F1 News
Szafnauer complains: 'I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but rules affect us more'
- GPblog.com
After the race in Bahrain it was almost impossible not to hear Otmar Szafnauer complaining about the injustice done to his team. According to the Aston Martin F1 team boss the biggest culprit for the team's failure in the desert was the rule changes.
Pink Mercedes
As we all know, the concept of last year's Racing Point car was heavily based on the Mercedes concept. Not surprisingly, Lawrence Stroll's team was jokingly labelled 'the pink Mercedes'. In Drive to Survive, Lawrence Stroll recently called other teams who complained about the Racing Point concept "sore losers."
With the chassis rules frozen this year, as well as the token system, it meant that Aston Martin couldn't change very much about its car. Although the FIA did make a few aerodynamic changes, Szafnauer says this is seriously to the disadvantage of teams driving with a low rake. "I am not a conspiracy theorist, but last year we already indicated that the new regulations would affect us more than teams with a high rake," he said in conversation with Motorsport.com.
Never unanimous
He also rejects that there was a unanimous vote for this year's regulations. "There was never a real vote. There was only an indicative vote. In this vote there were three teams against. Those were the low rake teams [Mercedes and Racing Point], but there was also a high rake team that voted against! So it was far from unanimous. It should never have been decided like that, because there were three teams against, while you need eight out of ten votes to decide something unanimously."