The first outspoken comment about it was made by McLaren's Lewis Hamilton following the season opening Australian Grand Prix, when Sebastian Vettel won pole position by over 8 tenths of a second and the race by over 22 seconds. Asked about the reasoning behind Red Bull's easy win, Ham answered with a rhetoric question: “Have you seen Vettel's front wing?”
He further urged the FIA to either ban the bending extremities of the RB7's front wing, or the Red Bull rivals will copy the design – which is believed to take approximately half a second off a lap time – in due time.
His claims were backed by footage and video materials from the Red Bull garage, in which the mechanics were spotted trying to repair the endplates of the car's front wing (which had been bottomed on the asphalt and kerbs).
Although the FIA's race director Charlie Whiting insisted that the RB7 has passed all the FIA tests prior to the race, the general idea that Red Bull are using something illegal to make their front wings flexible during the race did not disappear. A recent German report actually quotes an unnamed engineer as saying: “We know what Red Bull are doing, but we do not know how.”
The advantage of having flexible front wings translates into increased downforce at high speeds, which reduces lap times significantly, especially on high-speed circuits.
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