Red Bull fume over ‘clone’ Aston Martin while Alonso rages at F1 stewards

Formula One opened the European leg of the season in sweltering temperatures and an appropriately heated and fractious atmosphere in the paddock. Fernando Alonso launched a scathing attack on the FIA, the sport’s governing body, for which he faces a potential punishment, while Red Bull in turn expressed scorn and disbelief at Aston Martin, who were accused of copying the design of their car.

Before practice had even begun at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya the brickbats were flying. Aston Martin, who have been off the pace all season, wheeled out the updated version of their AMR22 car, which bore a striking resemblance to the mightily quick Red Bull RB18, with which Max Verstappen has already won three races this season.

At the end of last year, two senior aerodynamicists, Dan Fallows and Andrew Alessi, left Red Bull to join Aston Martin and the Red Bull Team principal, Christina Horner, noted his “grave concern” that Red Bull’s intellectual property may have been compromised. “It is quite a thing to instruct your team to come up with a very close-looking clone of our car and, of course, a few people have moved over the winter period, and what you can’t control is what they take in their heads,” he said.

The Aston Martin has already been dubbed the “green Red Bull” and Red Bull’s pit-wall team were pointedly all sat with the green edition flavour of the drink at their work stations during practice.

Aston Martin have form in this department. When the team were Racing Point in 2020, they used photographs to mimic the design of the title-winning Mercedes of 2019, after which the FIA banned teams from copying rival designs.

The FIA issued as statement on Friday announcing they had concluded a legality investigation into