McLaren managing director Jonathan Neale has insisted that the competing F1 teams need to 'stick together' amidst talk of arguments tied into the Resource Restriction Agreement.
Questions were raised last year about the amount spent by
Red Bull en-route to the championship title and then emerged again last month when reports suggested that the champions has broken the agreement put in place in 2009 in place of the budget cap proposed by Max Mosley.
Rumour have suggested that the FOTA teams will meet to discuss the RRA in Korea this weekend, with Neal insisting that teams needed to stick together even if 'a degree of tension' was to be expected given the competitiveness of the sport.
“I think there's always going to be a degree of tension between the teams and there has been recent speculation about whether
Red Bull are complying or not,” he said during the most recent Vodafone
McLaren Mercedes phone-in. “But none of us really knows because we are not in there, we don't really understand how their business operates or how it is divided.
“Quite understandably, many of the teams mask the way in which their public accounts are provided so that you can't reverse engineer what's going on.
Formula One has for decades been surrounded with a bit of mistrust and rumour - allegations about what are they doing, are they cheating on the circuit, have they got some new wonder device etc. - and I think that's all part of the sport. I think in reality the bigger prize is that
Formula One does need to stick together.
“We are doing well in capping costs in many areas and I think it's an exciting challenge, alongside the FIA, for technology development for 2014 and beyond. There will inevitably be pressures, there are those who would seek to divide the teams as we get ourselves ready for the next round of commercial negotiations, and there will be tensions of course.
“Everybody wants to do the best for their team but this generation of professional team principals are more than equipped to see the bigger picture as well as fight their own team's corner.”
Currently, all F1 teams with the exception of HRT are members of FOTA.