Jon Noble: Is the Red Bull bib controversy a storm on a 'tea-tray' or a brewing scandal?

When news of the FIA’s intervention on a potential parc ferme trick to adjust the front bib height erupted on the eve of the United States Grand Prix, it sent shockwaves up and down the pitlane. Suspicions about what team had a device inside its car to raise or lower the bib – more commonly known as a T-tray – pointed towards one team, but there had been no official confirmation about who it was.

That all changed in the Austin paddock on Thursday when Red Bull put up its hands and said that it was them – but was clear that it had never used the device outside of the regulations. Instead, it was a simple tool that the team had used to tweak the car quicky on practice days – one of many adjustable elements on the RB20.

As Red Bull team principal Christian Horner repeatedly said over the weekend: “It would be easier to adjust the rear roll bar than it is to get to that component. It's all part of the packaging and in the front end of the chassis.

“Every car has a tool that they can adjust the front of the bib with. Ours is located at the front, in front of the footwell, and it's been there for, I think, over three years. But you've got to have the pedals out, and other panels and pipework out, in order to be able to get to it. So, it's like any other adjustment on the car.”

He is certainly correct that if Red Bull had wanted to adjust car settings under parc ferme conditions, then there are a myriad of alternative ways that would be much easier to do and would fly completely under the radar. After all, the design of this front bib adjuster device is no secret.

It has been made public to rival teams because it forms part of the Open Source car components regulations that demands teams log parts on FIA servers that are freely available to be seen by all competitors. And the story ultimately only really got going because Red Bull’s competitors had dug through the Open Source documents and discovered the system. They found that the device had a range of settings that could be quickly adjusted by the use of a tool.

Horner believes uproar over Red Bull's device in Austin was a sign of rivals' paranoia

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Horner was clear in Austin that there was nothing more to the story than it being a case of rivals’ paranoia, with the FIA having to act to appease them. Some of the accusations being thrown around certainly did not make sense.

After all, it would certainly be almost beyond comprehension for a team to install a device that was a deliberate cheat, and know that it would have to upload its design so that all its rivals knew it existed. It has also been there for three years already, and if it had busted the rules then surely a whistleblower would have come forward already.

There is another aspect to it too, in that the device itself is not illegal. It is just like any other setting adjustment tool that a team has: you can change what you want on the car; you just can’t alter certain elements once parc ferme is in force between qualifying and the race.

If Red Bull and the FIA hoped that the matter would go away, then they are likely to be disappointed

It takes a bit of a leap to move from having a system where you ‘could’ have adjusted the settings, to actually doing it. Red Bull could alter a hundred other things on its car too, so the focus on this one part seems slightly excessive.

From the perspective of the FIA’s head of single-seater matters Nikolas Tombazis, he did not seem too alarmed by what he saw. He felt that the fitting of a seal over the adjuster was enough to ensure that Red Bull could not alter it, and from his perspective the matter was done.

Speaking during a small media briefing on Saturday morning, he said: “Honestly, can I say with complete certainty about whether there's ever been anything irregular? No. Can I say that the matter is closed? Yes, absolutely. I do think the amount of discussion about this topic is about a factor of 100 more than it deserves. But that is for you guys to decide what to write…”

Tombazis considers the matter closed, but reality may not be as simple

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

With it ultimately down to the regulator, and not teams, to decide what is legal or not, Tombazis’ stance pointed to the affair being closed. It would also suggest that ‘bibgate’ was (and to steal a brilliant turn of phrase that my media centre colleague Giles Richard from The Guardian wrote) – a storm on a 'tea-tray'.

But if Red Bull and the FIA hoped that the matter would go away, then they are likely to be disappointed because there remain those in the paddock who are convinced there is more to this story than has been made public so far – and they are not going to rest until they have answers. In private, they are questioning why, when the Red Bull squad elected not to run a livery takeover because the extra 1kg weight of paint was a performance handicap, the squad would deliberately fit an extra adjuster system simply to help it alter ride height in practice.

Some rivals also laughed at the way Red Bull demonstrated to the FIA how the device was adjusted with a lengthy socket, pole and Allen key. It was lambasted as a charade – and earned the nickname of being a tool that Bugs Bunny would use when in reality adjustments could be made in a much less public way.

There have also been suggestions that former Red Bull staff who have moved teams may have information about what the device was or was not used for – which is how it is claimed rival squads first became alerted to it over the Singapore Grand Prix weekend.

However, it must be said that paddock whispers of there being open knowledge of something are entirely different to there being proof of something nefarious having taken place – and especially when there may be ulterior motives at play to cause trouble. That is why Tombazis is cautious about following through on demands from some teams about interviewing former Red Bull personnel for official statements – or even signed affidavits as McLaren CEO Zak Brown has suggested should happen.

“We need to always consider that we're dealing with humans,” explained Tombazis. “We're dealing with humans changing conditions: with loyalties - old loyalties, and new loyalties. So, one has to be a bit careful about how you escalate that. We also don't want to be fitting lie detectors on people and doing interrogations under bright lights, or something like that. That is not what we want to do here.

Intensive interest on the T-tray area appears likely to continue as F1's triple-header rumbles on

Photo by: Andreas Beil

“I've obviously worked in the past in teams, quite a lot, and I've employed people from other teams. I think there's sometimes a tendency to say, well, where I came from, we were doing XYZ. And sometimes one has to really interpret these comments very, very carefully. You cannot just base an escalation on a few comments like that.”

Yet the matter seems far from closed; and there have been suggestions that the eruption of the bib controversy is part of a bigger picture play that has been running since the start of the season to destabilise the Milton Keynes-based team’s management. Whether or not that viewpoint is a conspiracy too far remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: it is likely to rumble on.

All eyes are now on Ben Sulayem, who clearly has two options on the table

On Sunday night in Austin, shortly before Mercedes boss Toto Wolff spoke to the media in his regular post-race debrief, he delayed the start as his mobile phone went off with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem on the other end. We don’t know what the pair of them talked about during their brief conversation, but it was very telling that, as he spoke on his return, after letting rip over what he felt was an ‘outrageous’ matter, he suggested there could be movement from on high.

“I think the leadership of the FIA is going to look at that, and say, 'What are we doing with this?'” he said.

All eyes are now on Ben Sulayem, who clearly has two options on the table – concur with Tombazis that the Red Bull system is a non-story and there is nothing to see here, or decide that some deeper probing is needed.

Ben Sulayem is set to have a say in the matter

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images