Amid a close title fight with McLaren, Red Bull Racing is accusing several of its F1 rivals of injecting water into their tires to gain a competitive advantage. Pirelli, F1’s sole tire supplier, found no evidence to back Red Bull’s claims but the FIA’s investigation is still ongoing.
Before Max Verstappen’s brilliant victory at Interlagos on Sunday, Red Bull went four months without a race win. The team’s descent from its previous dominant position has clearly created frustrations fueling accusations of cheating. However, many began taking the claims seriously after September’s Singapore Grand Prix. There were signs of moisture on wheel rims when the tires were stripped after the race.
Pirelli hasn’t discovered any evidence in its data that teams are cheating by using this method. The company’s F1 chief Mario Isola explained to Motorsport.com why teams would put water inside their tires and how it could be done:
“How to do that is very easy,” he said. “You have a valve – and you just put water inside.
“But how the system works is a different story. It’s basically a thermal effect: heat transfer between the tire and the rim that should give more consistency or less degradation to the tire, even if you have worse control of the pressure.
“Obviously, if you have a vapor steam inside the tire you lose the control of the pressure because you have a pressure that is higher.”
F1’s rules specify that tires must be filled using either air or nitrogen. This mandate was enacted years ago through an FIA technical directive. At the time, teams were experimenting with different gasses to better control tire pressure. Red Bull admitted that it devised a similar water trick but the directive shut the loophole. The team claims that former employees now at other teams continued developing this cheat without any tangible evidence.