An FIA parody account on Twitter caught a few fans out by “announcing” that Aston Martin had been “permanently banned” due to their new design.
Aston Martin arrived at the Spanish Grand Prix with fresh upgrades on the car, but it was hard not to notice that they looked very similar to those of Red Bull.
It comes after Dan Fallows left the Austrian outfit’s aerodynamics team to become technical director at the Silverstone side, and there were suspicions that they had illegally copied Red Bull’s car.
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They were found guilty of the same offence in 2020 when they copied Mercedes’ 2019 car, and have also come under fire this year for using the Silver Arrows’ old wind tunnel having previously shared it with them.
The parody account sent out an amusing tweet, depicting a conversation between team owner Lawrence Stroll and FIA president Mohammed ben Sulayem.
“Aston Martin has been permanently banned from Formula 1 for plagiarism, effective immediately, due to their Barcelona car. Mohammed Ben Sulayem was quoted saying ‘Lawrence bro what is this,” to which Lawrence replied: ‘Lawrence bro what is this.’ Because he is a copycat.,” they said.
One user used the jewellery debate to add to the humour.
“In a late development the car will, after all be declared legal after having several piercings removed,” they replied.
Hilariously, some fans spent a good couple of minutes to figure out that the news was fake.
“This scared me for a second,” replied another.
Sebastian Vettel broke into the top 10 during the second practice session on Friday having set 51 laps overall.
The four-time champion is not entirely sure of their relative pace as he does not believe winter testing is a representative benchmark, and he does not know what sort of setup everyone else was running during practice.
“It’s hard to say because the conditions are very different to when we’ve been here in the winter and we had lots of problems,” he told Formua1.com.
“Since then, lots of stuff happened and to really have a comparison you should have the real comparison.
“We don’t, we are confident that this is the way forward but we have to also be honest. It’s the first day we are out with a basically new car.
“[There is] lots of stuff for us to learn and lots of things to pick up. I think it was good but to drive, there are some differences here and there which we expected.
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“Now, let’s see how we get through the weekend and also let’s see which sort of numbers do come back when we put everything into the computer.”
Vettel hopes that the British team can put on a good showing throughout the remainder of the weekend, and also warns that the upgrades will not give them a radical turnaround from their recent form.
“We were into the top 10 which was strong,” he explained.
“I don’t know what other people did but I guess it will be very tight. You can’t expect miracles yet, it’s a long way and we knew that it’s not going to be a big step forward straight away.”
Aston Martin asserted to the FIA that they had started work on their new sidepods in November, and have been cleared of any wrongdoing.