Red Bull may be guilty of "more than cheating" amid the ’T-tray’ affair that is unfolding at the US GP.
That’s according to Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur, who weighed into Formula 1’s latest technical scandal that is being pushed hardest by Red Bull’s title rival McLaren.
Red Bull mechanics showed FIA inspectors how the unique ride-height adjustment system works before sprint qualifying in Austin, insisting it requires special tools rather than enabling surreptitious setup tweaks in parc ferme.
"If they really modified the car in parc ferme, it would be more than cheating," Vasseur told Sky Italia. "It would be huge.
"But I don’t know the details. The FIA will do its job.
"We have to trust the FIA on this one. I don’t want to make any comment on rumours and so, because I don’t know what has happened. I’m not in the team, for sure, and I don’t know if they use it or not.
"But if they use it, it’s clearly cheating. It’s not a grey area or whatever. We’ve had tonnes of grey area from the beginning of the season, but this, if it’s the case, it wouldn’t be a grey area at all.
"We have to trust the FIA, and let’s see."
Red Bull denies ever making illegal setup tweaks between qualifying sessions and grands prix, explaining that the device cannot simply be used on the fly.
"When you hear these cleverly worded comments like ’You can’t use it when the car is assembled’, well, I know the cars are not always assembled," McLaren CEO Zak Brown said on Friday.
"And why should the FIA seal something if it’s not accessible?" he wondered.
Brown is pushing the FIA to carefully look into how long the offending Red Bull system has been used for, and whether it was ever tweaked in parc ferme.
Rival Red Bull bosses hint that McLaren is simply pushing the matter so hard perhaps as retaliation for having its clever ’mini-DRS’ banned recently.
McLaren admits all of its rear wing designs - not just the low-downforce one used in Baku - had to be changed "to varying degrees" as a result of that technical scandal.
As for Red Bull’s T-tray or ’bib’ device, the team says it cannot completely remove it from the championship-charging car until Brazil.
Dr Helmut Marko insists: "The system is completely legal and was known to all the teams and the FIA. I think that says enough.
"You cannot change the ride height between qualifying and the race, and we have not," the Red Bull consultant told Sky Deutschland. "I don’t understand all the talk about this.
"Maybe someone wants to distract attention from other problems," Marko added.