27/10/2022
NEWS STORY
It is widely anticipated that the FIA will announce the agreement it has reached with Red Bull - and Aston Martin - over their breaches of the budget cap on Friday.
Red Bull and the sport's governing body were in talks at COTA and it was widely anticipated that an announcement was forthcoming, however the death of Dietrich Mateschitz led to discussions being put on hold.
With talks now continuing it is thought that Red Bull has reached an Accepted Breach Agreement with the FIA, which essentially means that the Austrian team accepts that it breached the cap and is ready to accept the resultant penalty.
However, it is the penalty that is likely to cause further outrage in the paddock and on social media as the Austrian team is likely to merely face a fine and restrictions on windtunnel time next season.
The breach, described as minor by the FIA and totalling around $1.8m, is understood to relate to a number of factors including catering, sick pay, Dan Fallows gardening leave and tax.
Speaking at COTA last weekend, Christian Horner admitted that another factor over which there was a question mark was spare parts.
"We feel that with such an immature set of regulations, there's going to be clarifications and tidying up, and I think, certainly how unused inventory was treated was, in our view, a change to the regulation.
"Certainly we applied a very strict ruling in the way that we treated our new stock," he added. "And I think that a clarification came out in June that changed the application of that.
"That had a seven-digit effect on our submission," he admitted. "But, of course, retrospectively, we were not allowed to change our submission.
"What you have to remember is that the submission can constitute about 75,000 line items. So, there's an enormous amount of data that has to be inputted into these submissions and I think it's only natural that, in a first year we have a set of very complicated regulations, to be able to get its arms around everything, is almost impossible. Almost impossible. And interpretations have been made, maybe by other teams have been slightly different, and then a change like that has a huge swing in your application of how you've completed your form which, had we been able to resubmit at that point in time, we would have treated very, very differently.
"There's probably several teams that have been affected in that manner," he insisted.
Deemed to have committed a procedural breach, Aston Martin will most likely face a fine, as was the case with Williams.
Check out our Thursday gallery from Mexico City here.