McLaren Racing boss Zak Brown isn’t giving up on his efforts to convince the FIA to take action against Red Bull’s partnership with ‘sister’ outfit, Visa Cash App RB.
Red Bull's history with a second team dates back to 2006, when it acquired Minardi and rebranded the Faenza-based outfit as Toro Rosso which later evolved into AlphaTauri and most recently into VCARB.
Initially, the small Italian team served as a testing ground for Red Bull’s young talent, with the likes of Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen all graduating to Red Bull and championship glory.
However, while Brown accepts that there was a justification in the past for special alliances between bigger and smaller teams, the McLaren boss feels that the current ownership structure exploited by Red Bull is no longer compelling.
A longstanding vocal critic of this arrangement, the American insists his concerns go beyond personal rivalry.
Brown argues that the close collaboration undermines the spirit of fair competition and calls for rule changes to prevent undue advantages from flowing between teams owned by the same entity.
“I’m actually speaking in the wider interest of the sport,” he said at McLaren’s F1 launch earlier this week. “If you look at every other major sport, you’re not allowed to own two teams – and I’d even go further.
“There’s A-B team relationships and when these started 15 years ago it was because there was a huge gap between the top teams and the bottom teams.
©McLaren
“Now that there’s this great budget cap in place, all 10 teams are pretty much running to the cap so we have an equal playing field.
“So to have two ownerships, I can tell you from sitting in the FIA and F1 Commission meetings the voting is always the same even when, in theory, it shouldn’t be in one of the team’s best interests.
“We’ve seen it on track, some collaborations going on, and then technically they’ve been very forthright in where they’re going to take the suspension, etc.”
While some see resource sharing as an efficient way for smaller teams to compete, Brown fears it creates an uneven playing field.
“The definition of a constructor is a team who develops their own IP, so I just think the sport’s now moved on to an equal playing field,” he added.
“To have A-B relationships, to have co-ownership of two teams, I think isn’t a level playing field.
“That’s not what the fans expect and so the FIA really needs to do something about it.”
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