In a bid to ensure that the rules are not broken, the FIA is to introduce further guidelines in terms of teams sharing information.
The most obvious example of such potential is between the two Red Bull owned teams, however there are a number of teams in the pitlane that share close relationships with rivals.
This season saw AlphaTauri almost claim seventh from Williams in the team standings, and some believe this to be courtesy of assistance from its sister team.
"I think, right or not right, it needs to be discussed," said Haas team boss, Guenther Steiner recently. "Obviously, there are a lot of other sports where that is not allowed.
"But up to now there was not an issue with this," he added, having made his point.
However, the FIA's single-seater chief, Nikolas Tombazis is confident that the sport's governing body has the situation in hand, though he admits there is room for improvement.
"We check teams that are in close proximity to each other a lot more closely than we check completely independent teams, exactly to make sure this thing doesn't happen," he tells Autosport.
"That is a concern," he admits. "It has been a concern not only between the two teams mentioned, but also among other pairs of teams.
"We believe that AlphaTauri specifically does have quite different aerodynamic solutions to the other company, and we don't think there's any sign of any direct collaboration. Clearly, they are working hard and they have made a step forward. But I don't think it can be said it's due to collaboration.
"That said, collaboration, or making sure that no such thing happens, is one of the tricky parts of policing teams. We need to audit and make sure that all of these teams are well segregated. And we will be issuing some further guidance quite soon to just provide further information to the teams about how they can convince us none of that is happening.
"We're not underestimating the challenge," he insists, "it is one of the difficulties we have.
"That is obviously heavily illegal," he says of teams trialling their own development programmes with a bid to sharing the data to benefit both, "because we have at times in the past checked similar components between teams and then got into their development process to see how they evolved.
"I don't think there's something like that happening at the moment. We have checked and we have a process to check. Is it easy? No, I'm not saying it's easy, it's always sort of a challenge."
The Greek engineer admits that one of the greatest threats comes from the potential for teams to correspond virtually.
"The main incentive for two teams to collaborate isn't whether they exchange components or whether they even share a wind tunnel," he says. "You can have two teams collaborating, one is in the UK, and one is in Argentina, and if two teams wants to communicate against regulations, have Zoom calls and have the engineers chat with each other, that is quite feasible.
"We don't watch people's day-to-day movements, and nor is it our intention to do so. These pairs of teams get more frequently criticised for collaboration just because they have common ownership or whatever, but it is not the only pair of teams that could collaborate. You could have two independent teams who decide to mutually gain by helping each other.
"I don't think that's happening," he insists, "I'm just saying that our tools to prevent this happening don't need to be just linked to physical components that are sold by one team to the other."
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