Bitter pill to swallow
The ADUO was supposed to be a virtuous step forward for F1, a ‘perfect’ middle ground between the much-criticized Balance of Performance and the risk of condemning several teams to seasons marked by a non-competitive engine, but for now it is proving to be a very complicated tangle to unravel that leaves at least puzzled.
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In Monaco the FIA informed the teams about the results related to the first ‘checkpoint’ and immediately those who could use the ADUO started working on the power unit as shown by the fact that Audi brought updates already in Barcelona and Ferrari will have improvements under the hood starting today in Austria. The FIA never officially released the results and Red Bull was stunned because it was ranked as the best engine manufacturer without therefore having the possibility to intervene on the power unit.
In Milton Keynes the outcry was immediate, but the request for explanations will not overturn the result, on the contrary. According to the report by The-Race.com the FIA would be willing to offer Red Bull a detailed explanation of the data collected and the reasons behind its decisions, even if some information related to the performance of other power unit manufacturers cannot be disclosed for confidentiality reasons.
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It should be remembered that the ADUO examines only and exclusively the thermal engine, the ICE, so it is plausible that overall Mercedes has the best ‘power train’ including also the electric part, but evidently at the ICE level Red Bull is the best and for this reason must remain sidelined even if team principal Laurent Mekies stated that “We do not find any single data indicating an advantage over our friends at Mercedes“.
What makes the situation truly paradoxical is the ‘grand finale’ that could put Red Bull in even more difficulty: the FIA will make the ADUO-1 measurements public only before the Belgian GP, that is in about a month, and if Mercedes does not make interventions by the Hungarian GP improving the power unit’s performance Red Bull will remain the reference ICE even when the second measurement period expires. Red Bull is basically trapped until Mercedes (or Ferrari in case of astronomical gains) improve their thermal engine.
