Racing Point’s rivals are unhappy because they’re realising they haven’t done a good job with their 2020 car, tech chief Andrew Green claims.
The Silverstone-based outfit has been at the centre of much debate during pre-season testing after revealing a design that appears almost identical to last year’s Mercedes.
Particularly unhappy have been Renault and McLaren with one if not both believed to be considering a protest against the car in Australia but Green sees it as nothing more than sour grapes.
“I don’t know what they’ve got to complain about because what we’ve done is completely legal,” he said via RaceFans.
“It boils down to the fact that some of the teams may have not done a good job as they should have done. I think they’re probably seeing that.”
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The reason for Racing Point’s big change in design comes from having the funds in place to do so, following the takeover by Lawrence Stroll in 2018.
And while the team struggled somewhat last year, Green thinks their rivals have forgotten their recent past.
“We’re a team that finished fourth two years on the trot with next to no money at all. We were absolutely hand-to-mouth and we finished fourth in the championship, we beat the likes of McLaren. We could do that with next to nothing,” he recalled, with those results coming in 2016 and 2017.
“For people to think that to take a team like that and inject money and resource into it, it wasn’t going to improve it, was just naive and I think they just haven’t stepped up to the plate.
“So I think a lot of their frustration is probably looking inwards and going ‘crikey, we haven’t done a very good job’. That’s what I’d be thinking if I was looking from the outside, then I’d be looking at my aero department going. ‘Come on guys, what on earth have you been playing at?’”
The debate on Racing Point essentially copying Mercedes was first picked up by Haas, who called them out for hypocrisy after the Silverstone-based team previously criticised them for doing a similar thing with Ferrari, albeit by buying in parts.
But team boss Guenther Steiner accepts that, while controversial, the so-called ‘Pink Mercedes’ is here to stay.
“I’m happy they’ve copied it, I have to be because it’s not illegal,” he said via FormulaSpy.
“There’s no point getting upset over something that’s legal. I can be unhappy, that’s it. It’s legal, we make the rules, we’ve got a big part voting for those rules, they were voted like this, so we have to be happy even if we’re unhappy because we can’t do anything about it.”