McLaren on Red Bull/AlphaTauri partnership: 'Have big concerns'

McLaren is uneasy about it

"We have some big concerns over the alliance between AlphaTauri and Red Bull. I think that is something that needs to be addressed in the future," Brown told Motorsport.com. Red Bull itself says they are not breaking the rules, but McLaren does not really care about that. Nor does the fact that the FIA is carrying out the necessary checks and (so far) has not observed any unauthorised practices assuage Brown and Co.'s concerns.

AlphaTauri transferred staff from Faenza to Britain this season. Currently, the British town of Bicester houses AlphaTauri's aerodynamics department and to save costs, more staff have been stationed there. At least, that is Red Bull's reading. The move, according to other teams, is not just to save costs.

"It is two teams with common ownership, which you wouldn’t have in other sports. It could benefit Red Bull in] a lot of different ways. There is a reason why they are moving a lot of their people from Italy," said Brown, who also knows that Helmut Marko has announced that his formation will do everything it can (within the rules) to benefit from having two teams present in Formula 1. “I get that because that’s what the rules say. But I think we need to look at the governance of the sport around technical alliances.”

FIA must strictly control

Information may not be transferred just like that, as teams work with budget caps and also with a maximum number of hours available in the wind tunnel, for example. Some teams in Formula 1, however, find it striking that AlphaTauri introduced updates through the season mainly to give them an advantage in the low-speed corners, a point where the RB19 was actually less so.

Could it be that information from AlphaTauri or updates are ending up with Red Bull after all? It is up to the FIA to prevent that, but Brown is thus not entirely confident that the technical alliance is within the permissible.