Mercedes-Red Bull F1 engine trick banned by FIA

A qualifying trick used by Mercedes and Red Bull Formula 1 teams for a speed boost at the end of a lap has been banned by the FIA, The Race can reveal.Those manufacturers had found a clever way to bypass mandated power reduction demands that need to be followed as cars burn through their battery energy on the straights.Rather than running in a ‘ramp down’ rate on the charge to the timing line at the end of a qualifying lap – where power normally needs to be reduced by 50kW every second to avoid a sudden drop off – they were able to run at maximum deployment for as long as they could.This could easily give them a 50kW-100kW advantage for a short period of time over others whose power was being reduced.While such a gain may only have been worth a fraction of a second, in the hundredths rather than tenths at some tracks, it was still clearly worth chasing in the fight for grid posi …