Red Bull technical director Adrian Newey has said that he is bored of other teams questioning the legality of the team's front wing.
The wing on the RB7 appears to flex at each end more than any other on the grid, but has been passed as legal by the FIA. More stringent load tests were brought in after a similar situation with Red Bull last year, and teams have now started to admit they will attempt to develop their own versions this season. Newey said that any complaints were growing old, and that he felt it was an attempt by one team to get the wing outlawed.
"To be honest, it's a bit boring," Newey told the Red Bulletin. "I've had a season of people moaning about our front wing last year. The tests were made more rigorous by the FIA, it's examined in great detail… I mean, frankly, I think it's an effort by one team in particular to get a change in regulations because the regulations are very clear in terms of what you can and cannot do with the front wing.
The rest comes down to how you run the car. We choose to run the car with quite a lot of rake; that means high at the rear, low at the front. Others, McLaren for instance, have chosen to take the opposite route. They run the car quite low-rake. Once you run the rear low, that means the front wing is automatically high."
Newey also said that it was annoying that McLaren had been able to make such an advancement in performance by copying the Red Bull exhaust system, but that it was just a challenge for the team to improve further.
"It's annoying but flattering at the same time. They've certainly taken a big step forward with it and it seems to have worked particularly well for them. That's the nature of Formula One. We have to keep developing, try to come up with new ideas to stay ahead."
While Renault have gone with a more radical exhaust system than the rest of the grid, Newey said it was not a path that Red Bull were looking at, instead focussing on improving its current design.
"We heard rumours over the winter that Renault were looking at the exhaust they've come out with, but we didn't spend any time researching it ourselves. We decided that with the time available we really wanted to concentrate on the route we were taking. That's the thing about Formula One: very often there are different paths that can be taken, and it's very difficult to forecast which one is going to be the more fruitful. Who knows? Maybe Renault will keep developing theirs and find more ultimate potential than ours? It's difficult to know and impossible to look at all the routes. I think you just spread yourself too thin."
Newey did acknowledge that the exhaust system was one of the most important development races of the season, and played down the significance of KERS; an area in which Red Bull have experienced difficulty so far this year.
"Exhaust systems are obviously a big area of development as we've seen already. The thing that's changed relative to last year is the diffuser and the knock-on effect that it has on the exhaust. Getting the car to suit the tyres and coping with the ban on the double diffuser is going to be, on the face of it, the biggest area of development. There's KERS too, but that's principally a packaging exercise."
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