Leading world champions Red Bull Racing’s team principal Christian Horner has labeled FIA’s new regulation changes to pit-stop slow-down for safety reason as “disappointing”. Horner is also claiming that rivals had deliberately targeted his team. Because the Milton Keynes based F1 squad Red Bull Racing is holding all-time best pit-stops records in the F1 history.

Formula One governing body FIA introduces new regulations for pit stops, to be at least 0.2 seconds slower, which will be affected from Hungarian Grand Prix.

“If you can’t be beaten, then the most logical thing is for your competitors to try and slow you down,” Horner said. “And that’s obviously what’s happening here.”

“You can see there’s an awful lot of pointed activity in our direction in the moment. That comes with the territory of being competitive. An awful lot of energy is going into trying to slow the car down which is what obviously happens in a competitive business. It’s something we’re used to but I’m not losing too much sleep about it.” Horner continues

“To have to hold the car for two tenths of a second, you could almost argue it’s dangerous because you’re judging your gaps. The guy that’s releasing the car is having to make that judgement, and I think that it’s not been well thought through.

“F1 is about innovation and competition. Seeing pit stops sub two seconds is a remarkable feat and we should be encouraging it, not trying to control it, otherwise where does it stop?

“We’re going to be told which way to walk into the garage, where we should sit on the pit wall, and which buttons we should press I guess. I find it a little disappointing. It’s the duty of the competitor to ensure that the car is safe, and the penalty for a wheel not being fixed is you have to stop the car immediately.

“So it’s a brutal punishment, if you haven’t got all four wheels securely and safely fastened. So what the technical directive is trying to achieve, I’m not quite sure because I think there’s an awful lot of complexity to it. Horner added

The FIA issued a technical directive before this weekend’s Styrian Grand Prix. Red Bull Ring which comes into force at the Hungarian Grand Prix on 1 August.

An FIA spokesman said: The key point is that this is a proactive safety update, building in some required latency into the procedures in order to ensure the decisions are being taken by the equipment operators rather than being automated, and thus to protect the pit crews from incidents similar to the one seen in Bahrain a few years ago.”

Article 12.8.4 is clear that: “Devices which are used to fit or remove wheel fasteners may only be powered by compressed air or nitrogen. Any sensor systems may only act passively.”

The new technical directive notes: “For safety reasons we would furthermore expect the minimum time offset between the initiation of the jack release procedure and the OK signal to the driver given by the green light to be at least 0.2 seconds.”

Fastest F1 pitstops of 2021 championship so far