Penalties won’t throw Red Bull ’off course’ - Marko

Dr Helmut Marko has played down the impact that Red Bull’s budget cap penalties will have on the team’s competitiveness going forward.

One element of the fine for the ’minor’ 2021 overspend is a $7 million fine.

"Seven million dollars is a lot of money. But it won’t hurt them," Gunther Steiner, boss of the small American team Haas, told the German broadcaster ntv.

"If you had said that next year you will have $5 million less than all the other teams in the budget cap - and I’m just saying a number - then that would have real damage to the development of the car," he added.

Steiner also doubts that the 10 percent reduction in wind tunnel time is a penalty that "really works" to disadvantage Red Bull.

"Red Bull is good enough to compensate," he said. "They can just do something else.

"There are still opportunities for them to develop somewhere else, so development doesn’t stop at all. It’s just moved to another area of the car.

"You can work on the weight instead. You can do so much with the money."

Fascinatingly, even Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko does not appear to substantially disagree with Steiner.

"We don’t let these controlled actions throw us off course," he told the Austrian newspaper Osterreich. "We make up for that with motivation.

"Also, we can mitigate the wind tunnel work to other activities, such as weight saving or suspension strategies. These are logical consequences," Marko, 79, added.

"We are also making adjustments in our accounting and legal departments."