The FIA says it has no legality concerns over the upgrade Aston Martin has introduced to its car for this weekend’s race.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said the update Aston Martin has brought to the Spanish Grand Prix was inspired by his team’s car.
“Copying is the biggest form of flattery,” Horner told the BBC. “It’s quite a thing to instruct your team to come up with a very close-looking clone of our car.”
Horner pointed out Aston Martin have also hired several ex-Red Bull staff. They include head of technical operations Andrew Alessi and head of aerodynamics Dan Fallows, though the latter only arrived at Aston Martin last month, long after work on the upgrade would have begun.
“Of course a few people have moved over the winter period,” said Horner. “What you can’t control is what they take in their heads.
“But obviously what would be of grave concern to us is if any IP [intellectual property] had in any way changed hands. So that’s why we rely on the FIA to do their job, to do their research, to do the checks, they have all the access, and we’ll be relying on them heavily to ensure that no Red Bull IP has found its way into that car.”
An Aston Martin spokesperson said the team had co-operated with the FIA’s inquiries over how the upgrade was produced. “We have shared details of our update with the FIA technical people. Having analysed the data and the processes used to create the update, the FIA has now confirmed in writing that our update was generated as a result of legitimate independent work in accordance with the Technical Regulations.”
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The FIA confirmed it had noticed the similarities between the two cars and taken steps to confirm Aston Martin had produced its own designs without obtaining any information from Red Bull in contravention of the rules.
“The FIA carried out a routine pre-event legality check of the…