Secret Red Bull Test

RasputinLives

No passing through my dirty air please
Contributor
Rumours are flying of a secret 5 day indoor Red Bull test to help develop the Renault engine.

Apparently the test was carried out in Austria, indoors, by the Toro Rosso team with Antonio Felix Da Costa as the driver. It appears Da Costa hinted at it on Twitter and the tweets were later removed.

This has not been confirmed yet but a source appears to have leeked this to the press, the other teams and the FIA at the same time.

If it is true then Red Bull have dodged a bullet by letting Toro Rosso take the flack. What do we think the punishment should be? Can't help but feel this is where the FIAs light punishment for Merc last year will come back and bite them.
 
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Wan't it just carried out on a rolling road to asses the engine? I don't know if that is illegal or not and it seems a hell of a stretch to call it a Red Bull test when it was Renault carrying it out using a Toro Rosso as the test rig, wouldn't that be like saying it was a Mercedes test using a McLaren the two cars are of a completely different design spec...
 
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I heard about this yesterday and didn't really think much of it. Then they talked about it for a bit at the beginning of FP1 and pretty much cleared things up as far as I'm concerned.

So the Renault engine ran for 6 days on a rolling road in Austria with an STR chassis. The car was run without front or rear wings, but it did have air blown over it for cooling purposes. The testing was almost certainly financed by Red Bull / Mateschitz and is completely within the regulations (if indeed no aero work was done). Why it had to be kept secret until now is not apparent, but it is clear that the testing was a massive success as the Renault teams couldn't even finish a race distance in the final pre-season test. Horner also stated that it didn't matter what chassis was used, as every Renault runner would have benefited.

It would be interesting to hear the whistleblower's motives here, and why they felt it necessary to bring this to anybodies attention.
 
So it appears some over excited whistle blower has whipped this one all up out of nothing.

Stopped people talking about Lewis and Nico for a short time though didn't it?
 
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