Why Red Bull’s F1 rivals see its “minor” breach as anything but

But what is crystal clear is that while the labelling of Red Bull’s overspend has been officially classified as a “minor” breach, its opposition sees it as anything but a small matter.

To be classified as a “minor” offence rather than a “material” one, teams must have overspent by less than 5% of the allowance. So with last year’s cost cap being roughly $145 million, that could still be up to $7.25 million.

There has been no confirmation from the FIA or Red Bull about the scale of the breach, but there have been plenty of suggestions it is somewhere between $1 million and $2 million.

That may seem quite a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things but when it comes to development budgets, extra spending like that ultimately makes a big difference.

Lewis Hamilton has made reference to just $500,000 more development money being unlocked for Mercedes last year as enough to allow it to bring a new floor design, which would have lifted the pace of his car to potentially change the outcome of the title chase.

As his team boss Toto Wolff said at the Singapore GP: “If it is a so-called minor breach, I think the word is probably not correct.

“If you’re spending 5 million more, and you’re still in the minor breach, it still has a big impact on the championship.

“To give you an idea, we obviously monitor closely which parts are being brought to the track from the top teams every single race – 2021 season and 2022 season.

“We can see that there are two top teams that are just about the same and there is another team that spends more. So we know exactly that we’re spending three and a half million a year in parts that we bring to the car. And then you can see what difference it makes to spend another 500,000 – it would be a difference.

“We haven’t produced lightweight parts for the car in order to bring us down from a double-digit overweight because we simply haven’t got the money. So we need to do it for next year’s car.

“We can’t homologate a lightweight chassis and bring it in, because it’s just $2 million that we will be over the cap. So you can see every spend more has a performance advantage.”

It is this trade-off between spending and performance that top teams have had to juggle under the cost cap era, and that is why the overspending of a rival is such a big matter for them.

Ferrari in particular has called several times for…