What F1’s rule book says on Aston Martin’s Red Bull clone

While the Silverstone-based team had been open in recent weeks that a major revamp was coming, few had been expecting it to have adopted much of the concept that Red Bull has put to use so far with the RB18.

But while even Red Bull has admitted that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and teams have long copied each other’s ideas in grand prix history, F1’s rule book has got stricter in recent years about such behaviour.

And ironically it was Aston Martin’s own actions, when it competed under the Racing Point moniker, that means things are much more strongly regulated now.

Back in 2020, Racing Point caused a big controversy when it ran a straight copy of the previous year’s Mercedes W10.

Its actions triggered complaints from rivals and, following a protest from Renault, Racing Point was found guilty of having illegally used Mercedes’ design IP with its rear brake ducts.

The FIA handed the team a €400,000 fine and docked it 15 constructors’ championship points for its actions.

Beyond the specifics of the case, Racing Point’s action prompted a wider debate in the sport about whether or not F1 risked damaging itself if teams suddenly felt their best way of achieving success was to copy other designs.

It was agreed that such a scenario should not happen and the FIA was mandated to come up with a series of regulations to limit the scope for car clones.

As the FIA’s head of single-seater matters, Nikolas Tombazis said at the time: “This will prevent teams from using extensive part of photos to copy whole portions of other cars in the way that Racing Point has done.

“We will still accept individual components to be copied in local areas, but we don’t want the whole car to be fundamentally a copy of another car.”

The new rules which came into force for the following season, and were carried through to the all-new 2022 rule book, banning the sharing of any IP between…