A prominent Dutch journalist believes he's uncovered why Dr Helmut Marko departed Australia with a grin.
Labelling Max and Jos Verstappen "pessimists" and himself an "optimist", the Red Bull adviser predicted the team could shrink a significant pace deficit to early 2025 leaders McLaren within five races.
Erik van Haren, writing in De Telegraaf, suspects Marko, 81, might have been eyeing an even swifter turnaround.
"On Sunday, insiders were already reporting that the FIA would be checking rear wings more strictly from now on," he noted.
In Melbourne, the FIA fitted ultra-HD cameras to cars during practice to track rear wing flexing—akin to the 'mini-DRS' trick McLaren used last year, which was banned over the off-season.
"Having analysed footage from the rear wing deformations combined to the static deflections measured inside the FIA garage in Melbourne, the FIA has concluded that sufficient grounds exist for a tougher test to be introduced from the forthcoming Chinese GP on the upper rear wing," the FIA has now stated.
Post-Bahrain testing, Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache remarked: "I think Ferrari and McLaren are still using the mini-DRS. It's still going on."
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff countered in Melbourne that wing flexibility isn't behind McLaren's edge.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, however, mused after the race: "What's quite strange is that they (McLaren) get great (tyre) warm-up, but also very little degradation.
"Normally, one comes at the expense of the other. You can have one, but you can't have both."
Red Bull hopes the probable loss of McLaren's mini-DRS advantage in Shanghai this weekend will dent their lead. Van Haren suggests the teams had a heads-up on the FIA's China clampdown.
"It is one of the reasons that he expressed himself rather optimistically about closing the gap with McLaren, which is clearly too fast at the moment," he wrote.
"Within Red Bull, they think that the new guidelines of the FIA will certainly affect the competition."
Even so, Marko remains wary about the FIA's ability to outsmart F1's crafty engineers.
"The teams simply have much more manpower than the FIA," he told Servus TV. "So in my view, what cannot be verified cannot be permitted."
