Racing Point team principal Otmar Szafnauer says the team only chose to protest Renault's brake-bias system because they were told they couldn't copy it by the sport's governing body, the FIA.
Szafnauer admitted on Friday ahead of this weekend's Mexican Grand Prix that the team wanted to introduce a similar system, whereby the brake bias is automatically adjusted via a GPS trace of the circuit, meaning the driver doesn't have to make the change manually.
However when they approached the FIA about the legality of such a system, they were told it contravened the regulations and only then did they choose to press ahead with protesting the system which led to Renault being disqualified from the results of the Japanese GP.
"We started looking at it after Silverstone," said Szafnauer. "We ourselves had some issues with our brake bias. It failed and it resulted in Checo [Sergio Perez] running into [Nico] Hulkenberg at the restart after the safety car. That is when we started to look at making our system a little bit more robust.
"As I am sure everyone does, we started looking at our competitors to see what they do better than we do, and that is when we noticed that Renault had the system that we really wanted.
"It [looking at other systems] started at Silverstone, we then wrote to the FIA asking if we could do the same and the FIA wrote back and said we can't."
On Friday Renault issued a statement explaining that it hid nothing from the FIA or rival teams as the system was clearly on display in a pre-season video [here] and that a former employee made Racing Point aware of how the system worked.
The statement said: "We'd like to clarify some facts. A video from Barcelona testing is doing the rounds; it shows a legal system, known by and now confirmed by the FIA to be compliant with the technical regulations. As we had nothing to hide regarding this innovative system, we hid nothing.
"The information submitted by Racing Point, admitted in front of us and FIA members after the Japanese GP, was received via a Renault F1 Team ex-employee who had joined Racing Point and not only via this video."
