Quote Originally Posted by truefan72 View Post
Well, to me it seems that there really should be a stronger or a full separation of these sister teams. To be honest Alpha Tauri for the most part simply exists to support RBR. The management is too closely aligned and too many questions of competitive integrity. What happened at the Dutch GP was/is too much of a grey area to ignore, and despite my changed belief that it wasn't nefarious, who really knows what was going on behind the scenes. I appreciate RBR providing another team to give us at least 20 drivers on the grid and not 18. But those last 2 seats are as close to a support team as ever. The FIA should look into a proper separation of the 2 teams to the extend that their relationship should be as light as possible.
The regs are fairly tight with regards to IP, and we've seen exclusion from the points due to it already. But it requires evidence beyond how the cars look, work, etc.

We've had the Pink Mercedes and now we have the Green Red Bull. I don't think the Williams side pod designed got named a copy of the Merc idea, but there was certainly some familiarity of the small pods before the recent Williams changes, and that happened at the start of testing, when nobody had any chance to simply try to copy a working design.

If you draw the lines in different places for ownership vs engine suppliers and such the whole thing gets fuzzy quickly. It's F1 and teams will try to copy more successful teams, or at least use their concepts as a basis for research.

The same applies to the drivers programs really, as we have seen recently that who supported them on the way to a seat doesn't matter much. Regardless of ownership any driver can be in contract with multiple teams. Though the RB/AT relationship does allow for an easy "swap" between teams due to most contracts, it's really no different than what the other teams can do when a shuffle takes place.