The 20mm Cable: How Red Bull Turned a Floor Stay Into an Advantage, and How the FIA Is Closing It to 5mm for 2027

On the RB22 that appeared at the Austrian Grand Prix, there was a detail the naked eye could barely register: a cable running down the lower ridge of the sidepod. It was not as flamboyant as a new wing, nor as attention-grabbing as a redesigned floor. It was just a "floor body stay" — and by Red Bull's reading of the rules, it was legal. Craig Scarborough, the technical analyst the entire paddock cites, dissected the truth: the Milton Keynes team exploited a tiny carve-out in the wording governing the floor body stay, which permits the bodywork near it to have a radius of just 20mm. From that carve-out, they moulded a sharper undercut than anyone else. And just a few rounds later, in Baku, Audi copied it outright. Now the FIA is preparing to patch it — not with an immediate technical directive, but by amending the 2027 technical regulations: reducing the permitted radius from 20mm to 5mm. To understand why a figure as small as 15mm matters so much, it must be placed within the right system. F1 is in a transition between two regulation cycles: the 2026 ruleset has just taken effect with a new-generation hybrid power unit and a lighter chassis, while the 2027 ruleset is still being finalised. In that interregnum, every loophole is worth double — because the team that finds it first holds an advantage while rivals are still re-reading the text. The sidepod is the bodywork section flanking the cockpit, housing radiators and channelling airflow toward the floor. The lower section of the sidepod — the part that forms the undercut — is one of the most sensitive zones of modern aerodynamics. The sharper the undercut, the stronger the airflow into the floor edge, and the greater the downforce without adding drag. That is why every team wants a more aggressive undercut — but the rules limit the bodywork's shape. The crux lies here: the rule on the "floor body stay" — the strut connecting the floor to the bodywork — permits the bodywork surrounding that strut to have a radius as small as 20mm. Structurally, this clause exists to serve load-bearing: a stay needs to be wrapped in a thin shell, not to perform aerodynamics. But Red Bull read something else into it. If a stay can exist there, and if the shell around it is permitted to be as thin as 20mm, then they could turn that very stay into the backbone of an undercut far sharper than standard bodywork allows. The grey area is not where the light is missing. It is where F1 is most real — where wording and design intent drift apart, and where the best engineer wins not through raw speed, but through the ability to read legal text. I have followed F1 regulation cycles long enough to recognise a recurring pattern: every time the rules are rewritten, some team finds a gap between one clause and another, and some governing body has to chase after it to patch it. This is not a malfunction. It is the operating mechanism of this sport. On the track there are 20 drivers, but the real race is fought between two brains — and in this case, those two brains are not in the cockpit. They are in the design office, among stacks of thick regulation documents and CAD drawings. Let us make the mechanism concrete. The floor stay is a structural component that keeps the floor plate from vibrating at high speed. The regulation on its dimensions — specifically the radius of the bodywork surrounding it — was written to ensure the component is strong enough and compact enough not to obstruct airflow. The 20mm figure was chosen because it is small enough not to form a significant aerodynamic surface. But "small enough to be insignificant" is itself an opportunity. Red Bull fitted a cable running down the lower ridge of the sidepod. That cable serves as a legal stay. And because it is legal, the shell surrounding it may be as thin as 20mm. The result is that the team can mould a razor-sharp undercut along that ridge — a shape that, without a legal stay as its pretext, would be deemed a violation of the bodywork shape limits. In other words, Red Bull did not break the rules. They used the rules to legitimise a design the rules never intended. I once wrote that I do not believe in titles. I believe in the system that operates to produce titles. And here is a vivid demonstration: the victory did not come from a driver being faster over a lap, but from a group of engineers who understood better than anyone the limits of every clause in a rulebook hundreds of pages thick. The trick first appeared on the RB22 at the Austrian Grand Prix. Notably, it did not exist only in the wind tunnel or on a CFD drawing — it went to the real track, running in race conditions, enduring real thermal and aerodynamic loads. This is the crucial difference between an idea that looks good on paper and a solution that can be deployed. Many teams have similar ideas in their drawers, but very few dare bring them into the light because of the risk of a technical protest or scrutiny by the organisers. Just a few rounds later, in Baku, Audi appeared with a copied solution. This is a telling signal. Audi is a newcomer as both a power unit manufacturer and a top-tier team, and the fact that they quickly identified and copied Red Bull's solution shows two things. First, the ability to gather and analyse technical intelligence in the F1 paddock is extremely efficient — teams monitor each other's designs down to the smallest sidepod detail. Second, Audi is positioning itself as a chaser of Red Bull, willing to learn from the leader rather than develop everything from scratch. That act of copying also reveals a rarely mentioned truth: in F1, a technical advantage has a very short shelf life. An exclusive solution can become common practice within weeks. Red Bull cut the loophole, Audi crawled through it, and then the very spread of the solution is what forced the FIA to act. The turning point came from a specific source. According to an exclusive report by Rosario Giuliana on AutoRacer.it, the FIA has officially moved to shut down this aerodynamic trick. The governing body is amending the 2027 technical regulations, limiting the floor support dimension to just 5mm. Reducing the tolerance from 20mm to 5mm is not a minor adjustment — it slams the carve-out shut entirely. Picture what happens geometrically. At a 20mm radius, the shell around the stay is thick enough to form an aerodynamically meaningful surface, enough to shape an undercut. At a 5mm radius, that shell becomes too thin to do anything but pure structural duty. In other words, the FIA is not banning the stay — it is making it incapable of carrying aerodynamics. This is a precise surgical move: hitting the target without disturbing the entire regulatory system. The direct consequence is that both Red Bull and Audi must redesign the entire lower section of their sidepods for the 2027 season. This is not a small change taking a few hours in CAD software. The lower sidepod sits at the intersection of several complex airflow streams: flow from the nose, flow along the body, and flow into the floor edge. Changing the shape there forces a recalibration of the entire downstream airflow map, from the front-wheel zone to the rear diffuser. For Red Bull, this is a measurable loss, since they were the ones who built their advantage on that design. But they are also the team with the deepest experience in finding alternatives — history shows that every time a Red Bull trick is closed, the team finds another. The question is whether they will have enough time and resources to do so before the 2027 season begins. For Audi, the risk is more structural. When you are a newcomer and you choose the path of copying rather than developing, you depend on the copied solution remaining legal. The moment the FIA closes the door, you lose not just a solution — you lose the time invested in it, and you must return to the starting point with fewer resources than Red Bull. This is a textbook lesson in the strategic risk of following. Notably, the FIA chose to amend the 2027 regulations rather than issue an immediate technical directive. This is a deliberate choice. If the FIA banned it immediately, it would interfere with the ongoing championship fight, creating an injustice for a team that designed legally under the current rules. By pushing the change to 2027, the FIA both closes the loophole for the future and respects the legality of the current design. This is a delicate balance between competitive fairness and sporting stability. The cost factor must be considered. The cost cap forces every design change to be weighed. Fortunately for the teams, this is a design change rather than a new component — it requires no additional manufacturing cost, only engineering time and computing power. But engineering time is the scarcest resource in modern F1, and spending hundreds of engineer-hours on a forced redesign is a real opportunity cost, especially when it runs in parallel with developing a car for a new regulation cycle. I have spent years watching how teams respond to regulation changes, and there is a clear pattern: teams with a dedicated regulatory-wording analysis unit always respond faster. Red Bull is said to have such a group — people who read the regulations not to comply, but to find the gaps between clauses. This is an invisible competitive advantage, one that does not appear on the lap-time sheet but decides positions in the standings. Technically, it should be noted that the original article provides no lap-time data proving the trick's real-world effectiveness. We know it existed, we know it was legal, we know it spread — but we do not know how many thousandths of a second per lap it was worth. This is an important information gap, and any conclusion about its impact must be placed in the brackets of caution. The source must also be questioned. This analysis originates from a newsletter for Red Bull fans, and that creates a framing favourable to the Milton Keynes team. The language describes Red Bull's design team as "cheeky," and the overall tone "respects the hustle." That framing tends to turn loophole exploitation into a story of cleverness rather than a story of rules being bent. That is a bias to be recognised, even though the technical event itself — the FIA amending the regulation from 20mm to 5mm — stands as an objective fact. Another assumption needs testing: will Red Bull really lose its advantage when the 2027 rules take effect? The answer is not simple. The team has a track record of finding alternatives before a season begins, and it has the resources to do so. Conversely, redesigning the lower sidepod could be an opportunity to develop a solution more advanced than the old one. In F1, every forced redesign is often a forced rethink — and sometimes the result is better. I do not believe in titles. I believe in the system that operates to produce titles. And the system here is a familiar cycle: a team finds a loophole, the paddock copies it, the FIA patches it, and then that team finds the next trick. This spiral has shaped the entire technical history of F1, from ground effect to subtle aerodynamic gaps like this one. Esports taught me that the meta always changes. So does F1, only one beat slower — and in this case, that beat stretches from the Austrian Grand Prix to the 2027 season. The question is not whether Red Bull will find a new loophole, but whether the FIA will patch it in time before it reshapes the race. There is a less-noticed dimension to this story: the impact on other teams. The original article mentions only Red Bull and Audi, but that does not mean other teams are unaffected. If Red Bull's solution spread to Audi within a few rounds, it may well have appeared at other teams too — they simply have not been detected, or have not deployed it to a noticeable degree. When the FIA cuts the limit to 5mm, the impact of this change could be broader than the two named teams. This leads to a question about the governance mechanism. When does a technical trick become widespread enough to force the FIA to act? The answer may lie in the number of teams adopting it. An exclusive solution for one team is a competitive advantage. But when it becomes common practice, it is no longer an advantage for anyone — it is just a new way of doing old things, and at that point closing it becomes a competitively neutral act. The FIA may have waited until the trick spread before intervening, to ensure that patching it would not create a new injustice. On Audi's side, this is a defining moment for their identity as a newcomer. A new team has two strategic choices: develop everything from scratch and accept being slower, or copy the best solution of rivals and chase faster. Audi chose the second path, and now it must pay the price for that choice as the solution is closed. But this is not necessarily a failure — if they learned to identify and deploy solutions that fast, that is a valuable long-term capability, even if the specific solution is banned. One claim in the original analysis caught my attention: that Red Bull's discovery of the loophole shows their deep understanding of regulatory wording. I agree, but I want to add a contrarian dimension. That understanding only holds competitive value while the trick exists. The moment the FIA closes the door, the entire intellectual investment becomes an expired asset. This is the essential risk of building an advantage on a regulatory loophole: you are betting that the governing body will not act, and in F1, the governing body always acts — the only question is when. So where is the execution blind spot? The blind spot lies in the assumption that a technical advantage can be sustained long-term. In a sport where the rules are rewritten cyclically and the governing body can amend at any time, any advantage based on reading wording is temporary. Teams that understand this will constantly seek new loopholes rather than try to protect the old one. And judging by Red Bull's history, they seem to understand this very well. Another blind spot lies with the FIA. Amending the 2027 rules to cut the radius to 5mm may create unintended consequences for other designs. When you tighten a technical detail to its extreme, you may inadvertently eliminate legitimate solutions that teams use for proper purposes. This is why technical directives and regulation amendments often come with supplementary clarification documents. We must watch whether the FIA issues further guidance to distinguish between using the stay for structural purposes and using it for aerodynamic purposes. There is an aspect I want to stress: this story is not about Red Bull cheating. It is about a team reading the rules better than its rivals and exploiting a gap the rulemakers did not anticipate. The line between "exploiting a loophole" and "breaking the rules" lies here: a loophole is exploited within the framework of the current wording, whereas a violation is acting against that wording. Red Bull is on the other side of that line — at least until the FIA changes the wording. This is also why I regard stories like this as more important than the result of a single race. The result of a race lasts only a weekend. A regulation change shapes an entire competitive cycle, affecting hundreds of engineers, millions of dollars of development, and the positions of teams over years. The 20mm cable on the RB22 at the Austrian Grand Prix may be one of the most influential details of this regulation cycle. For fans, this story provides a lens through which to see F1 differently. Rather than only tracking who wins the race, track who is reading the rulebook. Rather than only looking at the timing sheet, look at the technical changes in the bulletins. The real race is fought there — in the design offices, among the pages of the regulations, where figures like 20mm and 5mm decide who will be faster before a car even rolls out. In terms of timing, we have about a year and a half before the 2027 rules take effect. During that time, Red Bull and Audi must complete the redesign of their lower sidepods. The 2027 pre-season tests will be the moment that reveals the real impact of this change. That is the milestone to watch. But there is another, more important milestone: whether Red Bull unveils a new solution before the 2027 season begins. If they can, it proves their advantage lies not in a specific design, but in their ability to read regulations. If they cannot, it is a sign that their advantage was tied to a specific loophole — and that closing it has genuinely stripped away part of their strength. I once wrote about a play-off I analysed by rewatching footage for 240 minutes and drawing 14 pressure maps, just to prove that a tactical conclusion needs data behind it. That principle applies here: we know the cable exists, we know it is legal, we know it spread, and we know it is about to be closed. But we do not yet have the lap-time figures proving how much it was worth. That is the missing piece of the story, and the piece that needs to be filled with on-track data. While waiting for that data, a lesson about how F1 operates can be drawn. This sport is not only a race between drivers, but a race between systems: the design system, the regulation system, the governance system. When one system finds a way to overcome another, the overcome system adjusts. This is a continuous evolutionary process, and each regulation cycle is a new round of evolution. What I want readers to take from this story is not the conclusion that Red Bull wins or loses, but the awareness that in F1, a technical advantage always has an expiry date. A team that builds its strategy on constantly finding something new will last longer than a team that builds its strategy on protecting the old. And when the 2027 season arrives, we will know which of the two teams — Red Bull or Audi — understood that lesson. The real race is not at the starting line. It is on the pages no spectator ever sees.