#babs I’m sorry if you’re an MV fan and had to read these tags ily

[captainsophiestark]

Hey! I saw people on tiktok saying Max Verstappen had an illegal car or something. The video was made like a year ago, so I have no idea what they’re talking about lol. Do you happen to know?

OMG lmao Babs you’ve come to the right place, this is one of the topics I’m most down to rant about 😂 just a heads up, I’m not a Max Verstappen or Red Bull fan (in part because of this), so there’ll probably be some clear bias in my answer (but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum)

The short answer is, in 2021 Red Bull got busted for breaking the cost cap by a couple million dollars. According to the FIA it was on things that were just honest mistakes and not intentional cheating, and because the amount they went over wasn’t more than 5% of the total budget they were supposed to be limited to, they got a small (for this sport, since it was like 1.7 million or something) fine and a few other things like less wind tunnel time in their development for the next season. However, as a lot of other teams pointed out, it didn’t actually do that much since Red Bull could just spend more money on the non-wind tunnel parts of development and have very little affect on their overall ability to develop a car, and I’m pretty sure the fine wasn’t even taken out of their total budget for the next season, it was just paid separately (although I could be wrong on that part). So, as a result (although this is technically more of an opinion) Red Bull has this effing rocket ship that wins races by 20 seconds because they cheated in past seasons with basically no consequences. And the parts of development they cheated on to accomplish it is just building momentum to result in the nonsense we’ve been seeing this season, since they never got any real penalty that leveled the playing field