“Branded as Cheats”: Red Bull Warned by Spygate Survivor of Ruining 2007 Repeat as Budget Cap Racket Continues

No one could have predicted the ending to the 2021 season, with the intense amount of drama and controversy that followed. But the season ended, and Red Bull were deserved winners. Unfortunately, 2022 brought a new headache for the team as they have been adjudged as having breached the spending limits introduced by the FIA.

The cost cap breach has been the most discussed topic in F1 for the last couple of months. After a lot of fiery exchanges and insinuations, the FIA finally revealed that Red Bull were guilty of a breach of the limits. As a result, the team agreed to sign an Accepted Breach Agreement with the FIA. But according to Marc Priestley, the punishment doesn’t stop there.

Speaking on the “In the Fast Lane” podcast, he discussed how the hit to Red Bull’s reputation is a penalty in itself.  He said, “What happens is people are looking from the outside right now, and Red Bull are getting slagged off from all quarters…”

“But actually, if you go behind the surface, the Christian Horners and Max Verstappens, there are a 1000 people behind the scenes who’ve got nothing to do with this and are just trying their best to be the very best.”

“For everything I’ve just said about having this wonderful team culture and this brilliant group of people that have had just now started to generate massive success that’s because all of those 1000 people are brilliant at what they do and they’ve been doing excellent work.”

“And so they get tarnished and you can feel this. And I’ve had this thing in the inside of McLaren in 2007, you feel like you’re being tarnished with the same brush.”

“People won’t be calling them cheats just like they called us cheats in 2007 over the Spygate affair. Well, that was nothing to do with me, that was nothing to do with anybody in our team apart from a very small group. In fact, one person was at the heart of that. But the entire team, not just on the back pages of newspapers but on the front page of the newspapers here in the UK, were being branded as cheats. And that really hurts.”

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Spygate was one of the biggest scandals to hit F1, with a massive penalty for McLaren – a disqualification. In terms of punishments, Red Bull’s punishment is minuscule in comparison, but the damage doesn’t stop there.

Red Bull needs to handle the broken glass pieces carefully

McLaren were slapped with a $100 million fine and disqualification from the WCC. Red Bull has only been fined $7 million and some restrictions in wind tunnel testing. The comparisons are difficult to make, but at the same time clearly visible.

The important job then and now is to get out of the dirty water. Priestly said, “It’s actually a really important job of the team to manage that internally because we talk about confidence being a key part of any success that comes, you can quickly lose that if the whole world is talking about you in a negative sense.”

“So Christian Horner and the management team will have to very carefully navigate this internally. McLaren in 2007, Ron Dennis was very good at doing that. He sort of created this environment where it was us against the world. If the world were going to say these nasty things about us, we’ll take them on and we’ll show them. We had that mentality. It’s us versus the rest of the world. We’ll show them on the race track.”

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2022 has ended for all it matters to Red Bull. Both trophies have been won, Max Verstappen has his record. The job now is to plan for 2023 and to find a way to get out of the controversies.