10/06/2023
NEWS STORY
Despite its magical underside being laid bare for all the world to see, Red Bull chief engineer, Paul Monaghan insists his team is not losing too much sleep.
When Lewis Hamilton's car was lifted high into the air by the Monaco marshals following his crash in Saturday practice, team boss Toto Wolff opined the "whoever performed the crane has probably worked for Cirque du Soleil", the Austrian clearly frustrated that the secrets of the W14 had been laid bare.
In all honesty however, it is unlikely that too many teams were preparing to pore over the images arriving in their inboxes, especially as a couple of hours later they were given the opportunity to ogle the secret bits of the absolute star of 2023 thus far, the RB19 following Sergio Perez' crash in Q1.
Since then every man and his aerodynamic-expert dog has studied the shots of the RB19 as it swung helplessly above the Principality.
While Mercedes tech boss, James Allison has admitted that his aero team is poring over the images, Paul Monaghan insists that he and his team are not particularly concerned.
"It's not great," he said of the images. "We don't put our car up like that, but it has happened and we'll move on.
"But there's a phase lag between people seeing it, getting it onto their car and actually going faster with it," he said, when asked if there were fears of copycats. "A better description is that an ignorant copy isn't necessarily going to go faster. It has to integrate. And it's not just a bit of floor geometry."
Upgrades are not the work of a moment - just ask Mercedes, which while aware of the issues with its car from the opening race, didn't have the alternative available for several months.
With that in mind, Monaghan is confident that any team that does opt to copy the RB19 will not be in a position to see the fruits of its labour until the final stages of the season.
"If we change someone else's development plan, then we probably increase the phase lag by which they can get it to the car," he said. "So around Japan time we'll see where everybody is.
"But we've got to maintain our discipline and our development path. And it's only our car that we can change. We can't influence what those guys do. So, we'll keep plugging away in our own manner and we'll try to be quickest."
On the teams copying there rivals, he said: "It's happened for many years, and it will carry on. It's a method of levelling the sport. There are no copyrights, are there?"