Red Bull’s preparations for the FIA clampdown on so-called ’hot’ exhaust diffuser blowing are well advanced, Dr Helmut Marko has warned.
Marko said on Austrian television Servus TV that he regards the clampdown as "a move against Sebastian Vettel’s dominance", after Red Bull pioneered and perfected the technology for its RB7 car.
But team owner Dietrich Mateschitz’s right-hand man on F1 matters warned: "We would not be Red Bull if we did not already have ideas about how to mitigate the effect (of the ban)."
Off-throttle hot-blowing will be effectively banned from Silverstone next month, and on Tuesday it emerged that the FIA has immediately banned teams from running highly aggressive engine maps in qualifying and then switching to a more reliable race mode for the grand prix.
Marko has compared the FIA’s moves with the end-of-season banning of double diffusers and F-ducts, noting that "this time it (the ban) seems to be in a hurry.
"I would say it is about (the dominance of) Red Bull," he charged.
But the Austrian thinks McLaren will be similarly affected by the clampdown because "they copied our system very well", while Ferrari "never really got it under control".
Marko, meanwhile, predicted Renault - with unique front-exiting exhausts - to be hit particularly hard.
But Renault’s technical director James Allison responded: "Some teams will lose more and some teams less; it is hard to know exactly what relative loss we will suffer."
Meanwhile, a FIA spokesman explained that the immediate engine-mapping clampdown is because the spirit of the ’parc ferme’ rules was being exploited.
Charlie Whiting’s technical note to the teams on Tuesday insisted that cars "should be raced exactly as they qualified".