F1 leaders say they are target of bid to slow pit stops

Formula One leader Red Bull said a move to slow down pit stops on safety grounds appeared to be aimed at reducing their advantage but could instead add to the danger.

The governing FIA issued a technical directive to teams before the weekend's Styrian Grand Prix in Austria to clarify the rules and prevent the use of automated systems during pit stops.

New controls will be enforced from the Hungarian Grand Prix in August.

Red Bull holds the record for the quickest pit stop at 1.82 seconds and regularly manages to change all four tires in less than two seconds — a time considerably faster than rivals Mercedes usually achieve.

“If you can't be beaten then obviously the most logical thing is for your competitors to try to slow you down, and that's obviously what's happening here,” Red Bull team boss Christian Horner told reporters.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff revealed his team had asked FIA some three or four weeks ago about a safety mechanism related to a system they were using and asking if it could be optimized.

“Did that trigger anything else? Maybe. I don't know,” added the Austrian.

Horner said teams already had a duty to ensure their cars were safe as they left the pit lane and the penalties for a wheel not being fixed were “brutal.”

“What the technical directive is trying to achieve, I'm not quite sure because I think there's an awful lot of complexity to it,” he said.

“You can see there's an awful lot of pointed activity in our direction at the moment — but that comes with the territory of being competitive.”

Red Bull's Max Verstappen is 12 points clear of Mercedes' seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, while the team is 37 points clear in the constructors' standings.

Mercedes has had several glaringly slow pit stops, most notably when failing to remove a jammed wheel from Valtteri Bottas' car until the Tuesday after the Monaco Grand Prix.

Horner said there had been previous discussions and directives on pit stop procedures and the latest was not well-thought through.

“To have to hold a car for two tenths of a second, I think you could almost argue that it is dangerous because you are judging your gaps and the guy releasing the car is having to make that judgment,” he said.

“Formula One is about innovation and competition.”