohibits any such intervention.

In a few words, this mechanism in itself is not illegal, but on the contrary, its use in park-lock mode is illegal. The fact that the use of this mechanism is made by a simple spring inside the cockpit, is what has raised the suspicions of other teams that RBR can also use it under the limitations of park-ferme.

With RBR in the midst of a long and unpredictable battle with McLaren for the constructors’ title, as well as the drivers’ championship between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, the two McLaren drivers launched an indirect but clear attack on Red Bull for theme.

“We are obviously pushing the limits of the technical regulations. Everyone does, and that’s what makes her F1 what it is”said Oscar Piastri.“But from what I’ve heard and been told, this doesn’t push the boundaries: it clearly oversteps them.

I haven’t heard which car it is on, or if it exists on any car, and apparently there are some reports. But if it’s something that’s used, it’s clearly not something that pushes the boundaries of regulations. It is outside the ‘grey’ area and inside the ‘black’ area (of the regulations)”.

The Australian went on to say that the matter needs to be investigated whether RBR has shown a rapid improvement in performance compared to recent races. Just as explored after Azerbaijan and McLaren’s mini-DRS.

“If there is a big difference in performance, then there will definitely be some questions. If not, I don’t know. Ours mini-DRS it was legal. Although we had to make some changes, it was nothing revolutionary for the car. We’ll see if that makes any difference now.”Piastri concluded.

Lando Norris, for his part, added: “It’s one thing to have it in your car and another thing how much you utilize it and use it, and we have no idea about that. If it has helped them, if they took advantage of it as people think, maybe things will change in our direction.

“But if you’re talking about such things, they wouldn’t get many multiple positions or wins just because of such a device. I don’t think it will change anything in the balance, but maybe if we look at certain qualifying tests or the differences in certain races, where we were separated by centimeters or even milliseconds, nothing we can say that it helped one way or the other.”.

The Brit concluded: “It’s good that the FIA he does what he does. There is a difference between black and white in regulations and pushing the boundaries, creating new components and innovating within the space you are allowed to innovate. I think this is something that we at McLaren have done very well, but we make sure we don’t go too far.”