Red Bull boss, Laurent Mekies admits that he has serious concerns over how the FIA reached its conclusion in terms of the ADUO system.

To everyone's surprise - except Mercedes, which had been claiming the Red Bull-Ford unit was the most powerful before a wheel had barely turned - the Austrian manufacturer's ICE is indeed regarded as the benchmark by the sport's governing body.

While Mercedes has started from pole at all seven races, and converted six of these into wins, the best qualifying result for a Red Bull powered car has been front rows in Miami and Monaco, and two podium finishes, though Isack Hadjar's in Monaco is still 'under discussion'.

While Mekies accepts that the ADUO is based on ICE performance, and not the electric side of the hybrid engines, he takes issues with the FIA's conclusions, conclusions which will allow the two championship leaders, Mercedes and Ferrari, to 'upgrade' their engines.

"We are completely ok with the fact that the rules state that you should only try to estimate the pecking order of the ICE power," he told reporters in Spain at the weekend. "We are completely okay with that. We have all agreed to that and we don't think that is the issue."

However...

"We would like to have a deeper conversation because we do not see one single data sample that indicates that we would have an advantage over our friends at Mercedes," he added.

Choosing his words very, very carefully, the Frenchman suggests that the FIA must be 100% certain about how it reached its conclusion, because outwardly it doesn't make sense.

"You need to have extreme certainty in the way you are assessing the ICE pecking order, in order to have the right confidence to give it to the dominant team and not to the team that is chasing the dominant team," he said.

"Especially when you get relative performance variations from track layout to track layout that are perfectly consistent with the ICE power sensitivity," he added.

for example...

"You go to Canada, high ICE power sensitivity, we qualified sixth," he explained. "You go to Monaco, low ICE power sensitivity, we qualified pretty much 0.04 from pole. Then you go to Barcelona, again high ICE power sensitivity, you qualify sixth again.

"We do not see one single data sample where we estimate ourselves higher than the competition, let alone being consistently above them," he insisted.

The Frenchman is adamant that Red Bull is not seeking a Right of Review-type 'stunt', but merely wants to see how the findings have been arrived at.

As it stands the FIA has yet to officially publish the results, but nonetheless, with everything pointing to Red Bull being adjudged as the most powerful ICE, the manufacturer, understandably, wants irrefutable proof.

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Celtic Tiger, 2 hours ago

"Whatever happened to the transparency that MBS touted as a top priority to getting his a*se on the throne? Why not publish for the teams exactly how they go about finding these numbers? In fact, why not make it public for all of us to see, unless of course, as Doughnut-cali seems to view it, we're all too stupid to understand any of that "technical stuff" so we should just mind out own business."

Mekies sceptical of ADUO conclusions

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