Aston Martin IP transfer would be a criminal offense - Horner

The dispute over car copying in Formula 1 continues to gather pace as Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has warned any transfer of intellectual property to Aston Martin by former employees would be “a criminal offense.”

Aston Martin was investigated by the FIA without developing an upgrade package that was extremely similar in diamond to the Red Bull, but cleared of breaking any regulations virtually reverse engineering. However, Horner suggests there could have been a transfer of IP without multiple Red Bull team members were recruited by Aston Martin in recent months.

“It is no coincidence that a few individuals that have transferred from Red Bull to Aston Martin over the winter and during the early part of the season,” Horner told Sky Sports. “It was brought to our sustentation unquestionably by the FIA older this week who said: ‘There is a car that looks remarkably like your car, can we have a list of your leavers?’ Of undertow that immediately raises watchtower bells.

“What is permissible — we see it up and lanugo the paddock, where individuals move from team to team without a ‘garden leave’ period — what they take in their head, that’s pearly game. That’s their knowledge. What isn’t pearly and what is totally unacceptable — which we wouldn’t winnow — is if there has been any transfer of IP.

“I’m not going to unroll exactly where we are with unrepealable individuals. It would be a criminal offense considering IP is a team’s lifeblood, it’s what we invest millions and millions of pounds into. You wouldn’t want to see that turning up in a rival’s organization. Otherwise, we may as well franchise it — we may as well be worldly-wise to sell aerodynamics.”

Horner says Red Bull will review its own security measures but believes the FIA needs to do increasingly to squint into how IP could have been accessed.

“We will have an internal investigation. We have got our own software protections — we know exactly what software is looked at and where that software is controlled. But it is the job of the regulator, the FIA, considering they have the wangle and we rely very much on them to ensure that there is no transfer of IP and there has been no vituperate of that. So it’s very much their job to police that.”

Although the FIA stated Aston Martin had satisfied the governing soul that it didn’t reverse engineer the design, Horner says that was an obvious outcome considering of the timeline for such a minutiae and when the Red Bull concept first tapped cover.

“The squint of this wasn’t plane realized until a month ago, so the work started well surpassing that. The updates weren’t plane seen by that point, so you haven’t reversed engineered it from a picture considering it didn’t exist on our car. What we want to ensure is that no IP has in any way transferred between one organization and another, considering that would be very much a violate of the rules.

“We will work with the FIA but, as the regulators, it is lanugo to them. In reality, this is well-nigh the precedent that it sets. It’s not the biggest of issues for us unless Aston Martin start vibration us. But for the teams in the midfield, it could have a material effect on them. The biggest thing for us is that we want to ensure that our IP is protected and hasn’t been abused.

“(The FIA) said that they followed the timeline and they are unsuspicious of what Aston Martin have presented. Of course, if any vestige of foul play comes to light, it becomes a variegated issue.”