Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has revealed he is confused by Mercedes’ punishment in the tyre-test saga which he feels ‘does not fit the crime’.
Mercedes were last week banned from a young drivers’ test at Silverstone next month for helping Pirelli run the rule over potential new rubber in Barcelona.
Team principal Ross Brawn has insisted the penalty, which will deny them a chance to test new parts, is ‘severe’.
But ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone, Horner disagreed and told
BBC Sport: ‘The verdict was right. What is slightly confusing is the leniency of the penalty, which I would have thought was met with a huge sigh of relief at Brackley. They even suggested the penalty they would like to receive, which they duly received, and that’s it. That’s what it is. The significance of a young driver test, yes, it’s probably annoying for them to miss it. But it pales into insignificance compared to the benefit you would see from running race drivers around a track for 1,000 kilometres on a circuit rubbered in two days after a grand prix weekend. The problem with the penalty such as the one Mercedes have been given is that it is not a particularly strong deterrent to break the sporting regulations.’
Horner has now called for clarity from the FIA, adding: ‘It needs tidying up because at the moment, yes, they (Mercedes) breached the rules, but the penalty associated with that is not a deterrent. The most important thing is to achieve clarity from the FIA because they’ve deemed it illegal to test, but the sanction for doing that test doesn’t fit the crime.’
