In the winter of 2020, a car appeared in the Formula 1 paddock that looked as though someone had repainted the previous year’s championship-winning Mercedes pink. And that impression turned out to be much closer to the truth than its creators would have liked.
When Racing Point rolled out its RP20 for pre-season testing in Barcelona, journalists and engineers from rival teams began doing exactly what Racing Point itself said it had been doing all the previous year—taking photographs. Only now they were photographing its car, comparing the shots with images of the Mercedes W10 from the 2019 season. The similarities were so literal that the nickname “pink Mercedes” stuck to the car within hours. The nose cone, the sidepods, the aerodynamic elements—all of it echoed the philosophy and the specific shapes of the championship-winning car with a precision difficult to explain as a coincidence of engineering solutions.
The team itself did not even try to hide it. Racing Point openly said it had studied the Mercedes W10 through photographs taken from every possible angle. Szafnauer’s line, given to Reuters at the Barcelona tests—“Who is better to copy than Mercedes?”—went down in paddock history. Reverse engineering from photographs was not prohibited by the regulations at the time. You look at another team’s car, analyze its shapes, try to understand why it works, and build your own. It was a legal practice, one every team on the grid engaged in to one degree or another. The difference was one of scale: Racing Point seemed to have carried out the process with surgical meticulousness, and the result on track confirmed it—the car was quick. Sergio Pérez and Lance Stroll were immediately competitive in territory where Racing Point had previously appeared only in flashes.
But a quick Formula 1 car is not cause for applause if you are not in the top 3. It is cause for suspicion.
Renault lodged the first official protest after the Styrian Grand Prix—the second round of the season, held at the Red Bull Ring. The protest concerned brake ducts—components that channel airflow to cool the brake discs while also playing a significant aerodynamic role. These components are a kind of crossroads between pure mechanics and aerodynamics, and it was at that crossroads that the entire drama unfolded.
The key to understanding the scandal lies in a single regulatory change. Before 2020, brake ducts belonged to the category of non-listed parts—components a team could purchase from another championship entrant. Mercedes had every right to provide Racing Point with its CAD models of the ducts in 2019, and that was entirely legal. The team did exactly that. But from 2020, brake ducts moved into the category of listed team components—parts every entrant was required to develop independently. Transferring them, buying them, borrowing them was no longer allowed.
An obvious question arises: what do you do if you obtained the blueprints legally the previous year and have already built a part from them? The FIA had a mechanism for that, referred to in the documents as grandfathering—the inheritance of legality. If a team had used the acquired component on its car in 2019, it could continue evolving it in 2020, despite the category change. The logic was simple: you had already integrated the part into your design, built up your own experience with it, and preventing you from developing your own car would have been absurd. That was exactly where everything stumbled—and it stumbled asymmetrically, on one pair of ducts out of two.
The FIA investigation established the fact that turned this story from an abstract dispute over copying into a specific violation with specific consequences. Racing Point had indeed received CAD models of the Mercedes W10 for both sets of brake ducts—front and rear. The team fitted the front ducts to its RP19 and used them during the 2019 season. The rear ones, however, it did not.
What gets me is how fine that line turned out to be. The front brake ducts (FBD) on the RP20 were ruled entirely legal. The FIA classified them as an evolution of the design used on the RP19—a design created from Mercedes models, but during a period when such a transfer violated no rules. Grandfathering worked. The team received the blueprints, fitted the parts to the car, ran them for a season, refined them for the next year—entirely within the regulations.
The rear brake ducts (RBD) went exactly the other way. Racing Point received Mercedes’ CAD models for the rear ducts back in 2019, but never fitted them to the RP19. When the team first used those ducts on the RP20, they appeared on the car in a season when brake ducts were already listed parts. The mechanism of inherited legality did not apply: you cannot “inherit” something you never had. In essence, Racing Point introduced into its 2020 design a component designed by Mercedes, at a moment when the regulations required such components to be designed independently. The team also failed to make a formal written request to the FIA to clarify the legality of that move—a detail that later deprived it of the chance to claim an honest misunderstanding.
The FIA decision was delivered in several stages, and its structure itself tells the story of how the federation tried to balance the letter of the rules against the spirit of fairness. The fine amounted to €400 000—€200 000 for each car: one sum for Pérez’s car at the Styrian Grand Prix, the other for Stroll’s. The points deduction was 15 points in the Constructors’ Championship, 7.5 for each car. The drivers’ personal points remained untouched: the FIA held that the drivers bore no responsibility for the team’s engineering decisions.
On top of that, Racing Point received reprimands for the following races—the Hungarian Grand Prix and the British Grand Prix—following Renault’s repeated protests. The logic of the reprimands was straightforward: the rear ducts remained on the car, and every subsequent round formally amounted to another use of an illegal component. But the FIA did not keep increasing the penalty for every subsequent race without end—the team was effectively allowed to finish the season with those parts, receiving reprimands instead of further points deductions.
The decision pleased no one. Racing Point believed the punishment was excessive, because the transfer of the CAD models had occurred when it was legal and the team had acted without malicious intent. Its rivals—Renault, McLaren, Ferrari, Williams—thought the punishment too lenient: in their view, Racing Point had gained an illegal advantage and should have been stripped of every point scored using the illegal parts. Both sides filed appeals. And both sides ultimately withdrew them, leaving the original verdict in force.
Here lies perhaps the most fundamental question in the entire story, and it reaches far beyond a single Formula 1 season. When an engineer photographs another team’s car and tries to recreate its shape, they go through an intellectual process of their own. They estimate proportions by eye, make assumptions, test hypotheses in the wind tunnel, make mistakes, correct them. The final product is their work, even if it was inspired by someone else’s. It is like copying a painting in a museum: the result may resemble the original, but every brushstroke is yours.
A CAD model is something entirely different. It contains the exact coordinates of every surface, every mounting point, every hole. Handing over a CAD model is like handing someone the negative of a photograph rather than giving them a camera and telling them, “Take something similar.” The line between inspiration and copying runs precisely here, and the 2020 regulations were the first to try to formalize that distinction for brake ducts. The absurdity was that Racing Point had been taking packages of CAD models from Mercedes for nearly two years—from November 2018 to October 2019—meaning it began the work before the formalization came into force and finished it after.
I think that is the real irony of the situation: the team fell into the gap between two versions of the rules, and that gap turned out to be exactly one set of rear brake ducts wide.
The 2020 scandal forced the FIA to act quickly. For the 2021 season, Article 22 of the Technical Regulations was approved, radically tightening the rules. The new wording strictly banned a whole range of reverse-engineering methods: 3D scanning of rivals’ parts, photogrammetry, stereoscopic techniques, the conversion of photographs into point clouds or CAD models. The definition of Listed Team Components (LTC) was clarified and expanded to close the loopholes Racing Point had passed through.
In essence, the FIA drew a line where there had once been a gray area. Looking at another team’s car—allowed. Photographing it—allowed. Taking inspiration from its shapes—allowed. But any process that made it possible to turn visual information into engineering data with accuracy comparable to the original documentation became prohibited. Formula 1 has always been a sport in which teams balance on the edge of the regulations—but after the pink Mercedes story, this particular edge was fenced off with a concrete wall.
By then, Racing Point was already preparing for a rebrand. In 2021, the team became Aston Martin, retaining its technical partnership with Mercedes, but now within a framework of far stricter rules. Sergio Pérez, who lost his place at the team, moved to Red Bull Racing—and in that same 2021 won his first Grand Prix for his new team in Baku. Lance Stroll remained at Aston Martin.
Fifteen points and four hundred thousand euros—a relatively modest price for a story that rewrote the engineering rules of an entire championship. But the scandal’s main outcome is not measured in fines. It is that the FIA was forced, for the first time, to give a precise legal definition to the difference between “I looked at your car” and “I used your blueprints”—a difference that before 2020 existed somewhere in the realm of common sense, but not in the text of the regulations.