Racing Point technical director Andrew Green maintains that his team are only operating within the rules regarding their 2021 upgrades.
In an effort to keep costs down, teams will not be able to freely develop their 2020 cars for next season. Instead, they will have two tokens they can use on areas of their choice.
Therefore, there was uproar from rival teams when it was confirmed that Racing Point would not have to spend any tokens in order to use Mercedes’ 2020 suspension and transmission on their 2021 challenger.
However, since Racing Point will only be upgrading to the 2020 parts for 2021, Green doesn’t understand the argument that the team will gain an unfair advantage.
“The rules allow us to do that. And we do it,” he told Motorsport-Total.com.
“We have clarified this with the FIA and the world federation has no problem with it if we proceed like this. The rules say that the teams are able to get their cars up to 2020. That is only fair.”
Green also pointed out that Racing Point’s decision to switch to Mercedes’ design concepts came about before the token system was finalised to cut costs for 2021.
“You shouldn’t hold that against us,” he continued.
“To put it bluntly: It is an upgrade to the 2020 suspension, not to the state of 2021. Because we are now using the 2019 version. And we should be able to switch to the same specification that everyone already has used.
“It’s not like that, that we get an advantage by using 2021 parts. We only use what the others already have.”
Get your hands on the official Racing Point 2020 collection via the Formula 1 store
Renault team boss Cyril Abiteboul previously said that he couldn’t understand how Racing Point were allowed to use this loophole.
“Racing Point will probably get away with it,” he told Auto Motor und Sport.
“It’s frustrating. I still don’t understand it. We have already warned the FIA about this point when we had the draft of all the rule changes in the Coronavirus break.
“I do not understand the necessity of this rule. In every meeting, we raised the point but were always told it was part of a package. The package was so important that we didn’t want to let it fail at a single point. If the token rule had been voted on individually, we would never have agreed.
“We had no choice but to accept it. It was only afterwards that many people realised what this meant. But then it was already too late to change something for next year. That is my biggest disappointment. I accept it because it is a special rule that only applies to next year.”
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