Austin’s “tape-gate”: Red Bull fined as McLaren grid-marker intrigue bubbles after US GP
Max Verstappen took the win, Lando Norris chased him home, and somewhere between the grid fences and the orange tape on a pit wall, the stewards got involved.
The FIA hit Red Bull with a €50,000 fine after the United States Grand Prix — half of it suspended — for a procedural breach moments before lights out. The penalty related to a Red Bull team member re-entering the gate well at Gate 1 after the formation lap had started, in the vicinity of the second grid slot. Marshals were closing the gate and, according to their report, the individual didn’t respond to attempts to stop him.
That, in itself, is a straightforward safety call: once the grid clears, it’s hands off, gates closed. The stewards called it an “unsafe act” and stressed that impeding the closing process before the start is “absolutely prohibited,” hence the significant bill.
What sent the paddock rumor mill spinning was what that team member might have been up to. Multiple reports claim the Red Bull staffer reached toward a strip of tape McLaren had placed on the pit wall parallel to Norris’s grid box — a trick the team has used for some time as a visual reference to help Lando nail his positioning.
The tape isn’t outlawed. It’s not part of the car or the grid box and sits outside the start procedure regulations. By the same token, interfering with it isn’t specifically illegal either. So the alleged “tape tampering,” if that’s what occurred, was never going to draw a penalty on its own. And crucially, the stewards’ published decision doesn’t mention tape at all; Red Bull were sanctioned solely for the act of re-entering the gate area after the formation lap began.
Still, the suggestion of gamesmanship struck a nerve, not least because the method is well known and, depending on whom you ask, fair play or a soft target. One outlet reported it wasn’t the first time a Red Bull member had gone for McLaren’s marker and that McLaren have recently changed how they apply it to make it harder to peel away. Sources indicate there’s confidence the matter won’t repeat.
Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies framed Sunday’s infringement as a mix-up in a fast-moving moment. “We fully respect the stewards,” he said post-race. “It was felt that during the grid procedures, one of our guys had not followed marshal instructions. We spoke with our people — they’re very positive they followed instructions at all times, so I think it’s probably a misunderstanding. For sure it’s something we can do better, but we don’t feel we ignored any instruction.”
If there’s a broader takeaway, it’s how finely tuned pre-start routines have become, and how willing rivals are to poke at them. A piece of tape on a wall might not sound like much, but in the margins of a title fight, nothing is too small to protect.
And that’s the other layer here. On a weekend Verstappen controlled, the world champion trimmed Oscar Piastri’s championship lead to 40 points with five to go, while Norris — starting alongside polesitter Verstappen — delivered P2 for McLaren. You didn’t need to be in race control to sense the tension; the front of the grid is tight, and the psychological sparring is real. Make no mistake, marker tape or not, these teams are watching each other’s every move.
The sequence at COTA was set by a quirk of geography as much as anything else. Norris’s slot was adjacent to the first pit-lane gate where team members duck out when the formation lap begins. After that point, the gate becomes the marshals’ domain. When a Red Bull staffer returned towards it, the chain of events — and the fine — followed.
Where does that leave “tape-gate”? Officially, nowhere. There’s no rule to rewrite and no competitive advantage overturned. Unofficially, it’s an old F1 story: the edges of the regulations are where the sport is lived, policed and, sometimes, prodded.
Expect McLaren to keep using their visual cue, perhaps with a little more redundancy built in. Expect Red Bull to be scrupulous about gates and marshals at the next one. And expect the championship protagonists to continue squeezing each other on and off the track, because that’s what tight title runs demand.
The racing did the heavy lifting in Austin. The rest was a reminder that in this business, even the smallest strip of tape comes with a shadow.
