Red Bull use green-can stunt to accuse rival team of copying their car design

Aston Martin cleared by FIA after upgrades controversy Alonso facing sanctions after ‘incompetent’ stewards blast

Formula 1’s latest cheating row took a strange turn yesterday as Red Bull’s pit wall lined up a row of green lime-flavoured cans of their energy drink during practice in Barcelona in a thinly-disguised dig at rivals Aston Martin, whom they have accused of cheating.

Relations between the two teams are tense, with Red Bull having lost a number of personnel to Aston Martin in recent months, including Dan Fallows, their former head of aerodynamics, who was appointed Aston Martin’s new technical director last year but took up his post only in April after a settlement between the teams.

Now Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has asked the FIA to look closely at Aston Martin’s upgrades to their car for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, suggesting some of their intellectual property may have been stolen.

Aston Martin have arrived with a heavily modified car for this race featuring undercut sidepods and a stepped, ramp design on top of the bodywork, similar to Red Bull’s.

“Copying is the biggest form of flattery,” Horner told the BBC yesterday morning. “It is quite a thing to instruct your team to come up with a very close-looking clone of our car and, of course, a few peo

ple have moved over the winter period, and what you can’t control is what they take in their heads.

“But what would be of grave concern to us would be if any IP had in any way changed hands. That is where we rely on the FIA to do their job, they research, they have all the access and we will be relying on them heavily to ensure that no Red Bull IP has found its way into that car.”

Aston Martin responded to Horner’s comments by saying that the FIA had already confirmed their new design was the result of “legitimate independent work”.

However, that did not placate Red Bull, whose pit wall were clearly trying to make a point when they lined up green cans of the energy drink in first practice, the same colour that Aston Martin race in. Red Bull later released a statement saying that they had noted Aston Martin’s claims of legitimacy “with interest”.

“While imitation is the greatest form of flattery, any replication of design would obviously need to comply with the FIA’S rules around ‘Reverse Engineering’,” the team said. “However, should any transfer of IP have taken place, that would clearly be a breach of regulations and would be a serious concern.”

Aston Martin have been in trouble before for copying a rival’s design. In 2020, when they were competing as Racing Point, they were accused of producing a “pink Mercedes” based on the 2019 Mercedes design. They were eventually docked 15 points and